Sometimes Everything Is Terrible
Fear Not is a great way to start, but when things get awful, you need a different kind of story.
When I am reading a book by an author I’ve never read before, the question in the back of my mind, as I make my way through, is always the same:
How will this story end? Will you break my heart? Can I trust you?
It’s a fair question to ask, because so often the answer is No. No, you can’t trust me at all.
Christmas Eve, 2012, was the last day I thought we might still have a happy ending. We went to the movies and a seafood restaurant. Mom ate fried shrimp and I stared at her across the booth like I was watching a miracle. The previous weeks had been rocky and rough, five months of chemotherapy draining her life force, mood swings erratic as a cat standing on the remote control, but tonight she was wholly herself, laughing and bright and funny. The turnaround was so quick it was almost scary. I had recently watched an episode of Grey’s Anatomy about “the surge,” that burst of energy that people have right before they die, and it was haunting me. I confessed that to Mom, after dinner, as we waited for the valet to bring the car around, and she laughed and comforted me for the last time.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “Everything is going to be okay.”
John Gardner, in one of his books on writing fiction, said it was the moral responsibility of every novelist to create hope on every page. One day, he said, someone might turn to one of your books, and they may be considering suicide, and you must offer them in your pages a reason to go on. With that in mind, I apologize for what comes next.
Name The Pain
Admiral James Stockdale spent seven years as a POW in the most cruel prison camp in Vietnam. His leadership helped his men to survive years of torture, starvation, all forms of mental and physical abuse. His strategy became known as the Stockdale Paradox, and it starts with a plot twist. When asked, decades later, about the importance of mindset in a prison camp, Stockdale’s response was blunt and unexpected.
Optimists, he said, were the first to die.
Why? Because they were trying to live in denial of their circumstances.
This isn’t so bad! The optimists tried to claim, but it was really quite terrible.
I’m sure we’ll be out by Thanksgiving! They insisted, but they weren’t out at Thanksgiving, nor by Christmas, not for seven years.
In other words: they were trying to tell a story that wasn’t true.
Sometimes everything is terrible, and if you try to deny that, you won’t survive the hard parts. So I want to be crystal clear, in case I haven’t already. When I say success starts with the story you tell, that doesn’t mean that if we chant positive affirmations we will achieve our dreams; it doesn’t even mean that saying “change your narrative!” to your spouse is a good way to lift their mood. In fact, research shows that nonstop affirmative thinking will, in clinical studies, absolutely backfire, leading to negative results; and actually, it will do the same thing in a marriage, too.
I agree with John Gardner, hope is my moral responsibility, see the river, not the rocks, but sometimes the current will slam you into a boulder no matter how well you paddle. Sometimes you find yourself spiraling in a low oxygen environment, thousands of pounds of whitewater beating on you and no idea how to survive.
Mom woke up in the middle of that night, sick from chemo, weak from malnutrition, and fell down. She fractured her tailbone, and that set off a spiral from which she never really recovered: she became increasingly irrational, from pain medicine or maybe chemotherapy or maybe disease in her brain. By the end of December, she was in the hospital. One night after she fell asleep I went home, desperate to crawl into the safety of my own bed, close my eyes, escape for just a little while from a world that was fraying like a rope dissolving in my grip.
My phone rang in the middle of the night. “Your Mom is upset that you aren’t here,” the nurse said.
I blinked at the clock. 3 am. I was just so tired.
“Tell her I’ll be there first thing in the morning,” I answered, and could a different answer have changed the ending, because when I arrived, four hours later, I could hear the screaming from down the hallway. When I came to the doorway I will never forget what I saw.
She was on the floor, two orderlies around her.
Thrashing. Shouting.
Absolutely out of her mind.
“Mom!” I said, my heart emptying out. Her eyes rolled to me. All my life, when her eyes turned to me, I could count on seeing nothing but love.
But this day, when she looked at me, there was only rage. Hatred. Darkness.
Shining out of my own mother’s eyes.
Sometimes everything is terrible, that is absolutely true, but here’s the problem, per Stockdale.
The pessimists went next.
Feel the Pain
“We’re going to have to move to Seattle,” I wailed into the phone at 2 am, which is probably not what Steve expected me to say when I called him from the ICU.
Granted, the Pacific Northwest is home to my favorite landscapes and bookstores, but I know what was really going on. This was the day I realized Mom was going to die, and my first instinct was to flee catty-corner to the other side of the country.
I simply couldn’t stand the pain, and it was the first time in my life I had ever hurt so bad, but it was not and will not be the last time I felt a grief beyond bearing, and here is something I know now that I absolutely did not know then.
Seattle isn’t going to save you. You cannot escape the pain. There is only one way to survive the pain. You have to figure out how to stand the pain.
In her stunning book Bittersweet Susan Cain describes the work of Stephen Hayes, who identified seven skills that predict whether people languish or thrive after loss. The first five are all a variation on feel the pain. Per Hayes, we must acknowledge the loss, feel the negative emotions. We must expect to be brought to our knees. We must understand that sometimes, when we are on the river, our boat will flip.
Oddly, maybe unexpectedly, despite what all the tough guy movies would have us to believe, the only way to really survive our pain is to feel it. This is science but this is probably also why every religious tradition has mourning periods, rituals to recognize grief and sorrow, such as 40 days of Lent, seven days of sitting shiva. It is probably why there is an entire book in the Bible devoted to nothing but wailing.
Fear Not! I said last week, and that is indeed how every story starts, with the courage to step out into the wilderness. But in every story, in every life, no matter how brave you might be, the hero will get knocked down. The plot will twist. Sometimes in ways that we could never have even imagined.
We will all be brought to our knees in pain, in grief, in loss.
Next week we’ll Fight Back, starting with the end of the Stockdale story, the bit that comes after both the optimists and the pessimists have perished, but there’s an important interlude here.
Before you can fight back, the hero has to figure out how to stand the pain.
How do I stand the pain? You ask.
And I remind you of the studies of toxic positivity, and Stockdale in the prison camp, and I say first you name the pain.
And I remind you of the studies of Stephen Hayes and religious practices since time began, and I say then you feel the pain.
This is what I did not know ten years ago, this is what it took me so long to learn, this is the hardest part of the story so far but it is the only way through, it is always the only way through.
Name the pain. Feel the pain, all you can bear, and until next week, all I will say is this. That pain you’re feeling? No matter how intense? It doesn’t mean your story is over. It doesn’t mean your story is doomed.
It only means your story is true.
The Pain
Mom lived another year after that first break, twelve months of her body and mind splintering right in front of me, shards of memories and experiences so jagged that they can cut even now.
The wild look in her eyes when she tried to bite me.
The deep purple bruise on her thigh after I pinched her, desperate to break through a psychotic fit.
When she tried to call 911 on me, but was so disoriented that she ended up reporting to the Strava app that her daughter was torturing her.
“I’m not drinking that. You put something in there,” she hissed at me in the last week of her life, when I offered her a vanilla milkshake.
Marc was horrified at such an accusation. “Mom!” he said. “Robyn would never do that.” He took the drink from her. “Look, I’ll take a sip myself.”
“No!” I shrieked, lunging it away from him. Then whispered, “I did put something in there,” antipsychotics that she refused to swallow.
The last time Mom ever got out of bed she was holding Dad’s elbow, and he took her gently down the stairs into the kitchen, to the wall of family photos that she had created after Marc went to college, because she still wanted to see our faces every day. Because she loved us all so much.
“This is your family,” Dad said, because Mom did not know where she was, she did not know who we were. “This is your family,” but she didn’t believe him.
Mom had always been afraid of dementia, and she lost her mind.
She had always feared being weak, and in her last year, after multiple falls on fragile bones, she could barely walk.
She always loved being around people, fed off the energy and interaction with others, but for the last year of her life, she could not carry a conversation.
Everything she loved was taken from her: her purpose, her independence, her mind.
And her heart.
It’s an ending I will never, ever, ever be able to understand. Or forgive.
How can I ever trust you again? I ask when a narrator betrays me, and if I ever get an interview, I will also ask that question of God, because Mom told me once that all her life, since she was a little girl, she had felt like God was holding her hand, but sure as hell God was not holding her hand when she needed it the most.
This is one chapter in a year-long saga of love, grief, and the stories we tell to survive it all. To start from the beginning, go here. Or subscribe for free to get a new chapter every Tuesday.
Your best yet.
And here I thought you hated cliff hanger endings.
Just keeps getting deeper and better