There isn’t a child who hasn’t once cried out “It’s not fair!” with a stamp of
the foot, weeping grief and fury at what ill fortune has meted out. Or
heartless parents, or mean friends, or piggish older siblings, or that deaf
old Father Christmas — all guilty, in their turn, of inflicting hurt,
usually by saying “No”, but sometimes by turning away, as others, later,
will surely turn their backs.
Early in life we endure those small rehearsals for the larger disappointments
that will inevitably cause the blues in the night, while the real agonies —
the losses from which the spirit can never completely recover — await on our
personal Calvaries. Maybe there are some fortunate readers who have never
had reason to cry out “Why did this have to happen to me?” or “I have not
deserved this” — but surely not many.
Most of us must grapple with what C. S. Lewis called The Problem of Pain,
and the unanswerable question of why bad things happen to good people will
go on being asked until the end of human time.
The letters that come into my Wednesday page vary in seriousness, although all
problems loom as crosses to be borne in the eyes of those who write. The
23-year-old psychologist working in the NHS has had a breakdown, is
“transformed into a quivering wreck” and now, “the prospect of another 60 or
so years of life terrifies me”.
A 35-year-old, pregnant by a man she doesn’t love in a country she doesn’t
want to live in, says: “Life feels lonely and dark and not much fun.” A
middle-aged single woman has just had a serious diagnosis and, because she
sees no point to life, says she wants no treatment. Why, she asks, “should I
follow a lonely and unfulfilled middle age with a lonely and unfulfilled old
age?” A 60-year-old whose letter describes a satisfactory life by any
standards writes: “I should be grateful for my good fortune but feel this
tremendous loss and that I have not found true happiness.”
Occasionally, I confess, such letters can make me want to click my fingers
briskly and say: “Snap out of it!” More often they ring true and compassion
is the only response. But what, I wonder, would the lost, lonely and seeking
ones (let alone those who know in their hearts that they are being
self-indulgent) make of the following letter?
This lifts the lid on real pain: a level of suffering that most of us will
never experience. This letter reads like the cry of innocent Job, asking why
he is so afflicted, and to read it is to take the first step on a path to
understanding the human condition. For this young woman bears witness to two
things which I cannot but (given this day, Good Friday) express in terms of
the Christian story. Hers could be the agonised words of Jesus on the cross:
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And yet her human story offers
the eternal possibility of resurrection.
Dear Bel,
What to do when you’ve lost everything that was ever dear to you? I’m a 30-
year-old woman from the Netherlands, and in January 2006 I decided to give
up everything and move to France. I found a nice job, and I’m proud of what
I’ve achieved, but a sense of loneliness, grief and uselessness pervades my
entire life. l don’t know how to solve my own problems any more.
Those problems started when I was young. I come from a very disturbed home,
with a schizophrenic, paranoid father who was physically violent at times,
although never to me. Twelve years ago, when I was 18, he suddenly left us
(my brothers, my mum and me) and that was both a relief and a curse.
Although he could be very aggressive, I was always very close to him. His
leaving us hurt me deeply. I have never seen him since, because he refuses
every kind of contact and has repeated over and over again, written on the
envelopes he sent back unopened, that he is no longer our father. I then
found myself in the role of care-giver to my two brothers — twins three
years younger than me — and to my mum, devastated by her years of marriage.
Always a shy woman, she married at 19, and never grew up while he was there
to put her down. When he left, she didn’t know how to take over her own
life, let alone comfort three teenagers. I always wanted to leave my country
to pursue an education in the UK because I have a deep love of the English
language, but a sense of responsibility to my family made me stay. I
couldn’t bear leaving them in the state they were in.
Gradually, one of my brothers fell into a deep depression, tried five times
to commit suicide (my other brother and I found him once with a plastic bag
over his head and were just in time to save him), and finally succeeded in
doing real and lasting damage by falling from the third-floor balcony of his
apartment building. To this day I’m not sure whether that too was a suicide
attempt (he says it wasn’t) but anyway, he still lives. It took many
operations to get him walking again, and during his two-year recovery
period, I took care of him. Additionally, I quit university (studying
English) to work and pay the bills that he could not pay.
Then, my best friend died in a car accident. That broke my heart. I never
had many friends, partly because I feared revealing my family’s problems to
strangers, and she was the only one I completely trusted.
When I finally started to recover from these blows and had resumed my
studies, my mother had breast cancer diagnosed. It had already spread, and
after 11 months, during which time I took care of her, she died at 47. I was
then 25. I had no time to really grieve for her, because my brothers had an
extremely hard time coping with her death and the fact that they were now
orphans. I was afraid that the brother who had already tried to commit
suicide would choose that way out of his grief once again.
During all this time I had jobs to support myself and those who needed me,
and anyway, apart from my mum’s sister there was no one left. But believe it
or not, three months after my mum’s death breast cancer was diagnosed in my
aunt at 39. It then turned out that it was hereditary. I was tested for the
BRCA gene and the test came back positive. I once again tried to resume my
studies but felt very depressed at the time. I had always been a beautiful
girl, but couldn’t find a man I trusted. My relationships all deteriorated
because the men could not cope with the amount of grief I seemed to exude.
Because of the BRCA gene I was tested regularly — then, when I’d just
turned 28, disaster struck again. I felt a lump, went to see a specialist,
and yes, of course, it was cancer. Within weeks both my breasts were
amputated and I started chemo. I was told that the cancer had already spread
to my ribs and that I had a 5 per cent chance of surviving the year. My
brothers couldn’t cope with my illness. They told me so when I was in
hospital to have both my breasts removed, the very worst day of my life.
They came in, told me they couldn’t cope, walked out, and kept walking for
all I know. I never saw them again.
That meant I was all alone. I had to fight this disease alone, and I did.
Five months of chemo are like five years of hell, but I came through. I had
lost all my hair, my breasts, my health, my looks and my youth as well as
most of my friends, but I came through. And when the doctors pronounced me
in remission, I was proud. I had to face life after cancer — which meant
deciding whether to stay in the city I’d always lived in and which reminded
me so much of all I’d lost, or to go away. I bought myself a backpack,
decided I could live off the rest of my savings for another three months,
and started walking. I had nobody left to say goodbye to, nobody that
mattered, and the first weeks I cried as I walked. I walked all the way from
my home town to the north of France. I never hitchhiked, I walked every
single mile and slept in my tent. In retrospect it was almost like a
pilgrimage.
Then my money ran out and I had to find a job. As I said at the beginning,
I did find one, and an apartment. I’ve even found some friends, and of that
I’m proud. What I cannot seem to get over, however, is this feeling of loss
and grief. Very much betrayed by my brothers, I feel that I’ve lost all that
ever mattered to me — as well as the good looks I once had. I fear I’ll
never meet someone to share my life with, who’ll accept me even with all the
pain and scars I carry both inside and out.
I’ve already experienced the disbelief of people I’ve told just a fraction
of my story to, and this makes me feel like an invisible person. They see me
from the outside, but have no clue as to what’s on the inside. Maybe they
don’t want to know. I do my best to have fun, but what has happened to me is
an integral part of who I am. I cannot keep it hidden just to please people.
I’m unable to find a goal in life and don’t know if I can support the
constant grief. Life hurts too damn much. Please tell me what you think.
It’s easier for me to pour my heart out to someone I don’t know. I’ve lost
the vision that carried me through.
Bo
I wonder if you have truly lost that vision? Even writing those words I feel
humble and reticent, because of what you have endured. What words of comfort
can be offered to someone bewildered by the unfairness of existence? Where
is the consolation of liberal ideas of love and compassion to a woman so
abandoned by those she most loved? How can you even try to justify the
universe to a blameless soul who has been so cruelly smashed into the ground
by its random cruelties? Still, you have asked me what I think. My reply is
that the meaning of misfortune lies not within what has happened, but in
what we do with that experience. T. S. Eliot wrote that we have experiences
but “miss the meaning”,’ so to approach that meaning enables us to make
sense of what we have endured, “beyond any meaning we can assign to
happiness”.’ By which he meant that the starting point is to clear the mind
and spirit of any simple, human expectations of pity, fairness, love. It’s
as if we must expect to be alone on a promontory in the howling gale, stare
into the eye of the storm and survive, before we can turn back and pick up
the threads of life. But changed utterly, of course.
I feel you are at the beginning of a new phase of your seemingly interminable
journey. It started long before you shouldered that brave backpack — the
external symbol of all that had weighed you down. It began years before your
feet set out on what you perceptively call your pilgrimage. From the outside
it seems obvious that your chief misfortune (shared by many unlucky people)
was to have been so poorly parented.
You must have felt guilty at loving your father in spite of his treatment of
your mother, and so all the more wounded when your loyalty to him was repaid
by abandonment. I imagine this also made your relationship with your poor
mother even harder. In her turn she “left” you by dying, and then, to
compound the loss, the brothers for whom you had cared turned their backs on
you.
It hardly bears thinking about — and here I am not even going to address the
loss of your breasts, other than to recommend you get hold of Staying
Alive by Janet Reibstein, which is about the effects of breast cancer on
a whole family. I think you will find it revealing and heartening, as well
as moving. But picking over the past isn’t going to help us here, for you
must have done that so many times. The question is how to reprocess those
experiences to have the strength to move still further along your road.
Hard though it will be, I think you might begin by acknowledging that your
brothers’ treatment of you is as much your father’s fault as it is theirs.
Deeply damaged and lacking your strength, they allowed their inadequacy and
terror at what had happened to their one parent figure left to triumph over
natural affection for a sister. They should have been there to look after
you as you had once taken care of them, but they failed you. It’s truly
terrible, but I am asking if you can find it in your heart to pity them. I
would not suggest it were I not convinced of your extraordinary strength, as
well as of the likelihood of you being reconciled with them one day. After
all, you have bent your heads beneath a common grief.
For the three of you are survivors of a “war” — and war can tear families
apart. What’s more, it is said that anyone who has been tortured remains
tortured, and that anyone who has suffered torture will never again be able
to be at ease in the world. All the writings of the great Primo Levi bear
witness to this truth — and I offer it, not to make you feel worse, but to
“allow” you to feel as you do.
Let us give your true status. You are a witness to what the human spirit can
endure without giving in. This is a hugely important function, and when you
meet the people who are truly worthy of your friendship and love, they will
want to hear your message. Trust me — they will. Your story embodies the
truth expressed by Levi in If This Be a Man (required reading for all
with the courage to confront the worst): “Sooner or later in life everybody
discovers that perfect happiness is unrealisable, but there are few who
pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally
unattainable.”
You see, unlike many who suffer from clinical depression, you have found the
ability to fight, to cope each step of the way. Your unhappiness is limited
for the very fact that it has never triumphed. Of course you have cried,
felt broken and bitter — yet not once do you moan, “Why did this have to
happen to me?” Not once have you contemplated suicide, even though you don’t
like living very much. You remind me of Primo Levi’s description of a fellow
inmate of Auschwitz, who “possessed . . . an unlimited capacity for
endurance, a silent courage, not innate, not religious, not transcendent,
but deliberate and willed hour by hour, a . . . patience which sustained him
miraculously to the very edge of collapse”.
It’s significant that the word patience derives from the Latin verb patior —
to suffer. From it, too, comes the old word for the suffering of Christ on
the cross — the passion. There is a philosophical journey within the
etymology. For most of us have no choice but to endure — with whatever
patience or stoicism we can muster — the sorrows of our lives.
The cup will not be taken from us; we will learn how to drink from it without
drowning. When the “why me?” is transformed into “why not me?” we take our
places alongside our fellow human beings, pity them as we wish to be pitied
— and that co-feeling is compassion. This for me is the meaning of misery —
and the key to the understanding that can transcend it.
What helps to carry the cross is faith — in the broadest sense. Those who have
a religion can use it to help them, belief in a divine being providing both
a structure within which to grieve (God’s will) and an external source to
rail against (How could you do this, God?). Those of us without that can
still have faith — but in ourselves. Your letter is full of it — you are
“proud” of how far you have come, and rightly so.
You do have confidence (and fides means faith, within that word) in yourself,
in spite of everything, and this will go on providing signposts that seem
obscure just now.
You can’t help it, Bo. Though life can seem dark and meaningless, the glory of
human beings lies in our ability to surpass puzzlement, passivity and pain —
and be continually reborn into our own lives. The old blues men expressed
the same thought when they sang, from the depths of existential despair,
“Trouble in mind, I’m blue,/ But I won’t be blue always,/ For the sun will
shine in my backdoor someday.”
