Excerpt from a letter to a
friend upon the death of his estranged brother… included here because this may
be of use for someone one else in a similar situation…
“…For me, because of where I
am, I can see that your brother was simply a broken soul. Some people are just
not born for this world and they don't survive it. There are those who pull
themselves up by their bootstraps and go out and face the challenges, and
toughen up where they need to be tough, and dig in where they need to dig in,
and seize the day. You are one of those. So your brother is probably
incomprehensible to you. You have not been able to fathom that brand of
weakness and lack of character that would allow someone to not only fail their
own life, but to erode the relationships that they have with the only people
they can count on, until those people eventually have to cut them off. The
irony, the great insult and injury, is that the people who most try to help
these broken souls are the ones who bear the brunt of their inability to behave
in any decent way. The people to whom they owe the most are the ones they tend
to injure the most. If you think they do not know this and that it does not
pain them, you are mistaken. They live with it every day. They know every day.
He knew.
But the best that we can do as individuals differs from one to the next. He may
very well have been doing his best all along. His best was certainly not good
enough, but it may have been his best. In the end, after much soul searching
and back and forth and struggle, we come down to the only thing that we all
share - we have it in our very first moments and we have it in our very last
moments - it is the intense frailty of what we are. We are totally vulnerable.
Completely and totally helpless and vulnerable in our essence. We know it the
moment we are born, and we are reminded of it the moments before we die. In
between most of us do a remarkable job of being unaware of it, except for rare
and precious moments in between. We feel it when we become very sick, or very
lost or very frightened, or we lose something we had counted upon in a mortal
way. We catch a glimpse of it here and there. But we don't live with it in our
faces all the time.
Some of us, though, never really develop the ability to become unaware of it,
and so it follows us around all of our days. We try many, many things to get to
where the others are - where that vulnerability does not pursue and haunt us.
We try drugs and alcohol and jobs and lovers and television and books and sex
and food and whatever we can get our hands on to quell that sensation. Whatever
filter the rest of the world uses to be okay, to function and interact and get
by and be happy, we just don't have one. Or if we do, it's broken. So we try to
build our own filters, our own escape hatch, until the hatch takes over and it
never quite works, but now that it has been installed, it has a few demands of
its own. And broken people become its servants, trying unsuccessfully to
fulfill its constant, unreasonable, impossible demands. It is a testament to
the human spirit, that the broken soul does not give up on these strategies
that never quite work. That relentless belief that there might be some relief
is what keeps the broken soul pressing the lever, like those monkeys in the
intermittent reinforcement behavioral experiments - it is relentless faith that
if it worked even once, one blissful moment it worked, then it might yet
work again. So then we are addicts. Addicted to food, addicted to alcohol.
Addicted to television. Addicted to sleep. Faithfully, faithfully we push the
lever, pushing the lever over and over, hoping for relief. Rarely, but
sometimes, it comes. We keep at it.
And this is a path, my friend. It is not a path that cultivates the respect of
others, or creates any sort of normalcy or safety in the world, but it is a
path, as any path is - designed to teach those who journey it. Designed to heal
us in the end. There will come a day when you will see your brother's life
neither with pity nor with scorn, but simply with acceptance. He neither
failed, nor was he a hero to anyone other than himself and God. But he made it
through the world in the best way he knew how. People just don't fall down like
that for no reason, my friend. What lives in us, and what tortures us, and what
comforts us and what teaches us....all remain a mystery to the observer. Even
the closest observer.
In the end, you will find it
less useful to sit in judgment of his life, and more useful to mourn him in the
way we mourn any soul who has made it through this world and gone on from
there. There is no standard to which he needs be held now. Honoring somebody's
struggle, and their battles, some won, some lost, and the way that they just
made it through this life is enough. In between this person had humor, and
warmth and hopes and loves. He was also selfish and greedy and defensive and
hurtful. He was afraid and he was compassionate, in different measure and at
different times to different people. The sum of his life will not be apparent
to you soon, or maybe ever, but never believe that you can measure it by his
"accomplishments." For some the challenges are external (what you can
achieve) but for some they are within. Nobody will ever see the mountains they
scale, and the valleys they traverse. Their successes and achievements will
remain invisible to most, maybe even all. But don't believe for a moment
that they did not exist, or that they were not worthy.
For now, it is enough just to be present and to be a witness. When you go
through his things, you are not there to clean up the mess he left. You are not
there to discover his secrets. You are not there to feel sorry for him or the
shambles of his life. You are there as a witness, to honor his life. In the
same spirit as we used to carefully wash the bodies of our loved ones and dress
them and prepare them for burial, that is the spirit of your journey. All the
multitudes of feelings that you had for him during his life, and those that
crowd in on you as you approach the acceptance of his death, all those feelings
will attend you, but you will not be there to serve any of them. You will be
there to serve him. Not because he "deserves" or "earned"
your respect and honor in life, but because you are a deep and honorable man
and you are fully capable of respecting the task at hand and the relationship
as it was, and the spirit of the person who lived, broken, before you most of
his life. You would be capable of that, even if he were a total stranger to
you, and you had been called upon to do this duty for a stranger. Remember,
that by the time he died, he was a stranger to you. Whoever he was by then, you
were not there, you were not on the inside.
And he was not always
broken. He was once a small boy, and you were too, and he was your brother, and
you will find a way to honor the memory of your brother even though he did not
do as well as all hoped he would and he did not live up to anything, maybe,
that was expected. It will be a measure of who you are, in the quality
of the way that you approach this task, and it will inform and shape who you
are going forward. You stand only as a witness, to honor and respect the
passing of a soul who did his best to do his best. You will find a way to let
go of how he failed you and failed your family and failed his life, and you
will simply stand for what was best in him, and what was purely
uniquely him, and what is now gone from the world. That is all true
too, and it is all that matters now. It won't come immediately, but that
realization will come in time, and the more you can keep your intention on
that, during this, the more easily it will come, the more quickly it will come,
the more peace you will find. ”
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