ANNIVERSARY

LEGACY:  What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. ~Pericles

Every year it creeps up on me. In late February I start feeling uneasy, not myself. I wonder if I’m coming down with something. Why can’t I sleep? It’ll probably pass, I tell myself. But anniversaries are hidden things that can seep in and seize you unaware. The light bulb goes on when my son Ben calls from Boston or D.C. or Texas or wherever he’s gotten off to and says, “Tomorrow is the day that Lauren died.” Of course.

The first time I met Lauren was in front of the library. Accustomed to awkward middle-schoolers with little to say, I was captivated by this short confident exuberant 12 year old who looked me straight in the eye, stepped forward and stuck her hand out for a shake. Introducing us was my son, also 12, and, I think, also captivated by this new friend.

I wish I could remember the next time I saw her and the next, but I do know that she became a loyal pal of my son and a participant in many of the school and social gatherings that swept the kids along from middle school into high school. We got acquainted with her parents, and our family conversation included which part Lauren got in the upcoming play or her take on Student Council. Lauren was a big presence in a small package. She was also complete and fully-realized, so herself at an age when most of her peers were riddled with self-doubt and angst. Lauren didn’t have time for any of that.

It was a normal night at our house in late winter of Ben’s freshman year. Homework was done and he was in bed early because he was coming down with something. My friend Peg called late, too late for a regular call. I asked her to repeat what she said three times because I couldn’t take it in. I didn’t want to take it in. Lauren had been in the family car, her brother driving her to play practice. He made a teenage mistake and tried to make it around the crossing gates and they were hit. Lauren was dead and he was injured. Peg said her husband had passed by the tracks soon after the accident and came home shaken, hoping no one had been in that car when it was hit. When they later got a call from a friend and learned that it was Lauren, Peg called me. She knew what good friends my son and Lauren were and wanted to save him from walking into school the next morning to face this news.

The early loss of my father had marked my life and I had so hoped my children could escape grief’s reach. As I climbed the stairs that night to wake Ben and break his life in two, I cursed the gods all over again. Of all people, why Lauren, and by extension why Ben?

Every year, once Ben calls, I go to the florist and pick out the one most vivid bloom, this year a salmon-colored rose. While the clerk adds greens and wraps it in cellophane, I surprise myself by blinking back tears. It’s been years since I did that. Lauren should be thirty this year and full of the challenge of a whole new stage of life. Like memory, grief doesn’t go away. It just lies in wait for a moment like this.

All winter they pile snow in the parking lot at the town pool. By the time March 2 comes around there is a mountain of it. I park there and walk across the street to the tree, the one where Lauren’s car came to rest. There is a permanent bouquet secured there of pretty spring flowers. All year, when I drive by I check to be sure it is still there. In the early days there were piles of flowers, which would disappear, no doubt cleared out by some civil authority, to gradually build back up soon after. Now when I see the occasional addition I smile, reminded that others remember too and feel moved to act.

I bend down to place the flower at the base of the tree and whisper to Lauren that we miss her and that Ben is fine and happy. I figure she would like to know that about her old friend. I linger a moment before I climb back over the snow bank and return to the car. My mood starts to lighten even as I think of her family who has found a way to live on, and the others who love and remember her too today. The year turns soon after, spring comes, renewing energy and hope. But it doesn’t come until we’ve remembered Lauren.

First, I loved Lauren because she loved my son. Then, as I got to know her, for being so vividly herself. And for making everyone she met feel included and important. And for making her 14 years of life just as full and complete as much longer ones. And now I love her for her legacy – to be smart and provocative and unafraid – that makes me want to be more like her every day, and to tell her story to you.

CBH 03/10

THE BREAKUP

LOVE: Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. ~Zora Neale Hurston

Here is what you say to your heart:

Broken is overdramatic and unnecessarily hurtful. You are not broken; bruised is more like it – alright, perhaps it’s a severe contusion if that pleases you more. You will discolor and feel exceedingly tender for a while; in fact, you’ll hurt in places you didn’t know you had. But no one has to perform open heart surgery to fix you, and you don’t need the paddles to shock you back to life. You’re still beating. You know how to mend yourself, with time. Either you’ve done it before, or it’s time you learned. Over your lifetime, you’ll beat 2.5 billion times. That’s what you’re here for, not to moon over this insult. I can’t get along without you, you know.

Here is what you say to the retreating back of your person of interest:

Goodbye. No pleading, no demands for explanations, no stalking of his/her future activities. From now on, that person is the person who used to be at the center of your life. Old news, out of date, no longer qualifying as the focus of your attention. You need that attention for yourself. He/she is best viewed from a distance, both geographically and emotionally.

Here is what you say to your mind:

Okay, snap to. What were you thinking, investing so much of my capital in this person? Healing up, that’s what you need to be thinking about.

To your guilt:

If you are implicated in the breakup, you need to deliver at least one clear and complete statement of regret to your ex. This must be done with compassion from the high road, and cannot be a backhanded passive-aggressive blame-filled slam at the other person designed to get you off the hook. You don’t get to transfer your guilt and anguish to them so you can walk away more comfortably. Guilt exists for a reason, to call you to be a better version of yourself. So take this opportunity. Say to your guilt: Teach me, let me have it, show me where I should have behaved differently.

If you are not the one initiating the breakup but suspect that you facilitated it by doing or failing to do things that mattered, fine, but don’t twist things around so that you place this whole thing on your shoulders. Also, do not expect and especially don’t demand an apology from your ex. That trivializes your experience, as if this pain could be eradicated by a few words from an outside person who no longer deserves any power over your feelings. This is a collaborative process between you and all your parts. No one else has a say except your steadfast and loyal friends and family. Do not attempt to short-circuit this process by going after a cheap apology. Whatever relationship your ex has with his/her guilt will play out outside of your view, and is now none of your business. You will never know the outcome, and don’t need to.

To your emotions:

Sure, you will be all over the place for a while. I know you can’t help it. But try for a little balance. At some point there will be a few glimpses of good feelings, like freedom and excitement for your new future that will begin to leak through. Usher them to the front and see what they have to say. In the meantime, lay off the sad music and don’t you dare watch An Affair to Remember more than once a week. There is some healing in all that wallowing, but you mustn’t to overdo it or you may end up in a trough. Instead, be the star of your own movie. Cultivate resilience; remember that you are strong, or if you are not, this is your big chance to become so. And cultivate hope. You have no idea what is around the corner for you.

To your body:

You ache, you don’t want to get out of bed, you can’t imagine getting off the couch, but do it anyway. About food, if you can’t eat, think of what used to be your most yummy treat, get some and jump in and then follow it up with a protein bar. If you are stuffing your face, put your fork down and go outside. Food can’t fill that gaping hole, but activity can.

Walk, run, go to the gym and work out. Let one of your exercise nut friends accompany you. Sign up for tennis lessons or go swimming. Either start some new activity or revert to something you loved before the person even came into your life. Reclaim your body from the relationship and strengthen it. Get a massage in order to get a human touch without any complications.

To your friends:

Take me surprising places, get me moving, tell me the truth about my worth and my prospects. Tell me what you wish you could give me. Tell me what I’ve forgotten about myself; tell me who I was before this relationship began. Don’t try to fix me up yet, but start a list of people you think I should meet when I’m ready. Don’t be surprised if I don’t want to use it. Right now, I don’t think I’ll want to risk going through this again very soon.

Don’t tell me to snap out of it – it doesn’t work that way. Just walk with me.

And to the special few: Can I call you in the middle of the night if I am having a really tough time? As soon as they say yes, vow never to do it. Unless you have to.

To your expectations:

Stomp out any thoughts that this will reverse itself and the relationship will come back to life. The chances are slimmer than slim and even if you gave it a try, you would soon remember why you needed to part ways. Everyone sooner or later suffers through this and now it is your turn. Stand up and take it.

Tear your ex off that pedestal you keep trying to construct. See him/her with brutally clear eyes, imperfections and all. Use this information to create a revised account of what would please you in the future. And erase any notions that exceptional good looks have anything to do with character and desirability. That comes from a primitive desire to show off your ability to snag a looker, which has nothing to do with your happiness. Remember the lesson of Charlotte in Sex and the City: a plain partner may be the one worth having. Make a list of the gorgeous people you know and compare them with your desired qualities. Bet they don’t match.

To your self-pity:

Scram. You will weaken me. I am a survivor, not a victim. If I am disillusioned, it means that I just learned that I was illusioned in the first place. If I was trusting when I should have been suspicious, if I was secure when I should have been wary, if I was naïve when I should have been cynical, well, that’s just me and I don’t plan to let this experience take away my nature. If I was true to myself, I will take credit for that and walk away with regret but without self-pity.

To your history:

If your hold over me from my upbringing and prior relationships figured into the destruction of this one, then I have to ask you to loosen your grip on me. I want to go on from here without hauling you around as baggage. I’ll unpack you and keep the best parts, but I’ll leave the junk behind. Don’t try to follow me.

To your mirror:

You look like hell. Look at those bags under your eyes and the vacant stare. But look beyond them. You’ll get through this and you’ll be wiser in the end. There are unexpected gifts waiting for you. You’ll see.

CBH 02/10

HEROES HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE

BEGINNINGS: Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep upon you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring. ~Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assasin


It is the season of change. The holidays have faded, we can see more clearly with the leaves off the trees, and the snow piles nudge us to stay home more than usual. So we end up staring in the mirror trying to reason out how to improve ourselves. Lose weight? Stand up to an oppressive relative? Finally quit smoking? Stop the affair?


With all my years as a therapist, I am a big fan of change. I’ve spent years trying to figure out why it happens when it does, and why it fails to happens when it doesn’t. But I want to push beyond the shallow New Years’ Resolutions construct that plugs the media hole between the end of the Christmas holiday and Valentine’s Day.


I once spent a year asking all the therapists I knew to tell me what they thought accounts for people’s ability to create a wanted change in their lives – in habits, attitude, behavior, lifestyle. After the usual stunned and trapped expression passed, they each gave me a completely different answer: People change when they have something to lose, or something to gain, or the pain of keeping things as is starts to exceed the pain of changing. It is readiness, or their pride is at stake. They get sick and tired of being sick and tired. Or the consequences of not changing foreshadow disaster. Perhaps they become inspired by another’s example, or have a spiritual moment that gives them hope. Or God does it. Or there’s no telling.


Aren’t these therapists, people who traffic in change and transformation, I thought, supposed to be up on this topic and ready with an answer? For that matter, shouldn’t I?


Lacking consensus and sensing the whiff of truth in each of these wide-ranging answers, I refined my question: In the change you have witnessed, what were the various ingredients that had to be present to allow it to take place? A recovering friend answered right away – honesty, openness, willingness, the backbone of the 12 step approach. A narrative therapist blurted out her answer without hesitation – an audience, she said. It was a simple as that, to her.


The rest, failing to come up with such a sure and tidy answer, turned to personal storytelling. One told me about deciding to live in the face of a delibilitating illness that had invited him to consider suicide. Another described the relationship of two professors from warring countries who initiated regular dialogues between people who previously had never even occupied the same room, which kick-started the growth of empathy and acceptance. It reminded me of what I already knew – our answers are always embedded in our stories.


There are plenty of experts who pontificate on the matter of personal change. My favorite is James O. Prochaska of the University of Rhode Island, who asked similar questions in a more scientific way and came up with some concrete answers. He started publishing his theory of change in 1977 and is still at it. Every year, I wait for the New Year’s Resolution media blitz to discover Prochaska, but so far, no soap.


Change, he says, is a process, not an event, that allows us to first recognize the need for change, get used to the idea, and finally carry it out. It is not a linear process, but a kind of spiral where we get started, backslide, catch up, and keep slogging. These are necessary loops in the process of creating longstanding change. Clinicians call them relapses, people in recovery call them research, in our mirrors we call them failures that constitute a reason to give up. Prochaska learned all of this studying people trying to stop smoking, a nut it took me years of attempts to finally crack.


Reducing his work to one paragraph isn’t adequate, but here’s a glimpse: You start with the precontemplation stage (Why should I go to that damn gym? I have better things to do), progress to contemplation (Okay okay, I am out of shape. When the weather turns I’ll probably start going.), to preparation (I’d better start that water aerobics class in three weeks), to action (I’m going twice a week. I kind of like it), finally to maintenance (I feel better than ever. I’m sticking with this). See? He’s an expert who really understands the struggle. Why doesn’t everyone know about him and his work?


This is the Get Noticed decade, after all. Whatever you hope to do – sell books, guest on Oprah!, make the celebrity news cycle, get a speaking gig at your local library – you first have to Get Noticed. This should be easier than ever before in the age of You Tube, Facebook, blogging, Tweeting and whatever is going to debut next week to make them passé. Cyberfame has made word of mouth a more powerful and accessible force than imaginable before. Any of us, in theory, now has a crack at worldwide attention. Look at Susan Boyle whose You Tube audition on Britain’s Got Talent led to her debut CD breaking U.S. sales records. I was happy to help. I must have watched the clip 20 times, and bought that CD as soon as it came out, doing my little part to help fulfill her dream.


I checked Prochaska on You Tube. There were three mentions, all of other people talking about his ideas in brief clips with a total of 252 hits, a little shy of her 100 million. He may want to recruit a media consultant to change that.


Look at other recent success stories. Elizabeth Gilbert took a trip to foreign lands to become whole again after a relationship debacle, at least purportedly. The truth: she had secured a juicy book deal before she stepped on the first plane, and the wildly successful Eat, Pray, Love resulted. Julie Powell, a young woman who was in a bit of a trough, somehow decided it would improve her life if she took a year to prepare every one of Julia Child’s classic recipes and blog about it. She was right. She sold the film rights and ended up being played by Amy Adams in the film version while Meryl Streep played Julia, assuring its success. Now, Chicago writer and yoga instructor Robyn Okrant blogged about her year-long effort to follow every bit of advice that Oprah doled out, received a book deal, and is poised to become the latest media darling.


What accounts for their success? In each case, there is unmistakable talent. Boyle belted out her song like she’d starred on Broadway. Gilbert was already a proven author, once a nominee for the National Book Award, and exceedingly skillful at crafting her narration and tone. Powell lacks Gilbert’s writing flair, relying often on bursts of profanity rather than carefully crafted prose, but came up with a concept that attached her star to a compelling and beloved character in Julia. We don’t know Robyn on Oprah very well yet, but at first glance, she seems earnest and personable, like her subject. But she also seems centered, as a yoga instructor should, and quiet, the antithesis of Oprah. That contrast should make for compelling dramatic tension as Robyn tries to live as Oprah advises. As I write this, someone is no doubt casting the movie. I think Maggie Gyllenhaal would make a great Robyn, and for Oprah, how about Sherrie Shepherd?


But there is more. In each case the woman embarked on a classic hero’s journey, or should I say heroine’s journey? Just like Odysseus trying to get back home from the Trojan War, they each pursued a quest, and suffered the trials of the resulting journey. They encountered numerous obstacles and temptations both practical and emotional, passed a series of tests, overcame their enemies, and ultimately brought home a treasure. We love Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz for their fulfillment of these requirements. Why not apply them to our own new challenges, our next beginnings?


In the hero’s journey, the protagonist is supposed to resist the call to adventure, but I’m ready, listening for the call myself, ready to set out on my next quest. I’ve already got Prochaska as a mentor and guide, even if he needs a little help in the fame department, and I have a list of possible choices. Will I finally conquer my disinterest in that gym? Go out and Get Noticed so I can send out my book proposal again and prove I have a platform to sell books? Or devote a month to writing 50,000 words on one of those five ideas I have for a novel?


I’ll soon choose one and set out, thereby conquering my enemy – distraction by all the other things fighting for my attention. What will your next challenge be? Think of it as you’re hero’s journey and I promise it will beat the heck out of any New Year’s Resolutions you came up with.


CBH 01/10

Ms. Crankypants Seizes the Season

Ms. Crankypants

For starters, let me introduce myself. I’m Ms. Crankypants, guest contributor for the month. Carolyn is busy with other things – well, to be honest, I sent her what looked like an official email that the blog was taking the month off so she didn’t have to write anything. I don’t even feel that bad about it. A girl has to make her own opportunities after all. So this is my chance to tell you what I think for once.

About the holidays for instance. I’ve had it – year after year with the shopping, the decorating, the wrapping, the baking. Well, I don’t personally actually bake, but searching the stores for the special cookies that come in the cellophane covered boxes that are like the ones my grandmother used to make takes a lot of my time.

I’m not the only one who needs a rest. Look into the eyes of your neighbor, your relatives, the shopper who just cut in line in front of you at TJ Maxx, and you’ll see not peace and good will but panic. How will she – or you- get everything done in time?

So, I’ve decided to start a movement – The Christmas Sabbatical. Here’s the concept: Every few years you get to take a pass on all the holiday preparations and simply float on top of the season without unwanted fuss and no stress. You become exempt from any expectations. You need to do nothing. Don’t tell me you’ve never thought of it yourself. You have, you just haven’t had the, let us say, ova, to carry it out. Or if you have, you’ve kept it awfully quiet. But don’t worry. I’ll be happy to take the credit.

I’m starting small this year, just telling a few people like you, my target group – bright, engaged, creative people who have better things to do than fritter away their time on culturally-mandated busywork. I once saw a Martha Stewart magazine where she expected perfectly functional females to waste a day or two of their lives glue-gunning cranberries to a Styrofoam wreath. I know I’m a little bit excitable, but that one sent me around the bend. How will we ever achieve world peace – and it does look like it’s going to be up to us girls since the men have been making such a hash of it for centuries – wasting our time like that?

Next year will be the big rollout – a New York Times OpEd piece, an interview on The View (Elizabeth the conservative one will sputter in indignation), a book deal – but I get ahead of myself. Just to head off Elizabeth and my other critics, I am not suggesting giving up Christmas and what it stands for (which was what? I’ve forgotten). I just advocate the chance to take a year off from the bustle periodically and see what else shows up to fill the space.

A moment about tone. You want this to be a joyful experience that allows you unprecedented freedom and ease, not a way to bitterly weasel out of your responsibilities. I know to mention this because a certain significant other, call him Mr. Grumpy, I mentioned it to shot back, “Well, don’t do it anymore if you don’t like it.” Which completely misses the point, as usual. Just to be clear: the point is that you may usually love to do all the preparing, gifting, polishing, etc. but after a marathon lifetime of the same, deserve a break once in a while.

And here’s the beauty of it - The Sabbatical is not an all or nothing proposition. Given your personality, your budget and your other circumstances, you design it to fit your particular needs.

I have constructed a matrix, elegant in its simplicity, to lay out your options. It is based on first, whether you want your sabbatical to be complete (for those you who have been overfunctioning for years) or partial (if you just want to dial things back to an achievable level). Second, do you want it to be visible (so you can champion the idea) or invisible (so you can use it as an internal guideline to keep your own expectations in check)? Allow me to explain.

Option 1: Complete and Visible. You just resign from everything you usually do. Boldly declare that you are not participating this year and then duck because there will be a backlash. You will be called an atheist Christmas-denier. Not recommended if you have children in the house. They take everything so personally, and you may scar them for life and I don’t want to be implicated for that. I may be cranky, but I’m not a monster.

Option 2: Complete and Invisible. This requires more finesse. You totally take the year off, but don’t admit it. Always answer a question with a question, like “So where is the Christmas tree?” with “Have you seen the axe?” You might want to come down with the fake flu on Christmas Eve and get over it on the 26th and watch old movies in between.

Option 3: Partial and Visible. Admit what you are doing with pride. Choose your five favorite holiday activities and do them with gusto, then wrap yourself in the flag of nonmaterialistic values if anything else rears its head demanding to be done. Set an example for your family and friends and recruit them to participate in the big rollout next year.

Option 4: Partial and Invisible. Cut back but keep it to yourself. It will be entertaining to see if anyone even notices what you’ve dropped, and if they do, if they have the nerve to mention it. Remember to wear your new relaxation on your sleeve, so as to attract positive energy that helps everyone you come in contact with feel like they can settle down too.

Before I let you go to put this into practice, here’s a consideration of how the sabbatical concept impacts the prevailing notions about what Christmas must be:

There is the annual scolding that we must “put the Christ back in Christmas,” as if it is some sort of religious holiday. This is accompanied by he increasingly confusing squabbles over where people can put menorahs, crèches, Christmas trees, or not. My response: I’ll decide exactly what needs to be put in my own holiday, thanks, and you do the same.

And the language thing – can you say “Merry Christmas” to your atheist friends (you do have atheist friends, you know), or your Jewish neighbor or Muslim co-worker, without being an insensitive jerk? This however, requires that you prescreen any possible greetees for their religious identity so you can place them in the proper category which is potentially rude and unwelcome. My outlook: Let’s just all get over ourselves and just be glad that someone wants to greet someone else rather than blow their head off. Jeez.

Every year the Christmas card list forces you to make an accounting of your friends and associates, sadly removing the ones who are gone and scouring your year to see if you’ve made any new friends at all to add, which is a good thing if you ask me. But the Christmas letter thing, oh brother. Talk about making work for yourself. Now Ms. Crankypants likes a good story as well as the next person, but shouldn’t have to sit through a recitation of each mole that everyone in the family had removed this year. Limit it to one page and you won’t try your patience or anyone else’s. Besides, by next year, we’ll probably all be down to just a Tweet and think of all the time that’ll save.

Finally there is the problem of the proliferation of traditions that demand to be repeated year after year. Just because you flew to Trenton the last ten years on Christmas Eve doesn’t mean you have to repeat that this year. Too much accumulation of have-to’s leads to the very problem we are trying to solve – drowning in unnecessary commitments. It would be like never getting rid of your gramophone when you went to stereo, and keeping your Beta video tapes once VHS came in. Or listening to your Walkman in one ear and your iPod in the other. We’ve got to let the past go to create a manageable present. Mindfulness now, that’s what I say.

Okay, I think that’s it. Don’t tell Carolyn I was here. She tries to keep me under wraps, but she’s pretty easy to outwit. I’ll be back.

Oh yeah, happy holidays.

MCP aka CBH 12/09

Catching On

Carolyn B Healy

I met Lucia at a writing seminar. She was slight, with a lined, hard luck face and unruly dark hair that obscured her small brown eyes. Twelve of us, all strangers, sat in a loose circle in a sunny high-desert retreat house waiting for the first session to begin. Our leader, a successful and engaging author of personal growth books, arrived and immediately handed out water bottles and instructed us to drink and keep drinking to stay ahead of headaches and any other high altitude symptoms. It was a way of telling us we’d be safe here.

Each of us had a book project in mind and came for help in shaping it into a best-seller. He told us what to expect: Each of us would get two hours to lay out our book concept, the group could ask clarifying questions and provide feedback, and he would provide consultation about how to focus the topic to catch the interest of a large audience. But first, we would get to know each other.

He divided us into pairs and told us to interview each other, and be prepared to introduce each other to the group using one amazing fact learned during the conversation. Lucia and I were a pair. I don’t remember the amazing fact, but I do remember that we had remarkable overlap in what our early lives had been like. Both of us grew up only children of widowed mothers living in modest circumstances in a big city; both became therapists; both had two children almost grown; and both had killer book ideas.

As we talked on about our parallel histories, I questioned her about her experience growing up without a father and what she ultimately made of it. My killer book idea was that personal narrative, the story you tell about yourself, has everything to do with how your life turns out and your level of satisfaction with it. And that if you are not satisfied, changing that narrative is the – or at least one – route to transformation.

So how could I not ask? Plus, of late I had been putting an excess of energy into finally sorting out my parental loss and how it figured into my own story, so my curiosity could not be contained, even if it took us beyond the prescribed activity.

Lucia answered, “I remember everyone always saying to my mother, ‘Isn’t it a shame that you have to support Lucia alone?’ ‘It’s such a shame that Joe left you with such a hard life.’ Everything was a “shame.” I took that in, and that’s how I lived my life for years. Ashamed.” She explained that she’d been prone to disconnection and self-pity from girlhood, and had to work hard as an adult to come out of it.

I didn’t know what to say, not a common occurrence. I realized that there was a sentence that rang through my childhood too, directed to my mother Jessie: “Aren’t you lucky that you have Carolyn?” Or to me, “Your mother is so lucky to have you.” Or overheard around relatives’ tables, “Thank goodness Jessie and Carolyn have each other.” You hear that difference? It was all about luck and good fortune on my side.

I’d long wondered where my disposition toward appreciation and gratitude came from, and originally figured that they must come easy to me because of my early loss. It was no problem for me to tell the difference between an annoyance and a real tragedy that was worth getting worked up about. I didn’t need to make gratitude lists to open my eyes. They were open.

I would hear my friends moan about how hopeless and unfair their parents were, and suffer over not being allowed to go on a Girl Scout overnight because they had a family occasion they shouldn‘t miss. But how do you say something like “count your blessings” without sounding like you’re feeling sorry for yourself? So I kept it to myself. I knew what I knew because of my loss experience, I decided, one they hadn’t had.

As I grew, I discovered that, as usual, life isn’t that simple. And now Lucia further confirmed it. If my original idea had held up, she would have developed the very same practical assessment I had - any day when the roof didn’t fall in was a good day. Instead, she had gone through the same loss, but assigned it a different meaning, the opposite one even, and got a quite different outcome.

In fact, the encounter with Lucia proved my new theory – that it’s not what life throws at you, it’s how you catch it. It fueled my determination to write that book and highlight this route to resilience.

The meaning that Lucia put to her fatherlessness and how I saw mine activated whole different sets of neurons in our developing brains and sent us down entirely different paths. She developed a grim expectation, the opposite of my knee-jerk optimism.

As I look around, what is not to be grateful about? I see others whose attention is drawn to the negative – the latest political scandal or crime statistics or fears about health care or taxes. Happily for me, my attention goes instead toward a dynamite sunset, or a poke in the ribs from a friend, or a good medical report.

Does that make me a Pollyanna, or worse, a self-congratulatory one? Not so. I am lucky, not admirable. I can meet trouble when I see it, but it just can’t trump the rest. Dr. Martin Seligman, a founder of the positive psychology movement, asks if the word in your heart is Yes or No, and provides questions to reveal the answer. He rushes to say that even if it is No, there is plenty you can do to nudge it toward Yes, which brings rewards of pleasure, protection against physical and emotional difficulty, and greater achievement. Ask Lucia who worked hard to move in that direction.

My word is Yes. And I’m grateful for that.

One loose end: What about the personal narrative book? I did write up a nice book proposal and an agent friend shopped it around to several likely editors, but no one bit. I’ll dust it off one of these days, tighten it up, add my new learnings and send it out there again to see if it finds a home. I know which story I’m going to lead with.

CBH 11/09

Friends, Not Enemies

Carolyn B Healy

We flew in from the west over O’Hare, then banked over the Loop, studying first the close-together highrises and then the suburban houses ringed with still-green grass. Our friends sat in the row behind us and we talked about how great the city looked if only those puffy white clouds would get out of the way. We’d had a great week playing golf and seeing the Texas Hill Country but it was time to return to normal. We headed for that lovely moment of touchdown, when you are back home where you belong, but not yet overtaken by daily responsibilities. My calendar for the coming week was full. I’d see my writer friends on Tuesday, my poet friend Wednesday, a counselor friend late in the week. I felt fortunate to have all that to return to.

I’d been afraid that the leaves of precious fall, my favorite season, would all be down by the time I got back, a fear that my friend behind me, a dedicated gardener, echoed. But there they were in gorgeous yellows and oranges and reds, hanging onto the branches for all they were worth until we could get home and witness their departure firsthand.

It grew dark as we rode home in the taxi. Once we turned down our street and saw groups of trick or treaters and their lurking parents, some dressed up themselves, we realized we were in trouble. It was Halloween and if we stayed home candyless, we would have to hide in the basement until late in the evening. We threw our suitcases in the garage, checked for messages, even though there are few these days since email has replaced the telephone as the delivery method of choice for our friendships. We hopped in the car and went to our favorite bar for dinner and refuge.

Back home later, it was a smooth re-entry. We kept the outside lights off against Halloween stragglers and I threw myself into clothes sorting, old movie-watching and email catching-up. I slept like a baby, exhausted by all the relaxation, the eight-hour sleeps and languorous dreams of a vacation.

In the morning I woke up to a thud, and then another, and another. Sunshine streamed in through my tree-high bedroom window. I saw immediately that I had lost leaves after all. Every one of the bright yellow ones that had graced the tree right outside my window had fallen into a sad pool below, leaving small red berries visible against the bright blue sky. I remembered the benefit of this annual loss – you can see so much better once the leaves come down. I discovered a birds’ nest at the crook of two branches that I’d missed in my daily first gaze outside all spring and summer. Had I missed eggs and baby birds too?

Before I even got to the window I figured out the thuds. Dozens of birds swarmed the tree, nipping off berries. Robins, cardinals, finches and sparrows hopped, swooped and kept out of each others’ way, feasting like there was no tomorrow. It was a colorful diversity of birds, each with their own ways but all wanting the same thing – those berries. Some of the birds – drunk on fermenting berries? – lost their way and slammed themselves into my windows. I hoped they’d sober up before starting that migration, so they can tell my window from the open sky.

I grabbed my camera and tried to capture them in all their chaotic glory, but they didn’t cooperate – too much jumping around. So I settled for the better option, actually watching them. Because we like to see nature as human-centric, it was tempting to think of them as friends enjoying the feast together as we would, like bird Thanksgiving. But with brains smaller than jelly beans, they can’t manage that. They don’t have room for mirror neurons and consciousness and the desire to be understood, the fundamentals of friendship. They just chowed down and leapt from one branch to the other, doing their different dances.

I’m pretty interested in sorting out differences. As a therapist, I’ve always had to search through the surface differences among my clients to find the shared core of emotion and motivation and vision that allows for change. And as a writer I am taken with point of view, always imagining how various characters would see the same event so differently. In fact, if I don’t look out, I can get so wrapped up in examining everyone’s unique take that I forget to tell the story, or take so long that everybody including me has lost interest. Focus, I am learning, is a necessary antidote to this overload of empathy.

As a morning birdwatcher, I studied how each species looked different as they got the same job done. Years ago when I first started to learn a bit about brain science, one portion of the brain was credited with the ability to discern small details, like telling one species of bird from another. The next time I tuned in, the same part of the brain was described as the place where face recognition took place, and I heard the sad tale of a man who had lost that ability. As he walked down the street, he had no way to know if he was encountering his best friend or a complete stranger because he couldn’t sort out one face from another. Much embarrassment ensued as he struggled to manage this deficit. He truly couldn’t tell who his friends were, until he heard their voices.

As a friend, I am watchful for differences too. I have friends of many stripes. Differences in politics, religion, life circumstance, ethnic heritage, whatever, do not stop me. Being just like me isn’t nearly as important as being interesting and willing to share. This does not make me a good person, just a curious one.

I know that not everyone sees it this way. A long conversation with a friend last spring revealed that she does not have any friends who disagree with her, and likes it that way. I began to mention that conversation to other friends and found several more who said the same. During the political season I heard a similar tale from many more. They choose a cocoon of commonality and self-affirmation, secure in their beliefs together.

That’s a lot of comfort, but at what cost? In my experience, sad to say, people who stick to their own kind can become a little superior, and smug, and self-righteous if they encounter nothing but agreement. Oops. Have I said too much? Do I sound like a scold? My question is this: How do you grow and change and enlarge your view inside such insulation? What challenges you to rethink and fine-tune what you believe if you never test it against others’ thoughts and feelings?

My argument in favor of cultivating friendships with those who have differing views is this: If you hear an unfamiliar viewpoint from a person you know and trust, chances are you will consider it because you care about what matters to your friend. And you may even deepen your understanding of the issue by seeing it from another vantage point.

It is quite another thing if the only varying views you consider are the top-of-the-lungs rants of media pundits who get rich on the numbers of listeners they can recruit to their side. They trade on fear of The Other, and exaggerate the threat of other ideas, attributing evil motives to those who disagree. Predicting catastrophe is big business out there, and works to increase suspicion and split people apart, the opposite of friendship.

Give me friendship to bridge such divisions. The one ingredient that is present in friendship and absent just about everywhere else these days is respect. If my friend tells me a story of her dilemma years ago as a young coed, knowing that a classmate was about to have an abortion which she felt was “just about the worst thing,” and shares with me the helpful counsel of a nun she consulted, I can understand something new and appreciate how she was tested by that experience.

If my friend tells me that he would love to speak out on human rights abuses in his homeland but can’t afford to place his family in jeopardy, I gain a deeper understanding of what is at stake there and how grateful I should be for what we have here.

If I hear from my friend about a long ago summer when his all-white community turned into a nearly all-black community almost overnight, leaving his parents feeling that they had to upend the family and disrupt their comfortable lives, I am left to appreciate the work he had to do to overcome bitterness and resentment for what they lost.

Sure, there are awkward moments when I bite my tongue, and times when I don’t, and the endless internal debate about when to do each. And, like everyone else, I savor the times I can relax from that stress and hang out with people who largely agree with me.

As a young person I used to think I was 100% right all the time, which surely made me a real pain in the ass to people I disagreed with. Now I don’t think I’m so right. I aspire be right for me today, and I’ll try again tomorrow as I keep being challenged to consider new ideas.
The biggest change I’ve seen with my maturity is that now I’ve become a pain in the ass to the people I basically agree with, peppering them with comments like Wait a minute or Did you think about this or Here’s what my friend told me.

If respect is in place, we can tread that middle ground just fine. If not, if one person seeks to overpower and convert the other, the gulf widens. As I saw from the plane, it’s a beautiful world we live in. And as I observed about all those birds, if we can work around each others harmoniously we can all get what we want. And as I see my friends this week, I’ll find I have a lot to learn.

CBH 10/09

Up Deep Creek

Carolyn B Healy

I stood on the bank and squinted at the two white-clad figures in the middle of Deep Creek’s swirling water. As a nine year-old city girl temporarily plunked down in the Smoky Mountains for a family visit, I was on high alert for things I couldn’t see back at home, and this was going to be a big one.

My cousin Annette, six years older, was on the list of my most admired people. She could cook and sew and win 4H prizes. She had the same name as my favorite Mouseketeer, and I harbored a secret hunch that she was really the famous Annette and the family was keeping it secret. Plus, she was a teenager with teenage friends, some of them boys.

Now she was standing in the middle of the creek in a pretty white dress with lace trim. I bet she made it, I thought in a spurt of pride. I knew from experience what she was up against out there. That water was cold as ice. I knew that because her mother Anna Lou would regularly pile the cousins into her Plymouth and barrel over mountain roads to take us to the swimming hole “up Deep Creek” and then back to her house for popsicles.

Part of my annual immersion into the ways of my relatives was the agonizing entry into that frigid water, a test I had to pass to prove myself. While my cousins dove in and got it over with, I inched in, crunching down to pat the freezing water onto my goose-bumped arms. Once I finally gathered my courage and plunged in, it was a victory. Annette didn’t usually go along, being too busy with more sophisticated endeavors.

I stood on the bank behind Anna Lou and Uncle Commodore, my mother’s brother, and their sons Don and Jim. They seemed to think this was a normal occurrence. I had heard we were going to a baptism but that sounded like a churchy thing, not a swimming hole thing. What were we doing here? And what was a baptism anyway?

Was my petite Grandma there, having clambered down the bank on her tender feet, in her voile dress and Sunday hat with the veil? You know how memory is, focusing in on the main event and leaving the edges blurry. Grandma may have stayed home, since this was a Presbyterian ceremony and the rest of the family, she included, was Baptist. I didn’t know the difference, but they certainly did.

There was a lot of religion in that town. The various Baptist churches, red brick with white steeples in town and the more modest weathered wooden ones up the hollows, seemed to have the strongest foothold. One recent day, I had tagged along on an all-day genealogy outing up into the mountains with my aunts. I snapped pictures of the white clapboard church that a great-grandfather had built, and of the family headstones that surrounded it. It was something. How could a kid from 1111th Street have roots way out here, in a hollow that my aunts could barely find? I was more interesting than I’d thought.

The Presbyterian Church that my cousin was seeking entry to was back in town, painted bright white, right down the hill from her house, a couple of blocks from the almost defunct railroad line, just around the bend from the Baptist one of the rest of the family. But the church that made the biggest impression on me was the one that we had nothing to do with. It announced itself by a gothic-script sign on the highway into town: St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, Masses 8, 9, 10:30 am. It sat on a ridge overlooking the A&P and the Tuckasiegee River, its austere grey stone looking medieval and menacing. I didn’t stop to think that my home church back in Chicago was housed in an odd replica limestone Irish castle that may have looked as misplaced as this one. It also escaped me that my Unitarian church building served as the symbol for the South Side neighborhood that was so heavily Catholic it practically smelled of incense. Nine year-olds aren’t much on irony.

The ceremony was about to start. The other figure, the white-suited preacher, began to stir. He boomed a few words in his God-calling voice, put his arm around my willing cousin and – oh my gosh – dipped her backwards under the water. And held her there. And kept holding her there. Her family stood stock still. Since they were older than I was and better swimmers, I figured that if she needed rescue, they’d be on the job, and I should quell my impulse to splash out there.

The preacher’s incantations continued and to my relief he finally lifted her up, streaming, still breathing, and escorted her to the bank where her mother waited with a white terrycloth towel. We trooped back to the house for the usual pot luck – plates of sliced tomato and cantaloupe still warm from the sun, pyramids of sweet corn picked that morning, fried okra, stacks of cornbread, beef cooked beyond well-done to just this side of charcoalhood, and fried chicken from the poor creature I’d seen my grandfather ax-murder earlier in the day. I might have been the one from the city, but in their way, my relatives were far more conversant with violence than I was, but the necessary violence it takes to run a life close to the land. Dessert was Anna Lou’s coconut cake and watermelon, eaten in the yard so the juice could run down to the elbows.

I never asked Annette what it felt like to be dunked and baptized, being too shy and too young. I didn’t yet know that the result of curiosity could be learning, if only I’d ask. I remember how it felt to me. I’d glimpsed a jaw-dropping event I’d never see again and that my friends back home couldn’t imagine. For a while, the gulf between me and my relatives had widened, with me on the outside peeking in, wondering what would happen next.

But by the end of the meal, while the aunts cleared the table and teased Grandma into sitting on the convertible step-stool while they washed the dishes, and the men rocked on the porch, I played with my cousins out by the lilac bush. We chased fireflies and captured them in Ball jars with perforated lids that stayed on the back porch. Laughter leaked out of the kitchen windows, and the low rumble of the uncles’ voices rolled off the porch. In the process, I was restored. This was my family. I loved their slow speech and Southern story-telling. I loved their food, and how they loved my mother. And I loved Annette who gave me something to shoot for.

I wasn’t required to understand all their ways to belong there. It was a great gift of my childhood to see so early that we could be different yet connected. Annette was the star of that day in my memory but I think I was the lucky one. Later, dishes done, we all gathered in the front room and sat in a giant circle, moths hitting the screens, and the funny stories began. What I would give for a chance to hear those voices again, trying to top each other. Their generation is all gone now except for Commodore who celebrated his 100th birthday this summer. I inhaled all that love and knew I’d have a home here if I ever needed it, and vowed to take all these folks home with me in my memory, where they still reside.

CBH 09/09