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| At my grandparent's home, Orchard Lake, 1956 |
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| My brother's first sail boat, Orchard Lake, 1966 |
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| At our family home, Grosse Pointe Woods, MI, 1971 |
We all experience great losses in our lifetimes. Among the greatest for me is the death of my twin 43 years ago today. Interwoven with the loss of my brother to suicide are all the years leading up to January 30th, 1978. For much of his short life, my brother had been the target of our mother's projection of the self-loathing that was at the root of her narcissistic illness. It is why I learned to disassociate to survive what was happening — my mother's relentless shaming and rejection of my only sibling.
John was happiest when he was sailing. And these are the memories of my brother of the times when he was most at peace. I can see his smiles and feel his delight, and I can hear the sounds of the water and feel the warm breezes rippling against our skin and the sails of his Sunfish as we glided along. These were moments when John was free, happy, and distanced from the pain he carried.
My brother tried to cope as best as he could, but more and more the weight of the trauma he carried grew too much to bear. The "help" he received — the Valium, shock treatments, counseling with therapists who were not trauma informed — also added to rather than lessened John's trauma. Ultimately, the only way out that he could find was death.
My twin left this poem that he had written about not being loved by our mother:
If Only
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| Our family, December 1968 |
For many years, the weight of what I carried related to the loss of my brother, the sudden death of my father two years earlier, and the buried rage and grief I felt towards my mother was too much for me. I buried it as deeply as I could and hid behind alcohol and other addictions, distractions, and denials. But that could only go on for so long. As Alex Haley wisely states, "Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.”
It is my experience and perception that as we grow older, our choices point us in one of two directions. Either we are doing the work of opening and healing our hearts or we are staying defended and detached from what we carry within our deepest selves. If we are resilient enough to seek and find the support we need to engage in the process of embracing whatever losses have impacted us — ancestral, cultural, and other traumas — then there is the potential to be transformed rather than hardened, to be expanded rather than diminished, and to become more authentically who we are rather than stuck in a stunted state through which we remain stranger to our great capacity to be and experience love.
And that is truly what I believe we all come here to do: to love and be loved. This sounds so basic and simple, but for many of us this journey of opening our hearts is not simple or easy at all. Like my brother. John died not knowing love. My heart will always carry the grief of this. And also the great lessons from my brother's life and death which I have embraced with the whole of my heart and soul over the past 38 years.
Because of how I've been able to respond to what happened to my twin and our family, John's life was not in vain, his suffering and mine and our parents not all for nothing. And that's the big question, I believe, for us all — What do we do with our great losses? Whatever our choices, consciously or otherwise, determines whether we are evolving and growing or contracting with bitterness and resentment, fear and shame, and the grief that we've abandoned within ourselves. At least this has certainly been my experience.
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Over the past many years now I've been blessed with doing the ongoing work of gradually healing and opening my heart, work that I've done for both myself and my twin and all the generations before and after us. And the miracle of this deep heartwork has also empowered me to serve as midwife to my mother's journey out of her devastating mental illness and to a place where she first came to experience receiving and giving love late in life — a process which began for Mom at age 87 and lasted until her death at age 94 this past June. The power of love and the grace it births in our lifetimes is beyond description. It is the greatest gift.
So often I witness a world that is love starved. In all the ways that we humans deeply harm ourselves and others we can be sure that there is a deficit of love. This was certainly true for my childhood family and generations before us.
And it is indeed hard, hard work to peel back the fog of our denial and begin to truly befriend our deepest selves. Yet, it is only through this process that we grow in consciousness of what matters most, of our intimate interwoven connections with all of life, and of our great capacity for caring, kindness, compassion, and love. As Rumi wisely said so long ago, our greatest strength lies in the gentleness and tenderness of our hearts.
What a tragedy for all of us who live oblivious to this truth... as I once did. And as my brother did throughout his 26 years here on Earth. Once we get this, I mean really get this, our capacity to hurt ourselves and one another is profoundly diminished. Not that we aren't still human and capable of acting unskillfully and hurting each other. But we're much more likely to catch ourselves and intervene.
It is the violence which killed my brother which ultimately transformed me into a human being fiercely passionate about tenderness, compassion, and love. As the Dalia Lama affirms — Kindness is my religion.
Which brings me again to the truth that it isn't as much what happens to us as how it is that we're able to respond. Do we contract or expand? Do we hold onto bitterness or do the hard work of forgiveness? Do we become more entrenched within the walls that we've unknowingly built against love, or do we get the help and support we need to dismantle those walls and open to the light and love that's always been there within us?
And this is what my beloved brother's life and death has taught me: to be a warrior for Love. May we inspire each other to do the same.
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| On the shores of Orchard Lake, MI, 1954 |
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