Healing

 "You can only live in the past inside your mind." 

~Augusten Burroughs

Two of my dear high school friends were in a very serious car accident just five short, very long, months ago.   SHE has been home for a few months already and HE just went home this week.  He's alive and is walking, both miracles!  There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of both of them and their journey of healing. 


In Augusten Burroughs' latest brilliant book (I think all his books are brilliant)  This is How: Help for The self  he writes in the chapter entitled:  "How to Remain Unhealed"  

I had mistakenly assumed that healed meant restored.....

Heal is a television word.  It's satisfying to see somebody who 

has gone through adversity and come out the other side, healed.....

That's almost word for word, how they might introduce a segment on 

healing on a talk show.  'Come out the other side' Like a tunnel.  

But here's the thing:  there are some things in life from which you do not 

heal....The pressure to heal can cause enduring damage.....

He goes on to say that after a loss or tragedy there is a hole that is never filled.   But not to despair because look where he takes this.  


He says that humans are able to live 

....just fine with many holes of many sizes and shapes.  

And pleasure, love, compassion, fulfillment-these things 

do not leak out of holes of any size.

So we can be filled with holes and at the same time hold the feelings that might seem to be opposistes-like joy and excitement.  The feelings of loss return frequently and we will reside in them once and awhile, but he says 

.....loss creates a greater overall surface area within a person.  

You expand as a result of it..... even though it may feel like the opposite.....

Huge loss resets you in a way.....the pain of your loss will remain 

with you for the rest of your life, but great joy will be there right beside it....

Deep sorrow and deep joy can exist within you, side by side.  

At every moment.  And it's not confusing.  And it's not a conflict.  

This is among the oldest, deepest, most primal truths:  

the facts of life may be, at times, unbearably painful.  

But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief.  

Those things that ought to kill us do not.  

This should be taken as encouragement to continue....

And this is what my dear friends are doing.  They are continuing....  and they are my teachers.    

My, how 2 years flew by.....

Today is my dad's 2nd yartzheit. two years ago today, according the Jewish lunar calendar, my father died.    In some ways, it feels like just yesterday and in other ways it feels like it was ages ago.  I suppose, as I've said (and written) before, that must be what eternity is like, timeless.....not time bound.....

I am filled with so many emotions on this day of commemoration, but the predominate one is a feeling of profound existential loneliness.  I guess that's the status of someone without parents, being existentially alone......

Today, there are so many wonderful memories that are flooding in, and they almost feel like a soothing salve.  Yet,  I can't seem to be able to smear that salve on fast enough to soothe the grief and pain that still linger two years later......

There is the memory of my daddy and me in Washington, DC when I was about 5.

And there is the memory of us together at his synagogue's 100th anniversary dinner.  I cherish this picture, because it is the last one we have of us together before his health started to fail.

I am no longer someone's daughter.  I am existentially alone, yet the wonderful life lessons he taught me, along with the wonderful memories of him, nurture and cradle me and I am deeply grateful for those lessons and for those memories.  I have taken his lessons to heart and have become a strong and independent woman with fierce intuition and I know he would be proud of me.  Thank you for everything daddy!  May your nishamah (soul) have a complete aliyah (return to its eternal resting place).  I love you, always. 

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