Live long enough and at some point all of us will find ourselves close to someone in profound pain. We’re not talking garden-variety suffering here. We’re talking about serious addiction, self-mutilation, suicidal despondency. Almost always we are talking about the end-point culmination of years of accumulated pain. There are no more tomorrows, the body is shutting down, hope is nowhere to be found.
We speak often of our own suffering, but that of another can seem worse, can’t it? At least with our own suffering we enjoy the illusion of control (more on this in a moment). But the suffering of a loved one can leave us languishing in a kind of dispirited, impotent frustration.
We offer words of advice, a shoulder on which to cry, a sympathetic ear, material support, even a stern admonishment. But as is so eloquently explained in the closing passages of “A River Runs Through It,” more often than not our help isn’t wanted or isn’t the kind that is needed. And in truth our efforts are as much to alleviate our own suffering in the shadow of such pain as it is to help the sufferer. “Please get better,” we seem to say, “because I can’t take much more of your pain.”
If we aren’t careful we find ourselves swept out into the same stormy sea that has laid claim to our loved one, our own moods rising and falling with their own tumultuous highs and lows. We celebrate any signs of improvement, despair anew when the darkness returns. The deeper the depression, the more difficult it becomes for the sufferer to recognize the impact of his suffering on others. Eventually, for our own self-preservation, we must let go, must return to shore and surrender the fate of our loved one to a hoped-for power greater than our own.
The recent suicides of two teenaged boys familiar to my daughter combined with the dramatic suffering of someone near to us all has at times left me struggling to find any words of comfort or meaning to it all. Why does someone reach such a state? What, if anything, can we do? Am I my brother’s keeper?
I look back to the very zenith of my own suffering, wonder again why I survived when, say, a Gene Sprague does not. Perhaps a lesson lies in those darkest of moments, something I might offer my daughter by way of explanation to what has been happening around her.
Which beings me back to the illusion of control. While we, the witness to suffering, rue our lack of control in such situations, I think the sufferer compounds and perpetuates his pain by imagining that he does in fact have control. Always there is an imagined tomorrow, a new mate or job or medical cure, something that will emerge and at last deliver salvation. It is that greatest of tricks played by the mind: imagining that it can solve the problem that it, in fact, has created.
For me the turning point did not arrive until I at last had had enough; when I quite literally could not take another step; when hope itself died and there were no more tomorrows. Dead on my feet, I fell to my knees and from somewhere deep within came a voice that said: “I surrender. I can’t do this anymore. I didn’t ask to be here, didn’t ask for this shitty life, don’t want it anymore. Help me. Whatever you are, whatever put me here, whatever still exists within me, help. Please help. Tell me what you want from me, just don’t leave me like this. I can’t take another minute of this.” The illusion of control wasn’t simply gone, it was no longer wanted.
I waited. And, of course, nothing happened. Eventually the tears stopped and, perhaps out of boredom, I rose to my feet and wandered down the hall to my home office. I settled into the chair, empty – utterly devoid of any feelings or thoughts. There was just nothing left.
I don’t know how long I sat there like that, but at last “I” returned from the reverie and realized my eyes were focused on my bookcase and, in particular, an old journal I had completely forgotten existed. For nearly two years on a near-daily basis I’d used that bookcase and had never once seen that journal squeezed in there.
I pulled it out, opened and began reading. A chill started to creep up my spine. There, in my own handwriting, was a message from the Doug of 12 years earlier – a message that showed me I was reliving the same self-directed nightmare over and over and over again. The similarities in my actions and thinking across that span of time were eerily similar, and I realized that not only was I being offered a glimpse into my past but also a sneak peek into my future.
Even more important, something else opened within me: the faintest spark of light, of hope, because something in that other room had heard me. When I surrendered, when I let go and asked for help, something was in fact listening. It just didn’t respond the way my mind had expected. What better, more self-revelatory message could I have received than a message from the past written in my own hand? In essence, something had said: “You asked and now you have received.”
So my message to a 15-year-old child struggling with a world suddenly awash in suffering? That maybe part of the answer lies in letting go of the mistaken belief we have control in the first place. That to be relieved of our suffering we first must surrender our imagined ownership of it.