She and their friends gave him a wonderful leave-taking. They had theme-party nights—a Russian night with caviar and vodka, a Hawaiian night with grass skirts and leis scented with jasmine. They read poetry and had long conversations. “Having a gun pointed at our heads inspired us to become our best, most open hearted, honest and bravest selves,” Lazear Ascher writes in her memoir Ghosting. At the end, their life together was stripped down to the essentials. “There were many times when we felt blessed. It was as though certain death had granted us an extra life.”
When Bob got really sick, Barbara brought him home from the hospital so his final days would be more humane. She showered him with love and attention. “Dying was intimate, and I drew close,” Ascher writes. “We were single-minded, welded together in the process of this long leave-taking.”
Death was hard, but then grieving after he died was harder. After the memorial service and the wake, she was alone within the yawning silence of her apartment. She describes feeling that “a wind began to blow through the emptiness of my hollowed self.” One day a neighbor whose husband had died five years before called out to her as they were crossing the street in opposite directions: “You’ll think you’re sane, but you’re not.” Before long she was screaming at CVS employees because “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” was playing on the sound system…and her husband wouldn’t be. She began to fear bathing and music and Saturday nights. She started giving her stuff away—and later regretted it. She had visions of seeing Bob on the street.
C. S. Lewis once observed that grief is not a state but a process. It’s a river that runs through a long valley, and at every turn a new landscape is revealed, and yet somehow it repeats and repeats. Periods of grief and suffering often shatter our basic assumptions about who we are and how life works. We tend to assume that the world is benevolent, that life is controllable, that things are supposed to make sense, that we are basically good people who deserve good things. Suffering and loss can blast all that to smithereens.
“Trauma challenges our global meaning system,” Stephen Joseph writes in What Doesn’t Kill Us. “It confronts us with existential truths about life that clash with this system. The more we try to hold on to our assumptive world, the more mired we are in denial of such truths.”
People who are permanently damaged by trauma seek to assimilate what happened into their existing models. People who grow try to accommodate what happened in order to create new models. The person who assimilates says, I survived brain cancer and I’m going to keep on chugging. The person who accommodates says, No, this changes who I am…I’m a cancer survivor….This changes how I want to spend my days. The act of remaking our models involves reconsidering the fundamentals: In what ways is the world safe and unsafe? Do things sometimes happen to me that I don’t deserve? Who am I? What is my place in the world? What’s my story? Where do I really want to go? What kind of God allows this to happen?
The act of remaking your models is hard. Not everyone does it successfully. When Joseph surveyed people who had experienced train bombings and other terrorist attacks, he found that 46 percent reported that their view of life had changed for the worse, and 43 percent said their view of life had changed for the better. The journey of reconsideration and re-formation often involves taking what Stephen Cope, learning from Carl Jung, calls “the night sea journey,” heading off into the parts of yourself that are “split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out.”
To know a person well, you have to know who they were before they suffered their losses and how they remade their whole outlook after them. If a subtext of this book is that experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you, then one of the subsequent lessons is that to know someone who has grieved, you have to know how they have processed their loss—did they emerge wiser, kinder, and stronger, or broken, stuck, and scared? To be a good friend and a good person you have to know how to accompany someone through this process.
In 1936, when Frederick Buechner was ten, he woke up one fall day at sunrise. He and his brother, who was eight, were excited because their parents were going to take them to a football game. The game was not what excited them; it was the thought of the whole family, grandmother included, going on an outing, with treats and fun and adventures. It was still too early to get up, so the boys lay in bed. At one point, their door opened, and their father looked in on them. Years later, neither brother could remember if their father said anything to them. It seemed like just a casual check any parent might make to ensure that everybody was safe.
A little while later, they heard a scream and the sounds of doors opening and closing. They looked out their window and saw their father lying on the gravel driveway, with their mother and grandmother, barefoot and still in their nightgowns, leaning over him. Each woman had one of his legs in her hands. They were lifting his legs up and down as if they were operating two handles of a pump. Nearby, the garage door was open and blue smoke was billowing out.
A car screeched to a halt at the foot of the driveway and a doctor scrambled out, crouched over their dad, and gave a small shake of his head. Their father had gassed himself to death. It took them a few days to find the suicide note, which their dad had scratched in pencil on the last page of Gone with the Wind. It was addressed to their mom: “I adore you and love you, and am no good….Give Freddy my watch. Give Jamie my pearl pin. I give you all my love.”
A month or two later, their mom moved them to Bermuda. Their grandmother was against their going, telling them to “stay and face reality.” Decades later, Buechner thought that she had been both right and not right. He wrote, “Reality can be harsh and that you shut your eyes to it only at your peril because if you do not face up to the enemy in all his dark power, then the enemy will come up from behind some dark day and destroy you while you are facing the other way.” On the other hand, they loved Bermuda, and some sort of healing did happen there.
“We all create our own realities as we go along,” he would later write. “Reality for me was this. Out of my father’s death there came, for me, a new and, in many ways, happier life….I cannot say the grief faded because, in a sense, I had not yet, unlike my brother, really felt that grief. That was not to happen for thirty years or more. But the grief was postponed.”
It was a time of sealing up. One day, about a year after the suicide, Buechner saw his brother crying and asked him what was wrong. When he realized he was crying for their father, he was astonished. He had gotten over that pain long ago—so he thought. His mother had closed down, too. Buechner didn’t see her cry after the suicide, and they rarely spoke of his father afterward. She could be a warm person, and sometimes generous, but she kept her heart closed to other people’s suffering as well as her own. “The sadness of other people’s lives,” Buechner recalled, “even the people she loved, never seemed to touch her where she lived.”
Decades later, Buechner came to the following realization: “The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from.”
Buechner could not stay sealed up permanently. He became a teacher and a novelist. One evening early in his adulthood Buechner visited his mother at her apartment in New York. They were about to sit down to dinner when the phone rang. It was for him. A friend of his was weeping. He had just learned that his parents and pregnant sister had been in a car crash, and it was unclear if any of them would survive. Would Buechner be willing to come to the airport to sit with him until his plane departed? Buechner told his mother that he would have to leave at once. She found the whole situation absurd. Why was a grown man asking somebody to come sit with him? What good could it possibly do? Why ruin an evening they had both been looking forward to?
His mother was articulating the exact thoughts that had just run through his own head. But when he heard his mother saying them, he reacted with revulsion. How could anybody be so unfeeling, so cut off from the suffering of a friend? A few minutes later, his friend called back and said another friend had just agreed to come to the airport, so he was no longer needed. But that episode shocked Buechner and launched a journey. It was as if time, which had stopped the day his father killed himself, restarted.
What followed can best be described as a decades-long journey Buechner took down into the depths of what it means to be human. “What I was suddenly most drawn to now was the dimension of what lay beneath the surface and behind the face. What was going on inside myself, behind my own face, was the subject I started trying to turn to in my half-baked way.” He realized that most of us are on a journey in search of a self to be. He saw that this journey inevitably involved facing your pain and using your experience to help others face their own.
Naturally, he went off in search of his father, too. Buechner wanted to know what it had been like for his father to grow up in a family that, as it turned out, produced two suicides and three alcoholics. When Buechner met people who had known his dad, he’d ask them questions about what he was like, but their answers failed to satisfy: He was charming, handsome, a good athlete. Nobody could solve the elemental mystery: What demons lurked within him that drove him to that ending?
By middle age, Buechner could weep real tears for his father. In his old age he wrote that not a single day went by without him thinking of his dad. He had grown up to be a novelist and writer of great compassion, faith, and humanity. He had come to realize that excavation is not a solitary activity. It’s by sharing our griefs with others, and thinking together about what they mean, that we learn to overcome fear and know each other at the deepest level. “What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else,” he wrote in his book Telling Secrets. “It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are…because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier…for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own.”
The Buechner pattern is a familiar one. A person is hit by a blow. There is a period when the shock of the loss is too great to be faced. Emotions are packed away. The person’s inner life is held “in suspension,” as the psychologists say. But then, when the time is right, the person realizes that he has to deal with his past. He has to excavate all that was packed away. He has to share his experience with friends, readers, or some audience. Only then can he go on to a bigger, deeper life.
The writer David Lodge once noted that 90 percent of what we call writing is actually reading. It’s going back over your work so you can change and improve it. The excavation task is like that. It’s going back and back over events. The goal is to try to create mental flexibility, the ability to have multiple perspectives on a single event. To find other ways to see what happened. To put the tragedy in the context of a larger story. As Maya Angelou once put it, “The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.”
How does this process of excavation work? How do we help each other go back into the past and reinvent the story of our lives? There are certain exercises that friends can do together.
First, friends can ask each other the kinds of questions that help people see more deeply into their own childhoods. Psychologists recommend that you ask your friend to fill in the blanks to these two statements: “In our family, the one thing you must never do is _____” and “In our family, the one thing you must do above all else is ________.” That’s a way to help a person see more clearly the deep values that were embedded in the way they were raised.
Second, you can try “This Is Your Life.” This is a game some couples play at the end of each year. They write out a summary of the year from their partner’s point of view. That is, they write, in the first person, about what challenges their partner faced and how he or she overcame them. Reading over these first-person accounts of your life can be an exhilarating experience. You see yourself through the eyes of one who loves you. People who have been hurt need somebody they trust to narrate their life, stand up to their own self-contempt, and believe the best of them.
The third exercise is called “Filling in the Calendar.” This involves walking through periods of the other person’s life, year by year. What was your life like in second grade? In third grade?
The fourth is story sampling. For decades, James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin has had people do free-form expressive-writing exercises. He says: Open your notebook. Set a timer for twenty minutes. Write about your emotional experiences. Don’t worry about punctuation or sloppiness. Go wherever your mind takes you. Write just for yourself. Throw it out at the end. In the beginning, people who take part in expressive-writing exercises sometimes use different voices and even different handwriting styles. Their stories are raw and disjointed. But then unconscious thoughts surface. They try on different perspectives. Their narratives grow more coherent and self-aware as the days go by. They turn from victims to writers. Some studies show that people who go through this process emerge with lower blood pressure and healthier immune systems. “I write,” Susan Sontag once remarked, “to define myself—an act of self-creation—part of the process of becoming.”
The fifth exercise is my favorite. Put aside all the self-conscious exercises and just have serious conversations with friends. If you’ve lost someone dear to you, tell each other stories about that person. Reflect on the strange journey that is grief; tell new stories about what life will look like in the years ahead.
By sharing their stories and reinterpreting what they mean, people create new mental models they can use to construct a new reality and a new future. They are able to stand in the rubble of the life they thought they would live and construct from those stones a radically different life. As a young woman who had been assaulted told Stephen Joseph, “If someone had said to me the day after I was attacked that I would be able to do what I’m doing now, or that I would see the attack as a turning point in my life, I would have wanted to strangle them, but it was a turning point. I like who I am now and I’m doing things I never would have thought I was capable of. If I was to erase the past then I wouldn’t be who I am today.”
Rabbi Harold Kushner’s son, Aaron, died of a rare aging disease at fourteen. He’s spent the years since reflecting on how the tragedy has shaped him, and studying how other people are remade by their sufferings. “I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more sympathetic counselor because of Aaron’s life and death than I would ever have been without it. And I would give up all those gains in a second if I could have my son back. If I could choose, I would forgo all the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way because of our experiences….But I cannot choose.”
Human beings, John Stuart Mill wrote, “are under a moral obligation to seek the improvement of our moral character.” But what exactly does a good person look like? How can we make ourselves morally better? How can we cultivate good character?
One tradition has come down to us through the centuries; we might call it the warrior/statesman model of good character. According to this model, a person of character—or at least a man of character—looks like one of the ancient heroes, such as Pericles or Alexander the Great, or one of the more modern ones, like George Washington, Charles de Gaulle, or George C. Marshall.
This moral tradition, like all moral traditions, begins with a model of human nature. We humans are divided creatures. We have these primitive, powerful forces within us—passions such as lust, rage, fear, greed, and ambition. But people also possess reason, which they can use to control, tame, and regulate those passions. The essential moral act in this model of character formation is self-mastery. It is exercising willpower so that you are the master of your passions and not their slave. Developing your character is like going to the gym—working through exercise and habit to strengthen a set of universal virtues: honesty, courage, determination, and humility. In this model, character building is something you can do on your own.
This book has been built around a different ideal and a different theory of how to build good character. This book has been built around the Illuminator ideal. The Illuminator ideal begins with a different understanding of human nature. People are social animals. People need recognition from others if they are to thrive. People long for someone to look into their eyes with loving acceptance.
Therefore, morality is mostly about the small, daily acts of building connection—the gaze that says “I respect you,” the question that says “I’m curious about you,” the conversation that says, “We’re in this together.”
In the Illuminator model, character building is not something you can do alone. Morality is a social practice. It is trying to be generous and considerate toward a specific other person, who is enmeshed in a specific context. A person of character is trying to be generous and just to the person who is criticizing him. He is trying to just be present and faithful to the person suffering from depression. He is trying to be a deep and caring friend to the person who is trying to overcome the wounds left by childhood. He is a helpful sounding board to the person who is rebuilding her models after losing a spouse or child. Character building happens as we get better at these kinds of tasks.
What matters most is not the strength of an individual’s willpower, but how skillfull she is in her social interactions. In the Illuminator model, we develop good character as we get more experienced in being present with others, as we learn to get outside our self-serving ways of perceiving. As Iris Murdoch wrote, “virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”
The Illuminator model of character development is not austere, and its exemplars are not best captured by marble sculptures of men on horseback. The Illuminator model is social, humble, understanding, and warm. The man of character is not removed and strong; he’s right there next to you on the bench as you work through the kinds of hard times I’ve tried to describe in this middle section. But the Illuminator is not just there to see the depths of your pain, she’s there to see your strength, to celebrate with you in your triumphs. How do you see and recognize the gifts other people bring to the world? That is the subject of the final section of this book.