This Is How (11 page)

He told me he was gay.

And he was worried that his father wouldn’t accept him.

He spoke at some length about why he suspected his father would not accept a gay son.

Then he asked me, what should he do?

I told him the truth about parents, one I myself had learned many years ago.

If you have one parent who loves you, even if they can’t buy you clothes, they’re so poor and they make all kinds of
mistakes and maybe sometimes they even give you awful advice, but never for one moment do you doubt their love for you—if you have this, you have incredibly good fortune.

If you have two parents who love you? You have won life’s Lotto.

If you do not have parents, or if the parents you have are so broken and so, frankly, terrible that they are no improvement over nothing, this is fine.

It’s not ideal because it’s harder without adults who love you more than they love themselves. But harder is just harder, that’s all.

I told the young man what I myself had learned when I was even younger than him: parents are a luxury.

I also told him something I did not know at the time: people can change. Parents can change, friends can change, you can change.

While it’s true that you cannot change another person, it is also true that you can do or say or be something that inspires them to make the change within themselves.

I told him that if his father rejected him he should accept this rejection for the terrible and painful and infuriating and devastating blow that it is. He should rage and wail and grieve.

And then move clean on forward.

I said, “You can’t ever look back and point your finger at this man and blame him for a single thing, not even those things that are his fault. Any damage that’s been done, you have to fix yourself because it needs fixing and there is nobody else to do the work. Blame may well be justified but it’s not going to move you forward in your life. So don’t cling to him after he’s taken himself away. There simply isn’t that much time in life to waste.”

Once you have moved forward, away from the point of assault, the assault slides into the past and becomes a casualty of time’s arrow.

Time moves only forward, never back.

We look forward to a moment and then it arrives and an instant later it is gone. Like something on the surface of a river that we reached for but did not touch in time and it carried on, away.

You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.

W
HEN I WAS THIRTY-TWO
, somebody I loved died on a plastic-covered twin mattress at a Manhattan hospital.

His death was not unexpected and I had prepared myself years in advance, as though studying for a degree. When he died, I was as stunned as if he had been killed by a grand piano falling from the top of a building. I was fully unprepared.

I did not know what to do with my physical self. I could not accept his death at first. It took me about a year to stop thinking, madly, I might somehow meet him in my sleep. Once I finally believed he was gone, I began the next stage: waiting.

Waiting to heal.

This lasted several years.

I had mistakenly assumed that
healed
meant
restored
.

As though scratched by a thorn on my arm, I was waiting for my flesh to seal itself so completely that eventually there would be no trace and I would forget which arm had been scratched.

It is a terrible thing to wait for something you desperately need that will never come.

I wish somebody had taken me out to the Greek diner on Bleecker Street and ordered for me: Boston cream pie and coffee—just coffee, not cappuccino, not latte. And I wish this person had then simply told me the truth.

Which is terrible but immeasurably less terrible than living suspended inside a misconception for years and years.

I can’t give you Boston cream pie or coffee and I’m sorry.

But at least I can tell you the truth about healing. Not the nice, inspiring truth. The real one that almost makes your bones groan to hear, even as you are in some strange way relieved.

Heal
is a television word.

It’s satisfying to see somebody who has gone through adversity and come out the other side, healed.

That’s almost word for word, how they might introduce a segment on healing on a talk show. “Come out the other side.” Like a tunnel.

But here’s the thing: there are some things in life from which you do not heal.

The tunnel never ends. There is no other side of it.

If your child dies? You will never heal.

What will happen is, for the first few days, the people around you will touch your shoulder and this will startle you and remind you to breathe. You will feel as though you will soon be dead from natural causes; the weight of the grief will be physical
and very nearly unbearable. The loss of your child will feel and appear to be something fatal.

Eventually, you will shower and leave the house.

Maybe in a year you will see a movie.

One day somebody will say something and it will cause you to laugh.

You will clamp your hand over your mouth because you laughed and that laugh will break your heart, it will feel like a betrayal.

How can you laugh when your son is dead?

How can you laugh when your daughter is still missing?

In time—perhaps another year, maybe ten—you might have another child.

I’m just saying.
You might.

To your friends, you will appear to have recovered from your loss. You started over and you have a new family.

What they won’t know, however, is that the old family never left the dinner table. All that really happened, you’ll think, is that the hole in the center of your life has narrowed just enough to be concealed by a laugh or new son or daughter.

Yet, you might feel a pressure for it to be true. You might feel that “enough” time has passed now, that the hole at the center of you should not be there at all.

You may even feel that by still loving, so much, the dead, you now betray the living.

Maybe there was a lesson you were supposed to learn and, obviously, have not. Maybe this new child will be taken, too.

The pressure to heal can cause enduring damage.

But like losing an arm or a leg in a car accident, no matter what, that arm or leg will never grow back.

Parents who have lost a child should be told that they will never heal from their loss. They will always have a terrible, wide hole within them. And other holes, smaller ones.

The way the dead daughter used to smell like apples in the summer? That’s a hole.

How the dead boy snorted when he laughed really hard. Another hole.

One hole surrounded by nearly an entire constellation of others.

So no, if your child dies, you will not heal.

Do not wait for the healing to arrive. It will never come. The holes will never leave or be filled with anything at all.

But holes are interesting things.

As it happens, we human beings are able to live just fine with many holes of many sizes and shapes.

And pleasure, love, compassion, fulfillment—these things do not leak out of holes of any size.

So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography—and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.

Though there will always be days, like the weather, when the loss returns fresh and full and we will reside within it once again, for a while.

Loss creates a greater overall surface area within a person. You expand as a result of it. Though it may well feel like the
opposite. If you lose something or someone that is enormously important to you, there can be an overwhelming desire to stop living. To have no new experiences. To shut down.

Huge loss resets you in a way to an earlier time, before you had what it is that you lost. But all you have had, all you have lived remains in you as a part of your structure now.

No matter how huge your loss, as long as you remain engaged with your life, the best days of your life may still be ahead of you.

Don’t misunderstand me: the pain of your loss will remain with you for the rest of your life. But great joy will be there right beside it.

Deep sorrow and deep joy can exist within you, side by side. At every moment. And it’s not confusing. And it’s not a conflict.

This is among the oldest, deepest, most primal truths: the facts of life may be, at times, unbearably painful. But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief. Those things that ought to kill us do not. This should be taken as encouragement to continue.

And when the Worst Thing That Could Possibly Happen is what happens, you would not believe that anywhere in your future exists one of your very happiest moments. What you would believe, and be quite certain of, is that any good days and certainly your best days were behind you now.

But believing something is true, even with all your heart, is unrelated to whether or not what you believe is true.

While there are some things from which you never heal, so be it.

The truth about healing is that you don’t need to heal to be whole.

By whole, I mean damaged, missing pieces of who you were, your heart—missing what feels like some of your most important parts. Yet not missing any part of you at all. Being, in truth, larger than you were before.

Because all of us are made not only of what we have but of what we lost.

And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition.

Even when we lose a leg or an arm, there’s not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.

M
ANY PEOPLE CONTINUE TO
feel influenced and even controlled by the things that happened to them a long time ago. Sometimes, people harbor dark, traumatic memories from childhood. Or fragments of memories—incomplete scenes, uncomfortable feelings, perhaps even a sense of certainty that something specific and terrible happened to them, but little more than this.

Others experienced something traumatic in adulthood that continues to affect them day to day many years later. Maybe an assault has left a person afraid to leave their home or enter a particular neighborhood.

For a certain kind of person this will be the end of the story. Whatever experience they endured essentially continues to this day, ever present in the background, shaping the choices made on a daily basis, affecting the quality and range of their
life. This kind of person might be angry all the time or feel guilty or afraid. They just accept these states as a part of themselves.

Then there are people who are keenly aware of their experiences, who are psychologically ambitious; they wish to “get over” these historical traumas and might see a therapist to help them.