How to get there from here

After a conversation with a friend last week, I wanted to put this out there.

I was born with a gift for music.  One day, several hours after we’d returned from a jazz concert, I asked my son Richard, who takes after me that way and who was then in middle school, to sing the start of a song we’d heard there that was totally new to him, “Bedtime for Bigfoot.”  He nailed it.  He not only remembered it, he had the exact right pitch from the first note.  That’s my boy.

When I was a teenager, I was told I had a progressive hearing loss that had taken the uppermost frequencies and now was impeding my hearing speech. They had me take sign language and lipreading lessons.  Finding out that it was all an allergic reaction to aspirin was way in the future.  (Here.)

And I bottomed out.  It’s hard enough being a teenager, much less an aspiring musician going deaf.  I gradually pulled myself out of it, with much prayer and a lot of daily exercise to clear the brain, but it was a long, hard, slogging, two year process.  My first college roommate, upon meeting me, lasted two hours before she ditched me.  (The one I ended up with became a lifelong friend.)

I’m actually glad now that I went through all that: it taught me compassion. It taught me to keep my eyes open for people in pain.  I can’t fix everything for everybody or even everything for anybody, and in some cases, anything at all, but I have to be my best self and try. It is important to me never to inflict any pain on any soul for any reason if I can in any way know, and to help if I can.

So I was quite interested when I read Dr. Rachel Remen recounting having counseled a fellow doctor, who was terribly depressed, to write down five things every day that surprised him.

Me, where I am now, all that part of my life being long in the past, I would say that the thing to do is to look for things to be grateful for.  But I have come to realize that Remen was right; her patient had gone into an emotional lockdown where he was just trying to defend himself from being hurt any more.  He wasn’t ready to fathom gratitude; he was a cancer surgeon, and he just couldn’t handle the unending sense of loss.  He didn’t see that that loss was because he so deeply cared about his patients, whether he knew them well or not, that it represented the good side of him.

She writes of his begrudging reaction to her challenge.  And yet, slowly, trying to dutifully fulfill her assignment, he starts to notice things. At first, it was a tumor that shrank rather than grew.  Then came the day he had a lovely young mom in his office, where he knew how ill she was, with her small children  cuddling up shyly with her as they spoke.  Despite the intensity of the fatigue he knew she must be going through, their hair was washed and their clothes were clean, and being with her in a strange place, they felt secure.  And it hit him.  He told her that clearly, her children were well loved: he saw a great strength in her.  He told her he felt that that love would sustain her and pull her through this illness.  She was surprised, and thanked him then, deeply moved.  As was he.

And it had surprised him that he could see that and be that kind of a doctor to her.  He was surprised at how much it meant to his patient.  He was surprised that he had somehow become a doctor now whom a patient would think well of.  He was surprised to see: he’d had it in him all along.  It was just waiting for him to see it.

And he was grateful.

Our losses become our strengths by which we can bless others, especially with the gift of time added to them.  They are still losses.  Sometimes it takes a great deal of time.  Sometimes hearing aids, in whatever form they may come, be they electronic, be they friends, be they circumstances, be they God, are necessary.

I promise you this: it is worth going through what we have to go through to get there.