The Gift of Trauma — September 22, 2014
“I’m in trouble,” my 96-year-old dad called from the motel bathroom. I put down my map and opened the door. Blood smeared the floor where he had tried to clean it with a towel. Black clots from his gastro-intestinal bleeding spotted the bathtub and blocked some of the drain. I cleaned him up and took him the nearest emergency room, twenty miles away.
Finally back home a few days later and eighteen hundred miles to the west, his condition stabilized, but clearly my family obligations had taken a turn.
Asked to write about “family” for Clare Housing, I wanted to address more than just whom a family comprises. Many adults learn that they can choose those who are closest to them; others have little choice. Whatever “family” means to any of us, I want to write about its darker tunnels. Families generate inconvenience, stress, guilt, shame, anger, and grief. Their negatives are emotional and physical. Ultimately, however, I want to tell about how the downsides of “family” can bring us to peace of mind.
I spent many irate years resentful toward my dad. I was never the son he, a stubborn man, wanted: someone who would love football, someone with whom he could drink beer, someone who would give him grandchildren. One day I realized that, as best he could, he had avoided doing me permanent harm. Later, as an adult, I met a priest who had listened to thousands of confessions. He believed that at any point in life, we are all doing the best we can. Eventually, I packed my anger in a box and buried it.
My friend Anne, who is fifty, has suffered her whole life from a longing for parental love. She loved her family, but her parents had mostly ignored her and doted on her sister. Even though she knew that they were only doing their best, she felt empty. One day, however, they called her from their home in Pennsylvania. They wanted her help in getting a breed of puppy that was sired only near Minneapolis. She wept with happiness. The fact that she could do anything at all for her parents validated her own worth.
From time to time an ancient truth needs restating: We get to keep only what we give away.
This brings me to Clare Housing. Within the past year, I extended my “family” to include David. The victim of a terrible assault, a stroke, HIV, and other medical conditions, David’s ailments would drive most of us to self-annihilation. But David is more optimistic, more sanguine, and more forgiving than anyone else I know. If David has a bad day, medically, he accepts it calmly and with hope for the next morning. He laughs frequently and infectiously; he accepts the failures of others with grace, humor and love.
These qualities alone would be life lessons, but he goes further.
Although we talk about music, common acquaintances, and parts of our histories few others know about, David also allows me to take him in his wheelchair to restaurants, movies, Quaker meetings, parks, and, sometimes, the Quatrefoil library. He teaches the lesson Anne’s family taught. By allowing her help, they helped her.
He teaches the lesson I learned when my dad, seriously ill, instead of using a cane or walker, allowed me for the first time to support him by my arm, and I realized what a gift that was. One day I will do that for someone else. In the meantime, with or without thanks, assisting David – and sometimes strangers – gives me peace.
“It’s easy to be a holy man on top of a mountain,” says a character in Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. Most of us, however, live down below in a crowded, messy world. We need each other, sometimes those we call family, to help us value ourselves.