"In a dark time, the eye begins to see.../ The day's on fire/ I know the purity of pure despair.../The edge is what I have." -Theodore Roethke
Nearly twenty-five years ago I interviewed a patient who had just finished her last round of chemo therapy. The occasion was my television show, "Life Choices with Erie Chapman."
Her doctor said she was "cancer-free." She knew that also meant the cancer could return.
"How do you feel now that you have completed treatment?" I asked. "Are you worried about the return of your cancer?"
Her answer was startling:
"Not at all," she replied. "I'm so grateful I got this cancer. Now I can truly see life. Before, I think I was blind."
Joy sets the day on fire. So does agony.
It is the bland space in between where we linger neither fully alive nor actually dead. Perhaps, fearing agony or boredom, we anesthetize ourselves and thus never see some of the richest colors in life's painting.
One hundred years of living guarantees that there will be days of tragedy. My mother has been through enough of that to find serenity - or maybe she had it all along. You see her elegant light in another photo (left) taken recently by my daughter, Tia.
Some patients (and caregivers) who have been very sick or simply lived a long time understand the treasures of age and illness. Others block the inspiration that can come from facing into our hardest darkness.
"I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal," the poet John Berryman wrote.
Who would want an ordeal? But, that is exactly what the courageous do.
"Why go through the pain of climbing Mount Everest," the bold are asked.
The most common answer? "Because it's there." Why did Roger Bannister struggle to run the first four minute mile in 1954? Because he wanted to show what a human being could do. Why do saints like Gandhi and Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King choose painful paths to humanity? Because they believe their is nothing more important than Radical Loving Care.
What we know is that it is impossible to "see" unless we first enter the dark and then, crucially, reflect on the experience.
Pain is expensive. Why not let it teach us?
Of course, pain will find us whether we seek it or not. The tragedy is that when we run from it too fast we misplace its most valuable lessions, the ones that open the eyes of our souls so that we can truly see.
-Erie Chapman
