TIMES 2 COVER GOOD FRIDAY 2007

HOPE AGAINST HOPE

There isn’t a child who hasn’t once cried out, ‘It’s not fair!’ with a stamp of the foot, weeping grief and fury at what ill fortune has meted out. Or heartless parents, or mean friends, or piggish older siblings, or that deaf old Father Christmas – all guilty, in their turn, of inflicting hurt, usually by saying ‘No’, but sometimes by turning away, as others, later, will surely turn their backs. Early in life we endure those small rehearsals for the larger disappointments that will inevitably cause the blues in the night, whilst the real agonies – the losses from which the spirit can never completely recover – await on our personal Calvaries. Maybe there are some fortunate readers who have never had reason to cry out ‘Why did this have to happen to me?’ or ‘I have not deserved this’ – but surely not many. Most of us must grapple with what C.S.Lewis called ‘The Problem of Pain,’ and the unanswerable question of why bad things happen to good people will go on being asked until the end of human time.

The letters which come into my Wednesday page vary in seriousness, although all problems loom as crosses to be born in the eyes of those who write. The 23 year old psychologist working in the NHS has had a breakdown, is ‘transformed into a quivering wreck’ and now, ‘the prospect of another 60 or so years of life terrifies me.’ A 35 year old, pregnant by a man she doesn’t love in a country she doesn’t want to live in, says, ‘Life feels lonely and dark and not much fun.’ A middle-aged single woman has just had a serious diagnosis, and because she sees no point to life says she wants no treatment. Why, she asks, ‘should I follow a lonely and unfulfilled middle-age with a lonely and unfulfilled old age?’ A 60 year old whose letter describes a satisfactory life by any standards writes, ‘I should be grateful for my good fortune but feel this tremendous loss and that I have not found true happiness.’

Occasionally, I confess, such letters can make me want to click my fingers briskly and say, ‘Snap out of it!’ More often they ring true and compassion is the only response. But what, I wonder would the lost, lonely and seeking ones (let alone those who know in their hearts that they are being self-indulgent) make of the following letter? This lifts the lid on real pain: a level of suffering most of us will never have to experience. This letter reads like the cry of innocent Job, asking why he is so afflicted, and to read it is to take the first step on a path to understanding the human condition. For this young woman bears witness to two things which I cannot but (given this day, Good Friday) express in terms of the Christian story. Hers could be the agonised words of Jesus on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ And yet her human story offers the eternal possibility of resurrection.

Dear Bel,

What to do when you've lost everything that was ever dear to you? I'm a thirty-year old woman from the Netherlands, and in January 2006 I decided to give everything up and move to France. I've found a nice job here, and I'm pretty proud of what I achieved, but a sense of loneliness, grief and uselessness pervades my entire life. l don’t know how to solve my own problems anymore.

Those problems started quite young. I come from a very disturbed home, with a schizophrenic, paranoid father who was also physically violent at times, although never to me. 12 years ago, when I was 18, he quite suddenly left us (my brothers, my mum and me) and that was both a relief and a curse. Although he could be very aggressive I was always very close to him. His leaving us like that hurt me deeply. I have never seen him since, because he refuses every kind of contact and has repeated over and over again, written on the envelopes he sent back unopened, that he is no longer our father.

I then found myself in the role of caregiver to my two brothers, twins three years younger (15 when he left), and to my mum - devastated by her years of marriage. Always a shy woman, she married at 19, and never really grew up while he was there to put her down. When he left, she just didn't know how to take over her own life, let alone comfort three teenagers. I always wanted to leave my country to pursue an education in the UK because I have a deep love of the English language, but a sense of responsibility to my family made me stay. I couldn't bear leaving them in the state they were in.

Gradually, one of my brothers fell into a deep depression, tried 5 times to commit suicide (my other brother and I found him once with a plastic bag over his head and were just in time to save him), and finally succeeded in doing real and lasting damage by falling from the third floor balcony of his apartment building. To this day I'm not sure whether that too was a suicide attempt (he says it wasn't) but anyway, he still lives. It took many operations to get him walking again, and during his two-year recovery period, I took care of him. Additionally, I also quit university (studying English) to work and pay the bills he could not pay.

Then, my best friend died in a car accident. That broke my heart. I never had many friends, partly because I feared revealing my family's problems to strangers, and she was the only one I completely trusted. When I finally started to recover from these blows and had resumed my studies, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. It had already spread, and after 11 months, during which I took care of her, she died at the age of 47. I was then 25 years old. I had no time to really grieve for her, because my brothers had an extremely hard time coping with both her death and the fact that they were now ‘orphans’. I was afraid that the brother who had already tried to commit suicide would choose that way out of his grief once again. During all this time I had jobs to support myself and those who needed me, and anyway, apart from my mum's sister there was no one left. But believe it or not, three months after my mum's death my aunt was also diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 39. It then turned out that it was the hereditary kind. I was tested for the BRCA-gene and the test came back positive. I once again tried to resume my studies but felt very depressed at the time. I had always been a beautiful girl, but couldn't find a man I trusted. My relationships all deteriorated because the men could not cope with the amount of grief I seemed to exude.

Because of the BRCA-gene I was tested regularly - then, when I'd just turned 28, disaster struck again. I felt a lump, went to see a specialist, and yes, of course, it was cancer. Within weeks both my breasts were amputated and I started chemo. I was told that the cancer had already spread to my ribs and that I had a 5% chance of surviving the year. My brothers couldn't cope with my illness. They told me so when I was in hospital to have both my breasts removed, the very worst day of my life. They came in, told me they couldn't cope, walked out and kept walking for all I know. I never saw them again.

That meant I was all alone. I had to fight this disease alone, and I did. 5 Months of chemo are like 5 years of hell, but I came through. I had lost all my hair, my breasts, my health, my looks and my youth as well as most of my friends, but I came through. And when the doctors pronounced me in remission, I was proud. I had to face life after cancer - which meant deciding whether to stay in the city I'd always lived in and which reminded me so much of all I'd lost, or go away. I bought myself a backpack, decided I could live off the rest of my savings for another three months, and started walking. I had nobody left to say goodbye to, nobody that mattered, and the first weeks I cried as I walked (which must have made a strange sight in the Belgian Ardennes: girl with backpack crying every step) I walked all the way from my home town to the north of France. I never hitch-hiked, I walked every single mile and slept in my tent. In retrospect it was almost like a pilgrimage.

Then my money ran out and I had to find a job. As I told you at the beginning, I did find one, and an apartment, I've even found some friends, and of that I'm proud. What I cannot seem to get over however, is this feeling of loss and grief. Very much betrayed by my brothers, I feel I've lost all that ever mattered to me – as well as the good looks I once had. I fear I'll never meet someone to share my life with, who'll accept me even with all the pain and scars I carry both inside and out. I've already experienced the disbelief of people I've told just a fraction of my story to, and this makes me feel like an invisible person. They see me from the outside, but have no clue as to what’s on the inside. Maybe they don't want to know. I do my best to have fun, but what has happened to me is an integral part of who I am. I cannot keep it hidden just to please people. I'm unable to find a goal in life and don't know if I can support the constant grief. Life hurts too damn much. Please be kind and tell me what you think. It's easier for me to pour my heart out to someone I don’t know. I've lost the vision that carried me through.

Bo

I wonder if you have truly lost that vision? Even writing those words I feel humble and reticent, because of what you have endured. What words of comfort can be offered to someone bewildered by the unfairness of existence? Where is the consolation of liberal ideas of love and compassion to a woman so abandoned by those she most loved? How can you even try to justify the universe to a blameless soul who has been so cruelly smashed into the ground by its random cruelties?

Still, you have asked me what I think. My reply is that the meaning of misfortune lies not within what has happened, but in what we do with that experience. T.S.Eliot wrote that we have an experiences but ‘miss the meaning,’ so to approach that meaning enables us to make sense of what we have endured, ‘beyond any meaning we can assign to happiness.’ By which he meant that the starting point is to clear the mind and spirit of any simple, human expectations of pity, fairness, love. It’s as if we must expect to be alone on a promontory in the howling gale, stare into the eye of the storm and survive, before we can turn back and pick up the threads of life. But changed utterly, of course.

I feel you are at the beginning of a new phase of your seemingly interminable journey. It started long before you shouldered that brave backpack – the external symbol of all that had weighed you down. It began years before your feet set out on what you perceptively call your pilgrimage. From the outside it seems obvious that your chief misfortune (shared by many unlucky people) was to have been so poorly parented. You must have felt guilty at loving your father in spite of his treatment of your mother, and so all the more wounded when your loyalty to him was repaid by abandonment. I imagine this also made your relationship with your poor mother even harder. In her turn she ‘left’ you by dying, and then, to compound the loss, the brothers for whom you had cared turned their backs on you.

It hardly bears thinking about – and here I am not even going to address the loss of your breasts, other than to recommend you get hold of ‘Staying Alive’ by Janet Reibstein, which is about the effects of breast cancer on a whole family. I think you will find it revealing and heartening, as well as moving. But picking over the past isn’t going to help us here, for you must have done that so many times. The question is how to re-process those experiences in order to have the strength to move still further along your road. Hard though it will be, I think you might begin by acknowledging that your brothers’ treatment of you is as much your father’s fault as it is theirs. Deeply damaged and lacking your strength, they allowed their inadequacy and terror at what had happened to their one ‘parent’ figure left, to triumph over natural affection for a sister. They should have been there to look after you as you had once taken care of them, but they failed you. It’s truly terrible, but I am asking if can find it in your heart to pity them. I would not suggest it were I not convinced of your extraordinary strength, as well as of the likelihood of you being reconciled with them one day. After all, you have bent your heads beneath a common grief.

For the three of you are survivors of a ‘war’- and war can tear families apart. What’s more, it is said that anyone who has been tortured remains tortured, and that anyone who has suffered torture will never again be able to be at ease in the world. All the writings of the great Primo Levi bear witness to this truth – and I offer it, not to make you feel worse, but to ‘allow’ you to feel as you do. Let us give your true status. You are a witness to what the human spirit can endure without giving in. This is a hugely important function, and when you meet the people who are truly worthy of your friendship and love, they will want to hear your message. Trust me – they will. Your story embodies the truth expressed by Levi in ‘If This Be a Man’ (required reading for all with the courage to confront the worst): ‘Sooner or later in life everybody discovers that perfect happiness is unrealisable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.’

You see, unlike many who suffer from clinical depression, you have found the ability to fight, to cope each step of the way. Your unhappiness is limited for the very fact that it has never triumphed. Of course you have cried, felt broken and bitter – yet not once do you moan,‘Why did this have to happen to me?’ Not once have you contemplated suicide, even though you don’t like living very much. You remind me of Primo Levi’s description of a fellow inmate of Auschwitz, who ‘possessed…an unlimited capacity for endurance, a silent courage, not innate, not religious, not transcendent, but deliberate and willed hour by hour, a …patience which sustained him miraculously to the very edge of collapse.’

It’s significant that the word ‘patience’ derives from the Latin verb ‘patior’ - I suffer. From it too comes the old word for the suffering of Christ on the cross – the passion. There is a philosophical journey within the etymology. For most of us have no choice but to endure - with whatever patience or stoicism we can muster - the sorrows of our lives. The cup will not be taken from us; we will learn how to drink from it without drowning. When the ‘why me?’ is transformed into ‘why not me?’ we take our places alongside our fellow human beings, pity them as we wish to be pitied – and that co-feeling is com-passion. This for me is the meaning of misery – and the key to that understanding which can transcend it.

What helps to carry the cross is faith – in the broadest sense. Those who have a religion can use it to help them, belief in a divine being providing both a structure within which to grieve (God’s will) and an external source to rail against (How could you do this, God?). Those of us without that can still have faith – but in ourselves. Your letter is full of it – you are ‘proud’ of how far you have come, and rightly so. You do have confidence (and see ‘fides’= faith, within that word) in yourself, in spite of everything, and this will go on providing signposts which seem obscure just now.

You can’t help it, Bo. Though life can seem dark and meaningless, the glory of human beings lies in our ability to surpass puzzlement, passivity and pain – and be continually reborn into our own lives. The old Blues men expressed the same thought when they sang, from the depths of existential despair, ‘Trouble in mind, I’m blue,/ But I won’t be blue always,/ For the sun will shine in my backdoor someday.’