epilogue

As I finish this examination of deep human connection, I sit in my study. It is a quiet Sunday morning in February. Squirt, the dog, is curled up at my feet, snoring. Susie has gone to church. Outside, a light snow is falling. Here in my study I feel safer and more alive than anywhere in the world. Here, I am surrounded by my books. By my keepsakes. By my loved ones.

The study is just now aswirl with papers and files, and random stacks of books, empty tea cups, and unopened mail—reflecting the final phase, I suppose, of any book project. (I have heard it said that American author Joan Didion sleeps in the same room with a book project in the final weeks of the writing. I get that.)

My study is large and comfortable. There are overstuffed club chairs and a big white sofa (yes, paw prints) and a large, tattered Oriental rug with blue-and-salmon-colored highlights. It is my favorite rug, given to me by David.

Here are the shelves of books I most treasure—probably eight or nine hundred in all. They are in big bookcases along the wall to my right. Nearest to me are the volumes I could simply not live without: Thoreau, Dillard, Merton, Frost, Didion, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Emerson, Bonhoeffer, Forster, Dickinson.

Here, too, I am surrounded by portraits and photographs of the people I have most loved. There are, indeed, pictures of every single one of the friends I’ve shared with you. On the wall to my left hangs a photographic portrait of Armeda VanDemark Crothers. (The year is 1910. She is nineteen, and already displaying a warm but regal and commanding gaze. She has a big silk bow in her hair.) There is John Purnell, smiling out from a photo taken of him in the red-leather chair in his study, his dogs at his side. And there’s Seth, shirtless and speckled with paint, with his floppy hat on his head and a paintbrush in one hand. There are Susie and I together in a celebratory moment at Diane and Dave’s wedding five years ago. There is a picture of Thoreau. And of E. M. Forster just before his death. And there is Gramp, in the white-wicker rocker on the big front porch at 2800 East Main Street, smiling widely at age ninety-two, his thinning hair still blonde.

My study is alive with the presence of these human beings. When I walk into the room in the morning, I sometimes say, “Good morning, everybody.” Really, I do.

Often, when I walk in, I feel buoyed. Inspired. Expanded. Remember what Kohut consistently taught: In order to be fully alive, we must create around ourselves a vital surround of relationship—a surround of love that will be for us an evoking-sustaining-responding matrix of selfobject experiences. (Well, okay. And now we know what he means.)

“If we gain something, it was there from the beginning. If we lose anything, it is hidden nearby.” This haunting line by Ryokan feels truer to me now than when I started this book. I’ve been marinating in friendship over the three years it’s taken me to write this book. And, interestingly enough, this process has produced in me a strange sense of timelessness. No one has really gone away, have they?

“There is really no such thing as the baby,” said Donald Winnicott. “Only the mother-child dyad.” There is no such thing as the solitary self. Only the friend-friend dyad. Who am I? I am a co-creation.

My reflections of the past three years have given rise to a boundless sense of gratitude, and a visceral sense of the interconnectedness of all things. We are contingent beings in the most beautiful way.

In certain moments, I feel this connectedness bleed over into my whole life—as if love itself, and deep connection, were a kind of viral thing. After a morning spent, say, reflecting on and writing about Armeda, a feeling of connectedness with all beings overtakes me. At Whole Foods, where I go for lunch, I am standing in line with mothers and babies, and with old men on their wives’ arms. I feel our connectedness. At the gym, I am walking on the track with an Indian-American mother and her baby in a carriage. She is wearing a beautiful silk sari and pink tennis shoes. The mother and I exchange a smile. The baby looks directly into my eyes. I feel our connectedness.

2

As Edward Morgan Forster matured into a great novelist, and as his network of relationships became deeper and stronger, his vision of human connection itself became more and more expansive. He began to insist that we must connect across races, across barriers of time and culture. Only connect!

Sometime during the first decade of the twentieth century, Forster—inevitably, I suppose—had an electrifying encounter with the poetry of Walt Whitman. As he recounts it, he “heard Whitman’s voice intensely,” and he identified with it. And he appears to have heard it most intensely in Whitman’s “Passage to India,” from Leaves of Grass.

Passage to India!

Lo, soul! Seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,

The people to become brothers and sisters,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

“I opened Walt Whitman for a quotation,” wrote Forster, “and he started speaking to me . . . he is not a book but an acquaintance and if I believe him, he’s more” (emphasis added). He is not a book, but an acquaintance! Forster would find in Walt Whitman one of his greatest mystic friendships.

Whitman’s expansive words—“the earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work”—would, in fact, ignite Forster’s greatest novel, A Passage to India, which explores precisely the profundity of deep human connection across the many barriers of culture and race.

Forster slowly began to see, through his own decades-long examination of human connection, that all human beings are essentially made of the same stuff. Funny. This is precisely what the great scriptures of the East find. In every way that counts, we are exactly alike inside, they say. As I have written earlier in this book, the great Indian scripture called the Bhagavad Gita, or “The Song of God” (which both Whitman and Forster studied), called this “the vision of sameness.” Can we not connect to all human beings precisely because of this inner sameness? wondered Forster.

3

Barbara Fredrickson’s research shows that the upward spiral of love and creativity that emerges from vital human connection changes things. It changes who we are; it expands us; it expands our possibilities.

And over time, something remarkable happens: we change our own story. We begin to become active participants in creating our own fresh, pulsing, living narrative. No, we do not change the past. But we do change our perspective on it. We have new eyes—new eyes that are open to new possibilities. And we emerge with an expanded and, strangely, with a much more fully true narrative than before.

4

Late in life, Queen Victoria discovered—when cleaning out some drawers—a scrapbook put together by her mother, the Duchess of Kent. The scrapbook was filled with dozens of love letters the duchess had written to Victoria as a child, and in it the now-middle-aged Victoria found letters and cards full of sweetness, of caring and tender thoughts, and of authentic endearments. These expressions of love were clearly quite real. Victoria was shocked. She was moved. This challenge to her earlier narrative made her head spin. But it was undeniable. She had been loved by her mother. Her understanding of her mother would never again be the same.

Victoria’s autobiographical narrative slowly changed. As her own upward spiral of love increased (a rising tide lifts all boats) she reconciled with her estranged mother, and the tenderness between them once again grew. At her mother’s death Queen Victoria was inconsolable. “It is dreadful, dreadful to think we shall never see that dear kind loving face again,” she wrote in her journal, “never hear that dear voice again . . . the loss is irrevocable.” Curiously, after her mother’s death, Victoria was overcome with a grief that she did not want to relinquish. Indeed, she acknowledged that she was “dwelling” on her grief intentionally, as a way to feel the closeness to her mother in death—the closeness that she never fully managed in life. “I love to dwell on her,” she wrote in her diary, “and not to be roused out of my grief.” She was determined to cherish the memory. And in the process to make a new memory.

5

In my office hangs a stunning portrait of my mother at age twenty-four. Her face is soft, her gaze steady. She looks just the slightest bit solemn, perhaps even a bit afraid. But still, her face is beautiful and deep and substantive and soulful.

But here is a fact I’ve had to ponder: When I began the writing of this book, I had not yet hung this portrait. It was leaning against a wall with some other pictures, in a corner of the room. I realize now that as I began this book, I was still in a subtle internal struggle with Mom. Somehow, I could not bear her solemn and soulful eyes looking at me, staring at me from the serenity of the portrait. (Even as a boy and young man I could not bear to see her pain. I could feel it as if it were my own.)

A year or so into the writing of this book, I came into the study one day and—spontaneously, and for no reason of which I was conscious—turned the portrait face out. And so it remains.

Mom’s portrait hangs between a photograph of myself as a young man and a portrait of my grandfather in middle age. The three of us look remarkably alike. There is simply no question that we are emanations from the same seed. Part of a lineage. A shared soul.

When I was walking, recently, along a lane at my family’s summer cottage (built, remember, by my great-great-grandfather in 1893), I happened upon a stranger, a woman of some eighty years, perhaps. She was walking vigorously along the path. And when she looked up at me, I saw a wave of shock come across her face. She stopped me, putting a hand on my shoulder. She said nothing for the longest time, her deep eyes looking into mine. “You’re Barbara Cope’s son,” she said. “I would have recognized you anywhere.” I had not seen this woman in fifty years.

I now savor that beautiful portrait of my mom. Sometimes I just sit in front of it and look into her eyes. And I understand: Everything good that I have, I got from her—and from Gramp and Grandma, and from my dad. My writing life itself, in fact, I got from my mother—she who wrote a fine family history in her late eighties when she was almost completely blind and deaf. I even value, now, her indisputably excellent manners—her style, her thoughtfulness, her grace. I now admire (how did this happen?) many of the difficult things about her, as well: Her steely determination. Her courage. (The very last time I saw my mother awake and alert, she was having a knock-down-drag-out fight with her longsuffering caretaker, Julia. “I’m still in charge here,” Mom was insisting from the prone position in her big walnut bed—as Julia nodded her head quietly. “Um-hum, Miss Barbara.”) And, yes—and now perhaps I am becoming sentimental—I do at times even admire her old-fashioned sense of propriety. (John Purnell used to joke about this. He said of her, “It’s never wrong to do the right thing.”)

My mom, the queen. I told you before, and it turns out to be a truism: Queens are most beloved in old age. They have survived. They have fought the fight.

Now, on some days, that portrait of my mother echoes, speaks, exudes some kind of warmth that is electric. It’s undeniable. There is some kind of deep and sustained caring coming from wherever she is. Hiding nearby.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee . . .

Our autobiographical narratives change. They evolve. They deepen. And gradually, if we’re mining our true story, they embrace every split-off part. We long for union. And reunion.

5

One of Annie Dillard’s most exultant themes is what she sometimes calls “the profligate nature of the Universe.”

“The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another,” she writes, “or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here?”

Look around you. You will see that this extravagance extends to the human creation. We are surrounded by—flooded by, overwhelmed by—the sheer number and variety of other human beings. We are floating in a sea of other human beings, who—just like us—crave simply to be touched, to be cherished, to be known. We are swimming in a sea of all-too-solitary beings like myself, who sometimes go to the supermarket only in hopes of touching another human soul. Beings who sit in church together, side by side, and savor hearing one another’s voices. Who reach out, tentatively, with mingled fear and hope.

Again and again, our theme: In order to be a fully alive human being, you must create around yourself a rich surround of relationship. This surround will evoke you, will call you forth. It will affirm you. It will sustain you. It will challenge you. We can create this surround out of the very objects that are already near at hand. Potential “found objects” are everywhere around us. Everywhere in the wide world.

Find them. Begin to build with them. Keep building. Find soul friends and let them find you. Cherish them, and build together a new story.

The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,

The people to become brothers and sisters,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.