Sunday Stillpoint: Withstanding Storms

"A tree with strong roots can withstand the most violent storm, but the tree can't grow roots just as the storm appears on the horizon."

--The Dalai Lama, in his book, THE ART OF HAPPINESS: a Handbook for Living


Our daughter called us from New York today in tears. It is not the first time she has done that in recent weeks, in fact, she's called sobbing several times, but not because she is a drama queen or a crybaby, but because she's been agonizing and enduring through the worst crises of her twenty-five years. Just about every day, it seems, she is faced with another fear, frustration, or physical failure.

Back on December the 10, I sent out a Christmas letter to family and close friends, saying I was excited that our son was going to be able to be home for the holidays for his first time in three years, and that our daughter was flying in from New York, and that we hadn't had both kids home for Christmas since they were in college. It was to be a bittersweet visit, to be sure, for Dustin was due to redeploy to Iraq right after the new year, but for that moment, we were all excited and happy.

I put the stack of letters in the mail on December 12. At midnight, Jessica called, suffering severe chest pains and soon to be on her way to the hospital by ambulance. She'd had a cough for a while, she said, and was planning a visit to the doctor the next morning, but a coughing spasm had brought on a sensation of being stabbed in the chest with a knife, and she could not postpone medical attention. A friend of hers who is a doctor had urged her to call 911.

If you want to know what is the most horrifying sensation of being completely out of control and powerless to do anything about it, have your child call from 2,000 miles away, on her way to the hospital, alone, in the middle of the night. Next to something happening to Dustin in the war, this has been my worst nightmare, and here it was, happening live at midnight. I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been for her.

From the ambulance, she called again, simply because she was frightened and overwhelmed and didn't know what else to do. The ambulance attendants had reassured her that she would have a chest X-Ray and that it was probably a form of pneumonia and that they would put her on antibiotics and send her home.

From New York University Medical Center, she called again. It seemed the chest X-Ray had revealed a hole in her lungs.

A hole. In her lungs. She was 25 years old and she had a hole in her lungs and they were admitting her to the hospital.

Of course my first thought was to book a flight immediately, but a calming phone conversation with her boyfriend reassured me that although he'd been at work when she first went to the hospital, he was with her now, and would stay with her and take care of her and let us know what--if anything--they needed us to do.

So we waited pretty much by the phone for the next four days while she had CAT scans and blood screens and other tests.

She was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis! Who gets tuberculosis any more? My mother's mother died in a tuberculosis hospital in the 1930's, when Mother was only a toddler. She was adopted by a friend of the family. That was 75 years ago.

Jessica was immediately put under strict quarantine. Though she was permitted to return to her apartment, she was not allowed to leave that apartment for any reason except to visit the health clinic for her powerful antibiotics, sputum smear tests, and chest X-Rays.

At first, her boyfriend offered to rent a car and drive her home, but our son said, "I can't be exposed to TB right before I deploy. I could spread it to my buddies and there's no treatment for it where we're going."

But don't you get shots for that? we asked.

No, he said. You just get tested for it when you get back.

So we canceled her flight home and shipped her Christmas presents to her by UPS overnight. Her boyfriend tested positive for latent TB, and though he had to start the medication, was not put under quarantine, and he did what he could to keep her company, though his own apartment was at the opposite end of the city, and he was working.

For the next two months, Jessica was forbidden to leave her apartment for any reason other than visits to the clinic--they'd send round a car to pick her up. Other than that, she ordered in groceries. She couldn't work, of course.

And so this fiercely independent, resourceful, hardworking, disciplined young woman who had been entirely self-supporting her whole two years in New York, who had gotten her foot in the door on her own as an actor by auditioning and getting cast in plays "off-off Broadway", who had worked all through college, who was confident and strong and talented and determined….was trapped in a tiny Brooklyn prison of an apartment. Her whole life revolved around what the weekly sputum smear tests revealed. As long as she tested "positive" for active TB, she could not leave. Visitors to her home had to don surgical masks.

When we offered to come, she ordered us to stay away, because, "you'll only get sick." So we wired money from our bank account to hers and sent her care packages and called her daily and e-mailed constantly and sent funny cards in the mail and gave her a Netflix movies membership and there was nothing else we could do.

Nothing. Except pray, of course.

The hardest thing for Jessica to take in all of this was that she was suddenly--and completely--dependent upon others for every single aspect of her life. My dear brother stepped up one month and paid her rent. Her own dear brother, before he deployed, directed us to pay her rent from his checking account one month. Family and friends from all over the country sent check after check and strong long-distance bonds of love to sustain her.

Her boyfriend did everything we wished we could have done and more, God bless him, but for this Gethsemane, she was alone in the garden.

There's a phenomenon psychologists call, "kindling," in which stresses pile up, one after the other, like fire kindling, until the whole mess explodes into flame. If it wasn't enough that Jessica was desperately ill and in pain and washed out from the drugs and flat broke, she was still having to cope with living in a major metropolitan area. Soon after her diagnosis, there was a mass-transit strike in New York and the clinic couldn't send the car for her. She had to walk. Four miles. In winter. Coughing.

Her skinflint landlord decided a good way to save money would be to turn off the heat during the day. She had to track him down by phone and explain that the apartment was not empty during the day and she was FREEZING. Rains came and the bathroom window flooded--two inches of water in two rooms. Every ten-minute visit to the clinic meant a two-hour wait. Misery upon misery.

And still she could not leave. Her brother left for war and she could not hug him good-bye.

She got her cellphone bill. It was $500. Her only lifeline to family and friends had become a hangman's noose.

Every problem that came along assumed the proportions of an insurmountable, impossible, Great Wall of Life that she could not climb over or tunnel under or get around. Her helplessness magnified everything. Some days she cracked wise and made jokes and watched movies and endured. Other days she called home in tears. She would cry until the coughing set in and we would listen until our hearts cracked open.

They say when you are sick, you are never sick alone, because your illness affects all those who love you and must watch you suffer. This is absolutely true.

But as the Dalai Lama points out, the Buddhists have a different way of looking at pain and suffering from those in the west, and that is that everyone suffers, period.

In the west, especially in this magnificent country, where the right to the "pursuit of happiness" is written into our laws, we often have a sense of entitlement, that happiness is a guaranteed privilege of being American. When painful experiences come along, we tend to make things worse because we are so outraged that this is happening to us, so convinced that we are not meant to suffer in life, that suffering is an aberration or some kind of horrible luck--that we fight it. We fight our own pain.

And in the struggle against our pain, we compound our own suffering. By howling at what we perceive as the unfairness or plain bad luck in life, we actually make ourselves feel worse.

"If your basic outlook is that suffering is negative and must be avoided at all costs and in some sense is a sign of failure," says the Dalai Lama, "this will add anxiety and intolerance when you encounter difficult circumstances, a feeling of being overwhelmed."

What this does is make us feel like victims of life. Furthermore, the Dalai Lama points out that we often "perpetuate our own pain by replaying our hurts over and over again in our minds, magnifying our injustices…We also add to our pain by being overly sensitive, overreacting to minor things, taking things too personally and blowing them out of proportion…"

When we've been under sustained stress for a period of time, we find our coping abilities have become so overtaxed that they just wear out. My son says that after they'd been in combat conditions for several months, everyone became exceedingly short-tempered and irritable, impatient with their buddies. This is natural in any sustained-stress situation.

For my daughter to call home in tears is healthy--it's a good thing, because it's HUMAN. Anybody in her shoes, especially as young as she is and as far away from home, would react in much the same way to such a lonely and scary situation. For her not to reach out to those who love her the most in the world would seriously isolate her and cause her to give in to despair.

It's not spiritual failure when we feel overwhelmed sometimes by fear, negativity, or powerlessness. It's important, emotionally, for us to embrace those onslaughts the way a tree embraces a high wind--bending with it, sacrificing a few leaves.

But like a sturdy tree, it's also important for us to stay grounded in spiritual practice--rooted, held safe and secure. It is only when we allow our fears to take over our minds, dominate our emotions, and direct our decisions…that we break.

When we rage against our fate, our suffering, we are really giving in to our deep primal fear that we will not be able to survive. It's like being trapped behind a closed door and wanting desperately to get out. But sometimes, we beat against that closed door of life until our fists are bloody…only to discover that it opens inward.

The secret to getting through a period of sustained suffering is counter-intuitive to those of us (myself included) who consider ourselves fighters. There are times that fighting will do nothing but exhaust us.

The secret is in surrender.

The Dalai Lama puts it this way: "If the situation or problem is such that it can be remedied, then there is no need to worry about it…The appropriate action is to seek a solution…Alternatively, if there is no way out, no solution, no possibility of resolution, then there is also no point in being worried about it, because you can't do anything about it anyway."

(Granted, that's easier said than done--I'd be the first to admit that and my daughter the first to say so, right to my face!)

Also, for those of us who consider ourselves spiritual people, we can sometimes feel guilty or ashamed because we somehow don't seem to have enough faith to get us through this crises. But the truth is that all of us go through periods where we feel weak and frightened, alone and stubbornly without faith or hope.

Surrendering is not something you can do all of a sudden, when confronted with an insurmountable difficulty. It is something you practice. You have to train yourself, says the Dalai Lama. You have to re-wire your brain, re-program your mindset. And you have to do it pretty much on a daily basis.

The practice of surrendering to fate, God, destiny, the Universe--whatever you want to call it--is like a tree putting down roots. It takes time. It takes sunshine and it takes rain.

This week, Jessica will finally--blessedly--be released by the New York Department of Health. She is no longer considered contagious, though she will remain on medication for at least six months, and she is still nowhere near ready to return to work. Her boyfriend will, at long last, be driving her home.

Here, in the quiet country, in the embrace of family, she will finally be able to rest and recuperate. She'll stay here a couple of months, until she gets back her old energy. Here, in the roots of her childhood, she will regain her strength.

Out back, behind this old farmhouse, there's a mesquite tree at least a hundred years old. Part of that tree is dead, and some years ago, threatened to split the tree in half. My husband drove a gigantic bolt right through that tree, fastening the deadened half tight to the thriving half. Since then, that old tree has flourished and grown taller and stronger than ever, the leafy living part completely overpowering the dead barren part.

Even when you are young, and your roots are not yet that deep, you can be shot through with love, bound and sustained by family and friends, and strengthened enough over time to withstand the violent wind and galeforce rains of any storm.