1: “Looks like pancreatic cancer,” he said matter-of-factly after receiving his test results.
“Barbara Lazear Ascher‘s husband, Bob, delivered the news in the most straightforward way possible,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
Bob’s doctors told him he had three months to live.
Barbara and their friends “gave him a wonderful leave-taking,” David writes. “They had theme-party nights—a Russian night with caviar and vodka, a Hawaiian night with grass skirts and leis scented with jasmine. They read poetry and had long conversations.”
“Having a gun pointed at our heads inspired us to become our best, most open hearted, honest and bravest selves,” Barbara reflects in her memoir Ghosting.
As the days passed, Bob and Barbara’s life together condensed down to the essentials. “There were many times we felt blessed,” she recalls. “It was as though certain death had granted us an extra life.”
As the end approached, Barbara brought Bob home from the hospital. She surrounded him with love, warmth, and devotion. “Dying was intimate, and I drew close,” she writes. “We were single-minded, welded together in the process of this long leave-taking.”
2: While Bob’s death was difficult, it was the grieving afterwards that took its toll.
After the memorial service and the wake, Barbara was now alone in their apartment. She recalls feeling “a wind began to blow through the emptiness of my hollowed self.”
One day, Barbara found herself “screaming at CVS employees because I’ll Be Home for Christmas was playing on the sound system… and her husband wouldn’t be,” David writes.
“She began to fear bathing and music and Saturday nights,” David writes. “She started giving her stuff away—and later regretted it. She had visions of seeing Bob on the street.”
While crossing the street, a neighbor whose husband had died five years before said to her, “You’ll think you’re sane, but you’re not.”
C. S. Lewis once noted that grief is not a process but a state: “It’s a river that runs through a long valley, and at every turn a new landscape is revealed, and yet somehow it repeats and repeats. Periods of grief and suffering often shatter our basic assumptions about who we are and how life works. We tend to assume that the world is benevolent, that life is controllable, that things are supposed to make sense, that we are basically good people who deserve good things. Suffering and loss can blast all that to smithereens.”
3: “Trauma challenges our global meaning system,” Stephen Joseph writes in What Doesn’t Kill Us. “It confronts us with existential truths about life that clash with this system. The more we try to hold on to our assumptive world, the more mired we are in denial of such truths.”
One’s mindset regarding trauma has a significant and long-lasting impact, David surmises. “People who are permanently damaged by trauma seek to assimilate what happened into their existing models.”
People who grow through the experience create new models to make sense of what happened.
“The person who assimilates says, ‘I survived brain cancer and I’m going to keep on chugging.’
“The person who accommodates says, ‘No, this changes who I am… I’m a cancer survivor…. This changes how I want to spend my days.'”
To remake our models for living involves challenging our fundamental assumptions.
“In what ways is the world safe and unsafe?” David writes. “Do things sometimes happen to me that I don’t deserve? Who am I? What is my place in the world? What’s my story? Where do I really want to go? What kind of God allows this to happen?”
Asking questions like this is challenging, and not everyone does so successfully.
Writing in What Doesn’t Kill Us, Stephen notes that 46 percent of those who experienced a train bombing or other terrorist attacks reported that their view of life had changed for the worse, while 43 percent said their view of life had changed for the better.
This process of introspection and reexamination often involves taking what Stephen Cope, learning from Carl Jung, calls “‘the night sea journey,’ heading off into the parts of yourself that are ‘split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Do I have any experience with grief or trauma? What about David’s writing here resonates with me?
Action: Discuss with a family member, friend, or colleague.
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