Marrow (8 page)

The authentic self

is the soul made visible.

—SARAH BAN BREATHNACH

THERE'S NO WORD IN ENGLISH
that quite captures the meaning of the Yiddish word “beshert.” It sort of translates as “predetermined,” but that word doesn't have the same oomph as “beshert.” When used by matchmakers, “beshert” means the one person you are destined to be with, your soul mate or, as one rabbi put it, the other half of the broken eggshell.

“Beshert” is also used to describe synchronicities—like when you think of someone you haven't seen in ages and then you run into that person that same morning, walking to work on a street you rarely take. Why were you thinking of that person? And why did you take that street today? And what if you—or your friend—had left the house at a different time? You don't know the answers to these questions, but they make you wonder who's directing this show anyway. That's another meaning of “beshert”: something that seems to have been predestined by something you do not understand, and yet still, you trust it was meant to be.

That's how I feel about the bone marrow transplant. That it was meant to be. Not something we ordered, not anything we agreed to, but it came anyway, and therefore, it is beshert. Would I go back in time, alter destiny, and undo the need for the transplant? Smother the wildfire before it started spreading throughout my sister's body? Of course. But I can't, and so we must go forward,
trusting that in bringing together the broken eggshells of our love, there is something beshert—meant to be—for both of us.

What might that be? For Maggie, it might be a long life. For me, the privilege of helping her live. But I think the cosmic Cupid has some other things in mind too, and maybe we can touch on those things in the therapy session. In reuniting the Maggie-Liz eggshells, and in revisiting the stories that have kept us separate, maybe we can also heal other broken places in our lives. Because those stories we all drag around with us from childhood, unexplored and unforgiven, get deep into our psyches and become who we think we are. Meanwhile, the marrow of our selves is kept concealed, and our souls are left untapped.

It takes courage to dig for the soul with another person. I've done most of my soul-searching on my own—on the secluded islands of meditation and therapy. It's less challenging to examine myself—warts and all—in the privacy of my own head, or in a room with a therapist who keeps all confidences. It always surprises me how hard it is to lay bare my most vulnerable authenticity to my husband, with whom I have lived for almost thirty years, or with my closest friends and colleagues.

We crave intimacy with others, and yet we fear it. We want to be seen and loved for who we are, yet
we
don't know who we are! This is the tragedy and the comedy of being human. Afraid to look too deeply into our own selves, and afraid to ask others, “Who am I to you?” we circle each other, harboring old stories, many of which are not even true. I've been a brave person all my life. I've traveled to dangerous places; I've delivered babies; I've given speeches to large crowds and intimate gatherings; I've stood my ground at work and in the world. But being brave one-on-one with another person—to me, that takes the most courage. It
seems that intimacy should be easier—that we should have been born knowing, or at least taught, how to bare our souls honestly to the people in our lives. That instead of rejecting or attacking, we would move toward the other with curiosity and warmth, even when feeling shamed or hurt or angry or afraid. But we don't do this easily, we humans. We need help in learning how.

In his masterpiece of a book,
The Art of Loving
, Erich Fromm writes that love is an art that must be learned, but that “in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power—almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.” My aim in going to see a therapist with Maggie is for both of us to practice what Fromm considers the first step in the art of loving—what he calls relating “from center to center.” He writes, “Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence . . . If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences, that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, I perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood.” And, in this case, the fact of our sisterhood.

I'VE BEGUN TO PILFER MY
mother's photo albums. She and her brother—my crazy psychiatrist uncle—were the family photographers. You can tell which pictures my mother took: group shots of the family at the beach, on hikes, in the neighborhood. My uncle's photos are artsy shots of individuals with moody expressions in low-lit rooms. Over the years, my mother carefully glued the photographs into twenty big black books. When my mother died, my sisters and I divided up the collection. I put my five black books on a high shelf in a closet, but I take them down now, and even though I can feel my mother's dismay as I dismantle the system, I unglue pictures of Maggie at different stages of her childhood and line them up chronologically on my desk.

There she is, a bundle in my mother's arms—the third baby girl brought home from the hospital. And there I am, eyeing her dubiously, wondering what to make of this little interloper. In another picture, she's two and I'm four. We're paddling around in the shallow waters of the Long Island Sound. I have two long braids and short bangs, and I'm staring straight into the camera with a satisfied expression on my face. Maggie has a pixie haircut that makes her look like a tousled little mouse. She keeps her eyes on the water with an earnest and anxious look. In another picture, we're having a tea party, sitting on the sidewalk. I am serving. Maggie is waiting with her hands in her lap. Here she is at seven or eight, stand
ing under a blossoming apple tree, playing the violin. She's tiny and adorable. She was always tiny and adorable. Then she turned into a teenager. She stayed tiny but became stunningly beautiful. There's the photo of her at eighteen leaning against the dock at the beach—her sun-bleached hair falling below her shoulders, her flashing dark eyes, her soft smile. No wonder all the boys were in love with her. No wonder they still are.

Everyone loves Maggie—that's what we have always said in the family, and if I say it to her friends, they agree right away. What is it about her? Her bright hummingbird energy? Her love of what's wild—the forest, wildlife, her own wild nature? She's an unusual mix: part wild child, part worrier, part warrior. She's flown on seaplanes into the Alaskan tundra in wildflower season, scavenging for her artwork, and camped there, alone among the glaciers and grizzly bears. Yet she's also stayed close to home, living for years in our parents' Vermont town, marrying the boy next door, taking care of everyone but herself. She's fought battles for her patients, yet when it comes to fighting for her own well-being, she's scoffed at the whole idea—putting up with people who treat her badly, not paying attention to her body's warning signs. She's danced all night with unabashed joy at concerts, done endurance swimming around islands in Maine, and made me laugh so hard I've wet my pants. And yet she spent way too many years hiding her bright light so as to not outshine anyone else. She made a big impression on others, but kept herself small.

Sometimes I think Maggie stayed small because by the time she was born, my older sister, Katy, and I had already taken up a lot of space. Katy came barging into the world with a double dose of energy. My mother didn't know what to do with her. Neither did the conformist teachers in the elementary schools of our day.
At parent-teacher conferences my mother would tell the teachers, with a hopeful and worried tone, that perhaps Katy was a “late bloomer.” Perhaps she would settle down and conform later on. She never did, and the world's a better place because she didn't.

When I was born, Katy was four years old. I must have taken one look at the fraught relationship she had with my mother and decided right then and there to do things differently. I was calmer and more introspective than Katy, but I was just as strong-willed. The two of us seemed to know from an early age that we had things to do and places to go. In those days, powerful little girls were called “bossy.” It was not a compliment. Katy and I were bossy.

Maggie and our youngest sister, Jo, took a backseat to their older sisters. They were the good girls. Maggie was a people pleaser, a nervous sprite, someone who kept secrets, including her own. Jo was the little one, “the least of the Lessers,” as she says now. We left her out of a lot of our games and adventures because she was the baby. She was shy and barely talked for the first years of her life. Everything had already been said. Both Maggie and Jo said less than the big girls.

Until they became teenagers. Then, all four of us became creatures of our times. Just about every aspect of American life was in upheaval when we were teenagers. We spoke up against the Vietnam War, and for civil rights. We wore miniskirts and skimpy shirts. We had sex, smoked pot, and listened to rock and roll that broke the sound barrier. We called each other “sisters of the revolution.” Our poor parents.

In the middle of the line of photos of Maggie, I place a few of the four girls. Katy, Liz, Maggie, Jo. My father called us KaLiMaJo. Here's a picture of us in navy-blue sweatshirts at the beach, hoods pulled up and tied beneath our chins. Here's one of us at a cousin's
wedding, in matching Easter dresses, lined up in size order. And here we are as young women, long hair, happy smiles, arms around each other, striding down a dirt road in Vermont. In some ways, we were a united front. We were the four Lesser girls. We were KaLiMaJo. But in other ways we were rivals. We kept each other locked in the roles we had been assigned as children, even as we grew out of them in the rest of our lives. The places we lived, the men we married, the jobs we took, the families we created, the choices we made: they served as ways of both uniting and separating us. Never did I feel more connected to other humans than with my sisters, and yet at the same time, never did I feel as insecure or judged or hurt or pissed off. Would I ever be released from the role of the bossy one, the princess, the hot-shit city slicker who had left the state of Vermont and therefore the state of grace? Would any of us ever see the other without the blinders of family branding? And who would we be to each other without the attached stories?

Although we grew up in the same house, with the same parents, each of us four girls tells a different version of the story of our sisterhood. From the moment we could think, we began forming stories—about our mother, our father, each other, and how all the pieces fit together. All siblings do this; all humans do it. This is the great mystery of our shared existence—how what each one of us calls reality is only one small rendering of a vast and complex story. Take two siblings, or any two people, and ask them to describe an important event. What you'll get are two distinctive and sometimes conflicting accounts, each spiked with strong opinions masquerading as fact.

Memoirists confront this phenomenon all the time; they cleave to as true a tale as they can, but their own bias gets in the way at every turn. Anaïs Nin, one of the great memoirists of the twentieth
century said, “We don't see things as they are. We see them as
we
are.” Joan Didion's memoirs are masterful explorations of internal storytelling. She writes, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. . . . We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.”

There are four multiple-choice answers to the questions I have about my childhood, my youth, my family. Four answers written over time by four girls, four teenagers, four women. Often the answer I choose contains information that curiously does not show up in the answers chosen by my sisters. I might remember a meanness done or a helping hand extended, and one of my sisters will shake her head and say, “No, no! That's not what happened,” or, “I never said such a thing,” or “You
would
think that.”

Over the years, I have built cases in my heart around one sisterly slight, one overheard remark, attracting to them little grudges and bigger wounds, like a magnet gathering metal shavings and rusty nails. If I let the grudge build, it can affect a relationship for years. Sometimes I find the courage to bare my heart to a sister, and sometimes she will meet me halfway. When that happens, two things never cease to amaze me: one, how different our realities can be; and two, how the shavings and rusty nails will drop away if we just tell each other our stories—if we reveal our hurts, explain our behaviors, respect each other's point of view, apologize or accept an apology. If we let the shavings and nails go, we come home to each other's truths, and to the bigger truth: that we love each other. Then we can start over.

ALTHOUGH SHE AGREES TO VISIT
the therapist, Maggie warns me not to get too excited. “It's too late for me to change who I am, Liz,” she says.

“Why would you have to change who you are?” I ask her.

“Isn't that the point of therapy?”

“Actually, it's the opposite,” I say. “You don't try to change yourself. You try to know yourself, and then to
be
yourself—your real self.”

“What does that even mean, ‘your real self'?” Maggie asks. “I feel pretty real these days.”

“Words are going to fail me here,” I say, preapologizing for the inadequate words at my disposal. “These are hard things to talk about without sounding like a moron.”

“Try me,” Maggie says.

“What I mean is we're all born exactly who we are supposed to be, but we take these weird detours in order to fit in, or please others, or get our way, or just get by. We suffer wounds and build up scar tissue. You know how Shakespeare said, ‘To thine own self be true'? Well, for most of us, the voice of ‘thine own self' gets harder and harder to hear because other voices take over. Therapy is separating out the voices in your head, and deciding which ones to listen to and which ones steer you away from your real self, your real purpose, what you love, what you value. There's power
in naming the voices in your head: This one's my father's voice, that one belongs to a sister, that other one to a teacher, a husband, a wife, the culture, the country. Ah, and this one, this one rising to the surface, this one is mine. My own self. Can I trust that voice? Can I be true to it? That's therapy.”

“That doesn't sound moronic,” Maggie says. “But do people really ever figure all that out?”

“Well, it takes some time,” I say.

“But we've only got a couple of hours.”

“Yeah, and we have the ticking time bomb of the transplant. It will motivate us because we're doing it for each other,” I say. “We have a compelling reason to get down to the marrow of ourselves.”

“This above all, to thine own self be true.” My English teacher mother was quick to point out that Shakespeare put those famous words into the mouth of Polonius, the least true-to-thine-self of all the characters in
Hamlet
. It was the Bard's ironic way of saying that, while the key to life is authenticity, most of us pay lip service to the idea, never really biting into the gold kernel of truth at the core of the self. Never really having the support, the know-how, the guts to mine the gold and live the gold and give the gold. That's the tragedy at the heart of
Hamlet
. And it's a tragedy in all of our lives until we summon the courage to dig deep, to say our truth, to be our truth.

There is a gold kernel of truth within each of us. It is the marrow of who you really are. It's right there—your true self, your soul self—shimmering and powerful, free of fear, clean of envy, clear of purpose. And yet, at the same time, it's tantalizingly out of reach, hidden under layers of crappy things said and done to you; discounted or even threatened because of your gender or class or race; drowned out by the noise of your own anxieties and shame
and jealousy; terrified to show its unique and flawed face to a world that values conformity and perfection.

“To thine own self be true,” we're told throughout our lives—when faced with decisions big and small, when wondering about whom to love or where to live or what to do with our talents and dreams. How do I grasp my purpose? How do I live a meaningful life? How can I make a difference in the lives of others?

“Just be yourself.”

You have heard this. You think it's true. Or at least you want it to be true—this idea of having and following an authentic self. Perhaps you have searched for that self in the cocoon of a therapist's office or the pew of a church. Maybe you have run or pedaled toward him, traveled far and wide following her trail, felt him close to you in the effort of work or the rush of creativity. Maybe you've almost seen her in bed or on a drug trip or a drunken binge. All you know is that it's painful being separated from your one true self. And so you keep searching, sometimes effectively and sometimes like a fool, like a zealot, like a lost soul.

And sometimes, without even trying, you feel her, you sense him close by—your elusive authentic self. So close, as the Zen poet Ryokan says, she is hiding somewhere near you:

In all ten directions of the universe,

there is only one truth.

When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same.

What can ever be lost? What can be attained?

If we attain something, it was there from the beginning of time.

If we lose something, it is hiding somewhere near us . . .

You may be walking to work, passing the same store windows you do every day, but today, grace descends and your true self comes out of hiding. You see your reflection in the window, and for a minute you just know that by some mysterious and purposeful design, you belong right here, right now, in your body, in your life. You look around at the people rushing in both directions, and instead of your usual mix of annoyance or isolation, jealousy or judgment, you love them, you feel one with them, you want the best for them. You're not sure where this equanimity of spirit comes from, but it feels like the truth of who you are; it feels like your soul. You'd like to capture and harness it. You'd like to put it in charge of your life. You see all of this in your reflection in the window as you rush to work. But then you arrive, and you go into a meeting where you swallow your opinion, or you defend your position. You say something you later regret, or you don't say what you really wanted to. Your soul self swiftly goes back into hiding.

Or maybe you're driving your kid to school, distracted and overwhelmed as usual. Your eye catches the face of your son in the rearview mirror. And for no reason whatsoever your heart softens and you cheer up so fully that you are suddenly and blessedly free of striving, of rushing, of ruminating. It doesn't matter that you're late or that the remains of breakfast are encrusted around your son's mouth. It doesn't matter that it's winter and you are ten pounds overweight or that your boy writes his name backwards. You look at his face, and something comes over you, and in that moment you taste the delight of “enough.” Your son, just as he is, is enough. He's more than enough! And you are enough. You slip through the keyhole into a vast realm of freedom—the freedom of knowing and loving without apology exactly who you are.

I live for those moments. I've gone to great lengths to experi
ence them—to make contact with my true self. I don't necessarily recommend everything I've done. I've tried some weird therapies and chancy adventures—all-night ceremonies, dubious teachers, exotic healings. All to find what isn't even lost. All to uncover what is barely beneath the surface. All to reveal what seems uniquely mine, and yet is part of the same fabric of what is uniquely yours.

And why, you may ask, spend precious time searching for something as elusive as a soul? Why not leave it where it hides—near to us, yet so difficult to find and sometimes dangerous to follow? There are two reasons: First, you search for the soul for the sake of your own life—for purpose, for meaning, for strength, for freedom and peace and love. Second, you search for your soul for the sake of everyone else. You do it for your family, your children, your coworkers, the whole world. The world needs your originality, your ideas, your humor, your creations. All of this is alive and well within you, hiding somewhere near you, beneath the layers, down, down, down, into the soul.