"Thank You for Your Great Effort"

This morning, I received an email update from a high school friend. In all honesty, sometimes it is hard to read her emails and her blog. A month after she graduated from college, Emily became mysteriously ill, and she has battled a serious illness for the past 9 years.

Today I read her blog post about her 9-year anniversary of becoming sick. I link to it here because it’s beautifully written. It’s also very sad. I’m absorbed in my daily life of family and work, and her blog posts about illness and pain seem to come from a different world. It’s hard to believe that our lives have diverged so sharply since high school.

Her posts make me cry. Reading them, I feel mixed emotions: guilt that I have things that she longs for (a child, a husband, work, the ability to move without pain); renewed gratitude for the blessings of my life that are, all too often, invisible to me; sadness that someone I would have described in high school as sunny or bubbly is now suffering so deeply; joy at her connection to beloved friends and family; a sense awe at her faith; and humble gratitude that she has shared her journey with the people who care about her.

It’s not easy reading about Emily’s physical pain and her spiritual struggles. Part of me wants to follow a Spirituality-Lite kind of thinking: What a great reminder for me to count my blessings! But it strikes me as horrid to turn another human being into a simple story that reflects only on me, something to ponder before I drink my coffee and then forget about as I move on with my day. Another part of me wants to respond shallowly: Thanks for the update! Hang in there! But instead of those distancing responses, I’ve been trying this morning to articulate something deeper.

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg tells the story of Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. Suzuki was lying on his deathbed when an old friend visited. Suzuki said simply to his friend, “I don’t want to die.” His friend bowed his head and replied, “Thank you for your great effort.”

Now this story illustrates part of what drives me crazy about Zen Buddhism. I want the dying man’s friend to take his hand and say, “It will be okay” or “You’ll be at peace soon.” I mean, the man is dying—why not try to make him more comfortable or distract him? When I first read the story, I felt scared, and I wanted to push that feeling away. I skipped ahead to the next chapter.

But I found myself thinking of this story after I read Emily’s posts about her illness. In the story, the dying man says how he feels, and his friend is present with him. The friend accepts the dying man’s words, without trying to minimize them or push them away. In the face of death, that reaction seems inadequate. But sometimes, telling and accepting the truth is all you have. I can’t fix a friend’s constant pain, and that makes me feel crazy. I want to help. I can’t help.

In her blog, Emily describes facing, under extreme conditions, the task we all have: making the most of what we’re given as we face an uncertain life. She is saying both I don’t want to live this way and I am living this way. The scared part of me—the part that flatly refuses to consider that severe illness could happen to me or anyone in my family, the part that denies how hard this must be for her—wants to either push her story away or turn it into a simple, easily-contained lesson. Instead, I thank her for her great effort in telling the truth.