Death, Transgressions and Grace

What if everyone really is doing the best they can, with the resources they have?

My dad is dying.

At least, it appears that is what's happening.

Death has a way of surfacing what has been long-buried, and for several weeks now I've been riding waves of grief, anger, sorrow, confusion, compassion and love.

After my best friend died in a car accident in 1997 (she was only 16, and her death had a profound impact on the entire trajectory of my life), my preference has been to face death head on with sober acknowledgment and wonder, as one of the most important realities of existence.

What is a human being?
Why are we here?
What is the point of life?
Where do we go when we die?

Rachelle's death ignited in me a deep desire to understand the nature of reality, and once again these questions rise to the fore of my mind.

My dad is dying, and I just learned something about him that cracked my heart open in a way that will forever change me.

I want to share what I learned with you in the hopes that we - you, me, anyone reading this - will look upon our fellow human beings with a little more grace, forgiveness and love.

First, however, I want you to imagine that you are walking down a city street. Your stride is confident and swift, your eyes focused ahead and your mind lost in thought. While crossing the street, someone bumps into you, jolting you out of your reverie. You turn around in anger, ready to confront whoever it was that clearly wasn't watching where they were going...only to see that the perpetrator is blind.

*Adapted from a lesson of Rudolf Steiner's

Perhaps all transgressions we experience at the hands of our fellow humans are perpetrated from conditions of genuine deficit as real as blindness.

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When I was a little girl, my dad was my whole world.

We wrestled all the time, he always obliged our games of hide and seek, and he made us believe in magic and fairies and dragons; he even carved a labyrinth once out of the tall grass in our front yard with a lawn mower!

My favorite memories are of my dad taking us caterpillar hunting along bike paths and streams. We would cut swaths of the host plants to take home with us, caterpillars dangling like Christmas tree decorations from their leaves.

For years, our kitchen table was covered with frass (caterpillar poop) because there were so many glass jars full of milkweed and anise, with dozens of monarch and swallowtail caterpillars of all sizes munching and molting and pooping. Watching those butterflies emerge from their chrysalis (and then watching them fly away) was a very special experience in my childhood.

My dad gave me the immense gift of imagination, along with a sense of childlike wonder about the natural world.

Gradually, however, our relationship shifted.

The older I got, the less engaged my dad became. In many ways, he was an absent father. Emotionally aloof, socially awkward and unable to be there for me or protect me when I needed him most, while I was a teenager our bond shattered. It never recovered.

As an adult, I tried to cultivate a mutually loving relationship with my dad in a variety of ways. Some acts were selfless; many emerged from over-giving that led to resentment; and some were compelled by a selfish agenda to mold my dad into the dad I wanted. For my 40th birthday, I decided to give myself the gift of letting go of all expectations, disappointments and wishes, and to accept my parents as they are. This resulted in a distant yet loving relationship with my father the past two years.

Six years ago my dad had a stroke. Four years ago, he underwent amputation surgery of his right leg due to diabetic neuropathy that turned gangrenous. Though he got a prosthetic, he never learned to walk with it and has spent the last four years either in bed or in a wheelchair. Two months ago he began falling so frequently that 911 responders were coming to my parent's house daily to help my mom get him off the floor. He wanted to go the hospital for tests; my mom was terrified he would die there. He almost did.

Before admittance, he still possessed strong muscles and mental faculties, it was his balance that was failing. Just a few days (and ten pharmaceutical drugs) later, he could barely speak or move a muscle.

Maybe one day I will write about the horrific treatment of some patients like my dad, and the brutal nature of modern medicine on the human organism, but today I want to focus on a gift of grace that came from his stay at the hospital. While there, they did an MRI scan of my dad's brain; no one at the hospital went over it with him or my mom (since nothing in the scan was to blame, in their estimation, for his recent decline).

This past Friday, my dad was carried to his local doctor on a stretcher (he hasn't been able to move his own body or eat anything in weeks).

While going over his hospital reports, my dad's doctor brought up the MRI and told my parents that my dad's brain has been injured for a really long time; long before the stroke. The emotional processing region of my dad's brain showed the most severe injury and atrophy, along with significant demyelination of the white matter, consistent with neurological degeneration and dysfunction. According to his doctor, however, this was not a recent event but a long standing brain injury that is simply progressing rapidly now.

Wondering aloud if this brain injury might have originated in childhood, my mom reminded me that when he was nine (9) years old my dad almost drowned.

While swimming in a lake where he grew up in Minnesota, his head got caught between two wooden logs. Panicking, he gasped for air and instead sucked down lots of water and began to drown. Luckily, one of his brothers was nearby and came to his rescue, pulling his head from between the logs and bringing him ashore.

Near drownings in childhood can significantly damage a growing brain, causing lifelong neurological dysfunction.

I've always wondered why my dad is so good with young children and not so good with adults. Seriously, he was the best! Whether it was myself and my brother, my niece, my cousins...all young children who knew my dad loved him like no other; until they outgrew his ability to meet them developmentally, around 9 or 10 years of age.

Perhaps my dad's brain stopped developing in some specific ways after his near drowning experience. Perhaps he has been stuck in the body of an adult, with the emotional processing power of a nine year old. Perhaps this trade off allowed my dad to possess powers of memory and imagination better than anyone I know.

Perhaps the one thing I've always longed for from my dad - emotional affection, understanding and connection - is something he could never give me as an adult, no matter how much he may have wanted to.

He gave me everything he could in that regard throughout my early childhood, and that's no exaggeration.
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Perhaps all of our transgressions arise from conditions as real as blindness or brain damage.

We don't know the true state of people's brains and nerves, or how their physical body in many ways may present them with a soul and spiritual difficulty that isn't visible outwardly, causing behavior that is all too easy to condemn on the surface.

I believe if we knew everything there was to know about each other, we would feel only love.

It's the not knowing, the wondering and assuming, the waiting to know and longing to experience shared reality, that stops us from loving now.

None of this is meant to excuse certain behaviors; rather, I wish to illuminate our lack of true understanding as to their potential origins. This doesn't mean we neglect our own needs or martyr ourselves in the name of "love." In every case, we must weigh our actions against our own conscience and capacity.

Someday, I am convinced, we will know these kinds of things about each other, becoming truly transparent in a sense.

Until then, perhaps we could act "as if."

As if everyone who hurts us does so not out of pure malevolence, but because their behavior originates from conditions as real and measurable - whether physically or spiritually - as blindness or brain damage.

And because we are no different, and therefore no better.

We're all battling inner demons, and most of those battles aren't visible to the people in our lives.

Knowing this, perhaps we could give each other more grace, forgiveness and love today, and every day.

With love,
Elisha