On my website I have a place where people can write and tell me their personal stories. I get a lot of them, and it breaks my heart to realize how many men and women are suffering from loss and finding it so difficult to put their lives back together. Originally I believed that only women would find interest and comfort in my website and my book, Moving to the Center of the Bed: The Artful Creation of a Life Alone, and that most men most definitely would not read a pink book. But I began getting mail from men who informed me that they found the website and my book comforting and helpful in picking up the pieces of their own lives. I was heartened by that fact and of course it reinforced my own belief that we are all human and so share all human emotions and gratified for the reinforcement that what I've written is not gender specific after all.
The questions I'm asked in the letters I receive are as varied as the personal stories, but almost everyone says they don't know how to begin to recreate their lives which have changed so drastically. They just can't get started.
Well, for starters, I tell them about the biggest breakthrough I had in terms of understanding what was holding me back from being able to move forward: Acceptance and Perception.
As hard as I tried to have a positive and hopeful attitude as I learned to live alone, there were so many days when I swam in an ocean of negativity. It was hard to get used to the idea that I was going to be alone for the rest of my life.
One morning as I was having breakfast a memory of something that had happened several years before surfaced. I was in San Francisco, CA for one of my husband's medical meetings. While he was meeting, a friend took me to Green Gulch, a Zen Buddhist practice center in Sausalito for a spiritual experience. After a meditation, a Buddhist nun told us a story on the subject of perception:
One afternoon, after a rainstorm, a Buddhist nun walked out into the garden of her sanctuary. Everything glistened in the bright sunshine. Crystal droplets of water hung from the green leaves of the plants and trees. Everything was washed clean...renewed. She could smell the moist earth and the perfume of the abundant flowers. She breathed deeply and began her walk toward the far end of the garden. In the distance she saw something lying on the path. As the sunlight caught it, it glistened like a diamond. In the refraction of the light she saw colors of lavender, green, pink, and a bit of pale yellow. She marveled at the beauty of the object as she got closer and closer. In fact, she could not take her eyes from it. Suddenly, there it was at her feet. At last, she was able to see what it was that had so mesmerized her. It was a dog turd covered with raindrops.
As the memory of that story faded, I realized why it most likely had bubbled up. I didn't have to feel so terrible. I had a choice. Dog turd or diamond in the sun. Not that I would ever describe my situation in either of those terms but the message was clear:
Acceptance: This is what has happened in my life. Illness has separated my husband and me. I have to move on without him.
Perception: How I choose to view what has happened will dictate how I will respond to it.
As sad as my husband's illness was, it was also an opportunity for me to reexamine my life and myself and to move into a self directed future. Life was challenging me more than ever before but I had a deep knowing that I was equal to it. The thought that I could perceive my life differently and use that perception to move out of a tomb of gloom and into a perspective of anticipation and possibility was heartening.
And several days later, as if to reconfirm that newfound sense that acceptance and perception were key to my ability to move forward, I woke up with a song in my head. It was a song I'd first heard in my childhood, belted out by none other than Jimmy Durante, the Shnoz (the nose) as he was affectionately called. A beloved figure to many of us of a certain age, Jimmy would sit down at the piano and play and sing: "Ya gotta start off each day with a song...even when things go wrong. You'll feel better, you'll even look better...." And then he'd get up and tell jokes.
I wondered why that song that morning. And then I realized that it was my inner wisdom at work. I had visited with my husband the day before. It was my birthday, a day that used to be such a happy day, as were all the birthdays celebrated in our home. Much fuss and fun. But my husband didn't remember and couldn't articulate much when I mentioned it to him. I bought a birthday cake and shared it with him and others in his facility. And at the end of our visit, I left him standing in the parking lot and in my rear view mirror, I watched him watching me as I pulled away. I sobbed all the way home. My newfound realization of acceptance and perception was challenged mightily.
And then came Jimmy's song, playing in my head... a profound reminder that if I were going to survive I had to start off each day with a song, or more correctly for me, realize that this is my life, here, today. But I have the power within me to change my perception of it. I can stay stuck in the muck of resistance and despair, or move forward. I can view my life as hard luck, woe is me, or I can say, ‘I CAN HANDLE THIS!'
And though I am years away from that realization, when sadness opens its eyes with me, as it often does, and I find myself in fear and resistance, I have to summon my courage and remind myself that my life is beautiful as it is and I have an opportunity that very day to make it more so. I have to keep that promise to myself to remember the nun's story and dear old Jimmy's song.
