How Sorrow  Gave Me The Gift Of Self-Kindness

I have not always been kind to myself. Like any other ego, I am capable of self-critiquing until the sky looks level. But my life took a sharp turn when I was thirty-two years old. My only daughter was diagnosed with a fatal cancer at the age of three. She became a patient at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and I became drenched in sorrow. Sopped in self-pity and rage, I nevertheless found the courage to help keep her alive for another three years.

 By the time she died, I was exhausted beyond belief and knew I had to go with. Our son was ten when she died and he, too, had been through the hell of losing his only sibling. We were isolated deeply in our bereavement. No one knew what to say or how to treat us. Some mothers told their children that Laurie had moved away. She had finished first grade, been a Bluebird and made innumerable friends. Sadly, their sorrow kept them from coming around.

But I was on the spiritual path and knew that my burning desire to walk on until the end would keep my spirit alive. I kept it to myself, however. Within ten years, I had found my teacher and devoted countless hours to studying what he taught. That I was the Self in all beings and that God was within. My heart, however, was not light, even though I was bathed in it. I had to move through the grieving process one painful day at a time. It seemed never ending.

Life went on. We moved into a new house and my spiritual studies deepened. But in 2000 my husband received his own fatal diagnosis and he was told he had less than three years left. Believe it or not, this was harder on me in some ways than my daughter’s death. I was older and my husband was my strength, or so I thought. Now I became his and I cursed the situation like you wouldn’t believe.  All of my inner work seemed lost. I wept until my face looked like a giant puff. But I  was determined to grow. And grow I did. I had to witness my anger, fear, denial, all of the stages of grief. I went through them during the four and a half years that he survived.

 At the end I was left with myself alone. And kindness began to move in me. Self-kindness. Mercy towards this woman who had lost half her family. It manifested powerfully. I began saying no to things I had no interest or energy in doing. I kept up my meditation and writing. I moved slowly through each day, as if I was teaching a child how to live. But the child was me. And I listened to her and comforted her. I played soft music to her at night when she couldn’t sleep. I lit candles for her and let her watch as much TV as she liked.

 It was obvious to me that self-kindness was a spiritual teaching. And so it is. And so I am flowering in the wilderness of sorrow. And learning that kindness, as Naomi says, follows sorrow as surely as new flowers follow the rain.

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Selling this book one heart at a time. May it come into your life if it is meant to be.