Afterword--Finding Meaning

 Afterword

None of us could have imagined that in 2020 we would be in the midst of a global pandemic. Grief, the subject of this book, is usually a topic that no one wants to talk about, but as the pandemic picked up steam, I was suddenly being asked about it constantly. In March 2020, I was interviewed by the Harvard Business Review, where the writer, Scott Berinato, asked about the discomfort that everyone seemed to be feeling. I told him that the heaviness was a form of grief. It was not the grief from a death of a loved one, though for some of us that would be coming. It was the grief of losing our normal way of life.

The Harvard Business Review piece became the most-read article in their history, and within a week, every major network was calling me to discuss grief. In interviews, I explained that there were macro and micro forms of grief; in other words, big and little losses, plus everything in between. 

The first losses we were grappling with were things like canceled weddings and high school graduations and, following that, the loss of jobs. It’s important to name the feelings of sadness, disappointment, and anger. Understanding that all those losses involve grief also shows us the limitations of using the term “grief” to explain every kind of loss.

People always wanted to know how the sixth stage of grief applied to this experience. What does finding meaning look like in a pandemic? How can there be meaning in a virus that sickens and kills those we love? There is no meaning in the virus or the pandemic; meaning comes from what we do in response to it. It’s possible to grow though this tragedy rather than just go through it. 

We must look for meaningful moments, like nurses holding up phones so loved ones can say goodbye or family members waving through nursing home windows. I saw little moments of meaning in my life, too. I didn’t know many of my neighbors on my block until we began sheltering in place. We built a text chain. “I’m going to the grocery store,” someone would text. “Does the elderly man at the end of the block need anything?” That’s meaningful. Children who had to give up their playdates are playing with their parents in the front yard. Those moments are meaningful.

The COVID-19 pandemic is heartbreaking and horrific, but we have to find the light that exists in the darkness. Every storm we ever endured has passed. Every night has given way to a better day. Wars end, terrorist attacks end, and so do pandemics. This tragic time has reaffirmed what this book is about and shown me how much meaning matters, in both personal and societal loss.

Here are four kinds of meaning that we can look for at this time:

1. Speaking openly about grief

This pandemic has given us permission to talk about grief. People struggling with loss, discouraged that no one wanted to talk about it, may now be more easily able to share their feelings.

2. Meaning in end-of-life care

In my first book, The Needs of the Dying, I discussed the need to not die alone. It was written at a time when we valued medical technology. But now, decades later, the barriers to dying with family are not just related to end-of-life procedures; our heroic doctors and nurses are seeing this firsthand, as so many are dying and often no one, for safety and health reasons, can say goodbye. I hope that, as a result of the pandemic, those needs can be taken more seriously and automatically built into end-of-life care.

3. Meaning in rituals

In this book, I’ve written about the importance of rituals and how they shape, hold, and facilitate our grief. Not being able to have funerals to help to process a family’s grief will impact our losses in the long term. Perhaps this will help us to find deeper meaning in rituals in the future.

4. Grieving online

Countless people who were grieving reached out to me when their grief groups were canceled because of the government's “stay-at-home” order. People struggling with a recent or historical loss had no support, though grief groups and peer support are crucial to help us understand the magnitude of our losses. Hearing their unmet needs, I wondered, Could this work online?

When I started a free online bereavement group, more than a thousand people showed up on the first day. We now have more than twenty thousand attendees, and we're still growing.

Our lives are always changed by loss, and loss continues. Even as I write this, we have been met with the tragic news of George Floyd’s death. The pandemic will show us the consequences of grief being unwitnessed in the future, and the continued racial injustices are showing us the consequences of death and grief not being witnessed in the past. We are all going through collective loss, and we want to come back with a better world. One with posttraumatic growth, not posttraumatic stress. We want all our losses, big and small—job losses, postponed milestones, and cancelled funerals—to be marked and noted. We don't want our grief to be lost to time. We want to find meaning.   

Introduction--Finding Meaning

 Introduction

In 1969, Elisabeth Kulbler-Ross identified the five stages of dying in her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying. As a psychiatrist, she saw that patients who were dying appeared to go through common experiences or stages. Her work captured the world’s attention and would forever change the way we talk and think about death and dying. She ushered the truth of this universal experience out of shadowy euphemism and into the light. 

Decades later, I was privileged to have been her protégé and friend, and to have coauthored with her a book entitled Life Lessons: Two Experts on Death & Dying Teach Us About the Mysteries of Life and Living. In the second book we wrote together, On Grief and Grieving, which was her last,  Elisabeth asked me to help adapt the stages she had observed in the dying to account for the similar stages we had also observed in those who are grieving. The five stages of grief are:

Denial: shock and disbelief that the loss has occurred

Anger: that someone we love is no longer here

Bargaining: all the what-ifs and regrets

Depression: sadness from the loss

Acceptance: acknowledging the reality of the loss

The five stages were never intended to be prescriptive, and this holds true for both dying and the subject of this book, grieving. They are not a method for tucking messy emotions into neat packages.  They don’t prescribe, they describe. And they describe only a general process. Each person grieves in his or her own unique way. Nonetheless, the grieving process does tend to unfold in stages similar to what we described, and most people who have gone through it will recognize them. In the years since that book's publication, I’ve experienced a great loss myself, and I can  confirm that the five stages really do capture the feelings we experience as we grapple with the  death of loved ones.

The fifth of Kiibler-Ross'’s five stages is acceptance. At this stage, we acknowledge the reality of the loss. We take some time to stop and breathe into the undeniable fact that our loved ones are gone. There’s nothing easy about this stage. It can be extremely painful, and acceptance doesn't mean that we are okay with the loss, or that the grieving process is now officially over. However, there’s been an assumed finality about this fifth stage that Elisabeth and I never intended. Over the years I came to realize that there’s a crucial sixth stage to the healing process: meaning. This isn’t some arbitrary or mandatory step, but one that many people intuitively know to take and others will find helpful.

In this sixth stage we acknowledge that although for most of us grief will lessen in intensity over time, it will never end. But if we allow ourselves to move fully into this crucial and profound sixth stage—meaning—it will allow us to transform grief into something else, something rich and  fulfilling.

Through meaning, we can find more than pain. When a loved one dies, or when we experience any kind of serious loss—the end of a marriage, the closing of the company where we work, the  destruction of our home in a natural disaster—we want more than the hard fact of that loss. We want to find meaning. Loss can wound and paralyze. It can hang over us for years. But finding meaning in loss empowers us to find a path forward. Meaning helps us make sense of grief, as you will see from the many stories in this book from people who have gone through this sixth stage. 

When working with people whose loved ones have died, I often see how hard they search for meaning. It doesn’t matter whether the death occurred after a long debilitating illness or if it came as a total shock after an accident or anything else that was sudden and unexpected. There's often a desire to see meaning in it.

What does meaning look like? It can take many shapes, such as finding gratitude for the time they had with loved ones, or finding ways to commemorate and honor loved ones, or realizing the brevity and value of life and making that the springboard into some kind of major shift or change.

Those who are able to find meaning tend to have a much easier time grieving than those who don’t. They're less likely to remain stuck in one of the five stages. For those who do get stuck, this can manifest in many different ways, including sudden weight gain (or loss), drug or alcohol addiction, unresolved anger, or an inability to form or commit to a new relationship out of fear of  experiencing yet another loss. If they remain stuck in loss, then they may become consumed by it,  making it the focus of their life to the point where they lose all other sense of purpose and direction. though you can’t pin all of your troubles or vices on getting stuck after a loss, there is almost always a connection.

Grief is extremely powerful. It’s easy to get stuck in your pain and remain bitter, angry, or  depressed. Grief grabs your heart and doesn’t seem to let go.

But if you can manage to find meaning in even the most senseless loss, you can do more than get unstuck. When circumstances are at their worst, you can find your best. You can keep growing and finding ways to live a good and someday even a joyous life, one enriched by the lessons and love of the person who died.

The search for meaning after loss will lead each of us along divergent paths. Candy Lightner  famously founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in 1980 after her daughter, Cari, was killed by a repeat drunk-driving offender. Even though she never understood why her daughter had to die, she was able to find great meaning in forming a group that saved the lives of others. For her, nothing was worth the cost of losing her daughter, but the ability to create something good from that death helped give her the sense that her daughter’s life as well as her own had meaning.

John Walsh started the TV show America’s Most Wanted after the murder of his son, Adam. He found great purpose in fighting to get criminals off the streets so no other children would be harmed.

Walsh and Lightner found meaning in starting national organizations. Most of us are not going to act on such a large scale, but that's not an obstacle to creating meaning. We can find meaning in the smallest of moments if we look for it and make a point of creating it.

Marcy grew up with a father whose favorite TV personalities were Milton Berle, Danny Thomas, and Morey Amsterdam. Because her father told her he had met Danny Thomas once, a memory he cherished, after he died she thought of him anytime she saw or heard any reference to Danny Thomas.

One day she was in line at the post office to mail a package and buy some stamps.

“What kind of stamps would you like?” the postal worker asked.

“Forever stamps.”

“We have flags and flowers and commemorative stamps. Do you want to see them?”

“Who cares?” Marcy thought. “They all do the same thing.” But she decided to look at what they had. Out came a vast array of stamps, and suddenly Marcy noticed a Danny Thomas stamp. Thinking  of her father, she bought many sheets of the stamps. She didn’t frame them or do anything special  with them. She just used them. Now, whenever she’s mailing a letter or paying a bill and she reaches for a stamp, she sees Danny Thomas and smiles. In those little moments, memories of her father’s life come back to her and bring her comfort. She doesn’t need anything more than a  moment of sweet remembrance to find meaning in the life of her father.

In my work with grieving people, I've often been asked, “Where am I trying to find meaning? The death? The loss? The event? The life of the person I loved? Or am I trying to find meaning in my own life after the loss?”

My answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. You may find meaning in all of those, which will lead you to deeper questions and deeper answers. Maybe your meaning will come by finding rituals that commemorate your loved one’s life, or by offering some kind of contribution that will honor that person. Or the loss of your loved one may cause you to deepen your connection to those who are still with you, or to invite back into your life people from whom you've been estranged. Or it may give you a heightened sense of the beauty of the life we are all so privileged to have as long as we remain on this earth.

Deirdre’s husband had died two years before the events she recounted to me, and she still missed him deeply. They had had a very close, loving marriage, the loss of which left a large hole in her life. Her father had lost his brother the month before the death of Deirdre’s husband. She and her father had bonded in their grief. She said, “I knew his pain. He loved his brother. I got it.” 

Deirdre and her family live in Hawaii, and on the day she later described to me they had gathered at a campground near Pearl Harbor to watch a canoe race in which her niece was participating. A few minutes before the race was supposed to start, a nuclear warning siren pierced the morning air. Simultaneously, a text alert on Deirdre’s phone read Inbound missile alert. This is not a drill. 

“A group of people came out from under a pavilion where the coaches were meeting,” Dierdre later told me. “They announced over the PA system, ‘Okay, everybody be safe, get home safely, and make sure everyone's got a ride.’ ” She continued:

My dad, brother, uncle, and the rest of the family started breaking down their tents. I went to get my dad's ropes from the car, and when I came back, everyone was gone, even my mom.

“Bye,” I said. “But where’s Mom?” Then I saw her in her car. She was rushing home, too. I went to see my dad, who was the only one who hadn't left yet. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry and I asked, “Are you okay?”

Why did everybody else just take off? Why didn’t they stay to say goodbye? It seemed  ridiculous. If we were going to die, why not be together with those we loved when it happened?  If there had actually been an inbound missile, everyone would have died while they were in their cars racing home. No one said I love you or hope we see each other again. No one shared any final memories. We are a close family. Usually.

It was interesting to me that unlike everyone else, the two people who felt no need to run were my dad and me. We made a decision to be together in the time we had left. We had an amazing discussion during that terrifying period, and I thanked him for being my dad. He thanked me for being his daughter. We talked about what we loved most about life.

As a psychologist, I have tried to analyze why Dad and I stayed together for what we thought would be our last moments while everyone else in our family fled. I think it’s because the deaths of people we had been so close to had taught us about how valuable life is. If we only had five or ten minutes to live, we didn’t want to squander them.

It turned out to be a false alarm, but I love how Dad and I made a decision to spend what  remained of our lives doing something meaningful. None of us know how long we have. Five minutes, five years, or fifty years. We don’t have that kind of control, but we do have control over how we choose to spend whatever time remains to us.

Ultimately, meaning comes through finding a way to sustain your love for the person after their death while you’re moving forward with your life. That doesn’t mean you'll stop missing the one you loved, but it does mean that you will experience a heightened awareness of how precious life is, as Deirdre did. Whenever it ends—at a few days or in extreme old age—we rarely think that life is long enough. Therefore we must try to value it every day and live it to the fullest. In that way we do the best honor to those whose deaths we grieve.

Here are some thoughts that may guide you in understanding meaning:

1. Meaning is relative and personal
2. Meaning takes time. You may not find it until months or even years after loss
3. Meaning doesn’t require understanding. It’s not necessary to understand why someone died in order to find meaning
4. Even when you do find meaning, you won't feel it was worth the cost of what you lost. Your loss is not a test, a lesson, something to handle, a gift, or a blessing. 
5. Loss is simply what happens to you in life. Meaning is what you make happen
6. Only you can find your own meaning
7. Meaningful connections will heal painful memories

When I began writing this book, I had spent decades writing, teaching, and working with those in grief. I was well into my fifties by then and considered myself to be deeply acquainted with grief, not just as a professional, but also in my private life. Anyone who has reached that age will have  experienced grief. Both my parents had died, along with a nephew who was like my brother. However, nothing in either my personal or my professional life as a grief specialist had prepared me for the loss I experienced when I embarked on this book—the unexpected death of my twenty-one-year-old son. This was a loss so shattering that despite all the years I’d spent helping others through their grief, I didn’t know if there was anything that could assist me through my own. And despite my awareness that the search for meaning is one of the keys to healing from grief, I did not know if there was any way I could find meaning in this loss. Like so many others who grieve, something in me felt that my grief was too great to be healed.

In the year 2000, I had adopted two wonderful boys from the Los Angeles County foster care system. David was four years old and his brother, Richard, was five. By that time the two of them had been in five different foster homes and had one failed adoption. Addiction in their family  background had hindered their permanent placement, as had the fact that David had been born with drugs in his system. When I heard that, I feared that it might mean something was wrong with him that would not be fixable. But it only took looking at the faces of those two little boys to tell me that love conquers all. The adoption went through, and in the years that followed, my belief in the power of love appeared to be confirmed. David and Richard both made an amazing turnaround and were wonderful kids.

Unfortunately, the trauma of David’s younger years came back to haunt him when he became a teenager. At around seventeen, David began experimenting with drugs. Luckily, he came to me not long afterward and told me he was addicted and needed help. In the next few years, our lives were filled with rehab and twelve-step programs. By the time he was twenty, however, he was sober, in love with a wonderful woman who was a recent social work graduate, and entering his first year in college. David had shown a real interest in following a career in medicine, yet had gone back and forth on what kind of career—or whether he should be developing an interest in something else, and yet I felt hopeful. But then a few days after his twenty-first birthday, he made some typical  relationship mistakes and he and his girlfriend broke up. That was when he met up with a friend  from rehab who was also having a tough time and they used drugs again. The friend lived. David died.

I was across the country on a lecture tour when I received a call from Richard, sobbing that his brother was dead. In the months that followed, I was in an agony of grief. Fortunately, I was  surrounded by friends and family who saw me not as a grief expert, but as a father who had to bury  his son.

In the early days after losing David, amazing people like my partner, Paul Denniston, and spiritual  teacher Marianne Williamson, one of the godmothers for my sons, spent countless hours with me, listening, talking, trying to help in any way they could. My friend Dianne Gray, who headed the Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross Foundation at the time and is a bereaved parent herself, told me, “I know you're drowning. You'll keep sinking for a while, but there will come a point when you'll hit bottom. Then you'll have a decision to make. Do you stay there or push off and start to rise again?”

What she said felt true. I knew in that moment that I was still in the deep end of the ocean, and I also knew that I was going to have to stay there for a while. I wasn’t ready to surface. But even then, I felt I would continue to live, not only for the sake of my surviving son but for my own sake as well. I refused to allow David's death to be meaningless or to make my life meaningless. I had no idea what I would do to wrest meaning from this terrible time. For the moment, all I could do was to go through Kiibler-Ross’s stages and allow them to unfold as slowly as I needed. Still, I knew I couldn't and wouldn't stop at acceptance. There had to be something more.

At first I was not able to find any consolation in memories of my love for my son. I had a lot of anger at that time—at the world, at God, and at David himself. But in order to go on, I knew I would have to find meaning in the grief I was feeling. In my deep sorrow, I thought about a quote I share at my lectures: grief is optional in this lifetime. Yes, it’s true. You don't have to experience grief, but you can only avoid it by avoiding love. Love and grief are inextricably intertwined.

As Erich Fromm says, “To spare oneself from grief at all costs can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.”

Love and grief come as a package deal. If you love, you will one day know sorrow. I realized I could have skipped the pain of losing David if I'd never known and loved him. What a loss that would have been. In the moment when I really began to understand that, I found gratitude for my son having come into my life and for all the years I got to spend with him. They weren't nearly long enough, but they had changed and enriched my life immeasurably. That was the beginning of my being able to see something meaningful in my grief.

As time goes by, I have been able to keep finding deeper meaning in David's life as well as in his death, as I will describe in later chapters. Meaning is the love I feel for my son. Meaning is the way I have chosen to bear witness to the gifts he gave me. Meaning is what I have tried to do to keep others  from dying of the same thing that killed David. For all of us, meaning is a reflection of the love we have for those we have lost. Meaning is the sixth stage of grief, the stage where the healing often resides.

In the immediate aftermath of my son’s death, I wasn’t sure if I would ever write again, lecture again, or even want to live again. I canceled everything for six weeks. But then I felt I needed to get back to work. I needed to be of service and keep my own pain moving. As hard as my son’s death was, I still wanted to live in the face of devastating loss. I knew that David would want me to live fully.

Writing this book has been part of my return to life. When I began, I wasn’t sure if I believed my own words about finding meaning in the face of life-altering grief. I had been in such deep pain that I didn’t know if meaning was possible after such a shattering loss. But it has turned out that in  exploring the search for meaning in the devastation of loss, I have discovered that meaning is both  possible and necessary. I hope that Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief will be a boon for  anyone who's struggling to figure out how to live after a loss. I hope that reading it will be as healing for others as writing it has been for me.

What About Death Control? (early draft)

 So, What about Death Control? [in progress]

“Thinking about Death” was the title of my Feb. 23 blog post, and it was partly about what I called “death control.” Since that is such an important, and controversial, issue, I am posting this article that deals more with that matter.

Death Control is Not Euthanasia

First, it is important to note that “death control” is not euthanasia, which is illegal in every state in the U.S.

One page on The CompassionAndChoices.org website (see here) states this clearly: “Medical aid in dying is fundamentally different from euthanasia.” Here’s why:

Euthanasia is an intentional act by which another person (not the dying person) administers the medication. By contrast, medical aid in dying requires the patient to be able to take the medication themselves and therefore always remain in control.

Thus, if used soon enough, MAID (medical aid [or assistance] in dying) can be used for people suffering from cancer, ALS, MS, or other progressively debilitating diseases—but not with those suffering from acute dementia. (This latter is a very sticky issue that I will think/write more about later.)

Death Control is Not Suicide

The term “physician assisted suicide” (PAS) has long been used, and terminally ill people who have taken means to end their lives have often been said to have committed suicide. But increasingly, that is seen to be a negative/judgmental term to be avoided.

Citing the same CompassionAndChoices webpage, many leading medical organizations “have all adopted policies opposing the use of the terms ‘suicide’ and ‘assisted suicide’ to describe the medical practice of aid in dying.”

Here are some differences between MAID and suicide (h/t to suicideinfo.ca):

** Suicide is often carried out alone and in secrecy, leaving loved ones with devastating grief; MAID involves decision-making informed by medical personnel and often includes loved ones.

** Suicide is usually due to mental pain: distress, loss of meaning and purpose in life, and psychological burdens considered too heavy to bear any longer; MAID is chosen by those whose death is apparently inevitable in a reasonably short period of time ahead. 

** Suicide is often carried out in violent ways (such as by self-inflicted gunshot); MAID uses non-violent means provided by trained professional.

So, What is Death Control?

Death control is providing terminally ill people with the choice of being able to end their life at the time and place of their choice—and with grace and dignity. Such is the purpose of these organizations in the U.S.:

Compassion & Choices 

Death with Dignity National Center

Final Exit Network

These organizations are seeking among other things to increase the number of states where MAID is legal, and this seems to be a good and important work. Several states are considering legislation at the present time; sadly, neither Missouri or Kansas is. (See this map of the situation in all states.)

Links to articles related to “death with dignity”

Twelve Myths About Physician Assisted Suicide and Medical Aid In Dying | HCPLive - Clinical news for connected physicians (7/7/18)  [questionable]

Ten Facts About Medical Aid in Dying | HCPLive - Clinical news for connected physicians (8/28/18) [good]

FS-Medical-Aid-in-Dying-Is-Not-Suicide-FINAL-3.20.19-Approved-for-Public-Distribution.pdf (compassionandchoices.org) (3/18/19) [good and important]

Chapter 52

The following is Chapter 52 from Transcendent Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi. 

 Chapter 52

Never again had come back again. After Katherine left I peeked in on my mother. No change. A few days before, I’d had a meeting with my advisor to discuss the possibility of graduating at the end of the quarter rather than waiting another year or more. 

“What are your goals? What do you want?” he asked. I looked at him and thought, How much time do you have? I want money and a house with a pool and a partner who loves me and my own lab filled with only the most brilliant and strong women. I want a dog and a Nobel Prize and to find a cure to addiction and depression and everything else that ails us. I want everything and I want to want less. 

“I’m not sure,” I said. 

“I’ll tell you what, just finish the paper, submit it, and then reassess. There’s no hurry. If you start the postdoc now, if you start it next year, or the next, it really doesn’t make a ton of difference.”

My lab was frigid. I shivered, grabbed my coat from the back of my chair, and put it on. I rolled up my sleeves and started to clear off my workstation, something I should have done the last time I was there. The last time I was there, I had finally finished my experiment, answered the question. I had tested the results enough times to be as certain as was possible that we could get an animal, even that limping mouse, to restrain itself from seeking reward by altering its brain activity. When I observed the limping mouse for the final time, fitted as he was with the fiber-optic implant and patch cord, everything had looked the same. There was the lever, the little metal tube, the manna of Ensure. There was that mouse, that limp. I delivered the light and like that, like that, he stopped pressing the lever. 

I left my workstation, went to my office, and sat down to write my paper, thinking about all of my mice. I should have been ecstatic to be finished, to be writing, with the hope of a new publication and graduation looming before me, but instead I felt bereft. 

The demands of scientific writing are different from the demands of writing in the humanities, different from writing in my journal at night. My papers were dry and direct. They captured the facts of my experiments, but said nothing of what it had felt like to hold a mouse in my hands and feel its entire body thump against my palms as it breathed, as its heart beat. I wanted to say that too. I wanted to say, here it is, the breath of life in it. I wanted to tell someone about the huge wave of relief I felt every time I watched an addicted mouse refuse the lever. That gesture, that refusal, that was the point of the work, the triumph of it, but there was no way to say any of that. Instead, I wrote out the step-by-step process, the order. The reliability, the stability of the work, the impulse to keep plugging, keep trying until I figured a way through, that was the skin of it for me, but the heart of it was that wave of relief, that limping mouse’s tiny, alive body, living still, and still. 

Pastor John used to say, “Stretch out your hand,” before he asked the congregation to pray for a fellow congregant. If you were close enough to the person who needed prayer you would literally touch them, lay your hands on them. You would touch whatever part of their body was accessible to you, a forehead, a shoulder, a back, and that touch, that precious touch, was both the prayer and its conduit. If you were not close enough to reach, if your arm was simply outstretched, brushing air, it was still possible to feel that thing I have often heard called “energy,” that thing I used to call the Holy Spirit, moving through the room, through your very fingers, toward the body of the person in need. The night I was saved, I was touched like this. Pastor John’s hand was on my forehead, the hands of the saints on my body, the hands of the congregants outstretched. Salvation, redemption, it was as intentional as skin touching skin, as holy as that. And I’ve never forgotten it. 

Being saved, I was taught when I was a child, was a way of saying, Sinner that I am, sinner that I will ever be, I relinquish control of my life to He who knows more than I, He who knows everything. It is not a magical moment of becoming sinless, blameless, but rather it’s a way of saying, Walk with me.

When I watched the limping mouse refuse the lever, I was reminded yet again of what it means to be reborn, made new, saved, which is just another way of saying, of needing those outstretched hands of your fellows and the grace of God. That saving grace, amazing grace, is a hand and a touch, a fiber-optic implant and a lever and a refusal, and how sweet, how sweet it is. 

Chapter 25

 The following is Chapter 25 from the book Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. The narrator is a single 28-year-old graduate student in neuroscience living in California, and her mother has moved from Alabama to live with her. 

Chapter 25

Before my mother came to stay with me, I realized that I no longer had a Bible. I knew she was in bad shape and probably wouldn’t notice, but it nagged at me to think of her reaching for one and not being able to find it. I went to the campus bookstore and purchased a New King James Version with the same amount of embarrassment and fear of being caught that one might have when purchasing a pregnancy test. No one batted an eye. 

At first, I kept the Bible on the nightstand, where my mother had always kept our Bibles, but, as far as I could tell, she never touched it. It rested on that nightstand in the same position, day in, day out, gathering dust. After a while, when I came in to sit with her, I would pick it up and start to flip through it, reading passages here and there, quizzing myself to see whether or not I could remember all of those hundreds of Bible verses I had committed to memory over the years. In college, whenever I struggled to remember all of the proteins and nucleic acids I needed to know intimately for my major, I would think about the surfeit of Bible verse knowledge taking up space in my brain and wish that I could empty it all out to make room for other things. People would pay a lot of money to someone who could turn the brain into a sieve, draining out all of that now-useless knowledge—the exact way your ex liked to be kissed, the street names of the places you no longer live—leaving only the essential, the immediate. There are so many things I wish I could forget, but maybe “forget” isn’t quite right. There are so many things I wish I never knew. 

The thing is, we don’t need to change our brains at all. Time does so much of the emptying for us. Live long enough and you’ll forget almost everything you thought you’d always remember. I read the Bible as if for the first time. I read at random, the rich and grandiose storytelling of the Old Testament, the intimate love letters of the Gospels, and I enjoyed it in a way that I hadn’t when I was a child, when I had such a hawkish approach to memorizing Scripture that I almost never took the time to think about what I was reading, let alone savor the words. While reading from 1 Corinthians, I found myself moved by the language. “This is actually quite beautiful,” I said to myself, to my mother, to no one. 

— 

Here’s a verse from the book of John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. I wrote about this verse in my childhood journal. I wrote about how writing itself made me feel closer to God and how my journal keeping was a particularly holy act, given that it was the Word that was with God, that was God. In those days my journal was my most prized possession and I took my writing very seriously. I took words seriously; I felt like those opening words of John’s were written just for me. I thought of myself as a lost apostle, my journal as a new book of the Bible. I was young when I wrote that entry, maybe seven or eight, and I was so very smug about it. Proud of how well it was written. I was almost tempted to show it to my family or to Pastor John. 

So it was a bit of a shock, years later, when P.T. delivered a sermon, one of his few memorable ones, in which he told us all that the word “Word” was translated from the Greek word Logos, which didn’t really mean “word” at all, but rather something closer to “plea” or even “premise.” It was a small betrayal for my little apostle’s heart to find out that I had gotten my journal entry wrong. Worse still, I felt then, was the betrayal of language in translation. Why didn’t English have a better word than “Word” if “Word” was not precise enough? I started to approach my Bible with suspicion. What else had I missed? 

Even though I felt ambushed, I did like the ambiguity that the revelation introduced into that verse. In the beginning there was an idea, a premise; there was a question. 

— 

My junior year of college, I went to a church service by myself. I wore a simple black dress and a big floppy hat with which I could easily hide my face, though a woman in a hat at a university church service was a strange enough sight that I probably drew more attention to myself, not less. I went to the very last pew, and I hadn’t but bent my knees to sit down before I felt sweat start to bead on my brow. The prodigal daughter returns.

The reverend that day was a woman, a professor in the Harvard Divinity School whose name I’ve forgotten now. She preached on literalism in the church and she began the sermon by asking the congregation to ponder this question: “If the Bible is the infallible word of God, must we approach it literally?” 

When I was a child, I would have said yes, emphatically and without a moment’s thought. What I loved best about the Bible, particularly the outlandish moments in the Old Testament, was that thinking about it literally made me feel the strangeness and dynamism of the world. I can’t tell you how much sleep I lost over Jonah and that whale. I used to pull my covers up all the way over my head and shimmy down into the dark, breath-damp cavern it created, and I would think of Jonah on that ship to Tarshish and I would think of the punitive, awful God who ordered him thrown overboard to be swallowed whole by a giant fish. And I would feel my breath shorten in that confined space and I would be amazed, truly amazed by God, by Jonah, by the whale. The fact that these sorts of things didn’t ever seem to happen in the present did nothing to keep me from believing that they happened in the age of the Bible, when everything was weighted with import. When you’re that young, time already seems to crawl. The distance between ages four and five is forever. The distance between the present and the biblical past is unfathomable. If time was real, then anything at all could be real too. 

The reverend’s sermon that day was beautiful. She approached the Bible with extraordinary acuity, and her interpretation of it was so humane, so thoughtful, that I became ashamed of the fact that I very rarely associated those two things with religion. My entire life would have been different if I’d grown up in this woman’s church instead of in a church that seemed to shun intellectualism as a trap of the secular world, designed to undermine one’s faith. Even Nana’s hypothetical question about villagers in Africa had been treated as a threat instead of as an opportunity. The P.T. who had revealed that in the beginning was the Logos, the idea, the question, was the same P.T. who had refused to think about whether or not those hypothetical villagers could be saved and in so doing refused the premise, the question itself. 

When Pastor John preached against the ways of the world, he was talking about drugs and alcohol and sex, yes, but he was also asking our church to protect itself against a kind of progressivism that for years now had been encroaching. I don’t mean progressive in a political sense, though that was certainly a part of it. I mean progress in the sense of the natural way in which learning something new requires getting rid of something old, like how discovering that the world is round means that you can no longer hang on to the idea that you might one day fall off the edge of the Earth. And now that you have learned that something you thought was true was never true at all, every idea that you hold firm comes into question. If the Earth is round, then is God real? Literalism is helpful in the fight against change. 

But while it was easy to be literal about some teachings of the Bible, it was much harder to be literal about others. How, for instance, could Pastor John preach literally about the sins of the flesh when his own daughter got pregnant at seventeen? It’s almost too cliché to be believable, but it happened. Mary, as she was ironically named, tried to hide her condition for months with baggy sweatshirts and fake colds, but it wasn’t long before the entire congregation caught on. And soon Pastor John’s sermons about the sins of the flesh took on a different weight. Instead of a punitive God, we were told of a forgiving God. Instead of a judgmental church, we were encouraged to be an open one. The Bible did not change, but the passages he chose did; the way that he preached did as well. By the time Mary’s due date rolled around, she and the baby’s father were married and all was forgiven, but I never forgot. We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do. 

— 

I became deeply interested in the idea of Logos after P.T.’s sermon. I started writing in my journal more often, but the nature of my entries changed. Whereas before, they were simply recordings of my day and the things I wanted God to do, after, they became lists of all the questions that I had, all the things that didn’t quite make sense to me. 

I also started paying more attention to my mother. When she spoke Fante on the phone with her friends, she became like a girl again, giggling and gossiping. When she spoke Twi to me, she was her mother-self, stern and scary, warm. In English, she was meek. She stumbled and was embarrassed, and so to hide it she demurred. Here’s a journal entry from around that time: 

Dear God, The Black Mamba took me and Buzz out to eat today. The waitress came over and asked what we wanted to drink and TBM said water, but the waitress couldn’t hear her and asked her to repeat herself but she didn’t and so Buzz answered for her. Maybe she thought the waitress didn’t understand her? But she was talking so quietly it was like she was talking to herself. 

There were other moments like this, where the woman whom I thought of in my head as fearsome shrank down to someone I could hardly recognize. And I don’t think she did this because she wanted to. I think, rather, that she just never figured out how to translate who she really was into this new language.

Note:

“The Black Mamba” or “TBM” and “Buzz” are code words she uses in her journal for her mother and brother. 

Meaning, Purpose, and Significance. Also Objective and Subjective Meaning

The following is an excerpt from the summary of The Great Courses "Big Questions of Philosophy," Lecture 36, by David K. Johnson.

Meaning, Purpose, and Significance

It is customary to believe that life is meaningful when it has a purpose.

Some think that God’s existence is necessary for life to be meaningful.

Our life can be meaningful only if God caused us to exist for a particular

purpose—because he had a specific plan.

The problem with this conception of meaning, however, is that having

a purpose is not the same as having meaning. What’s more, we cannot

say that whatever goal God has for us is, by definition, good. That

presents us with the same problem as in Plato’s Euthyphro: God would

choose such a goal because he recognizes it as good by some outside

standard. However, if there is a goal that is good by an outside standard,

then our life could be meaningful, regardless of whether God exists.

Some believe that the soul or afterlife makes our life significant, that

is, meaningful. Otherwise, we are but insignificant lumps of matter on

a speck of dust that will be obliterated by the sun in short order—if

we don’t obliterate ourselves first. An objection to this view is that it

doesn't seem that the soul is necessary for this kind of significance, nor

is an afterlife. What’s more, it’s not even clear that significance should

concern us at all.

Those who suggest that life is not meaningful are called nihilists. A

noted nihilist was French author Albert Camus. He agreed that God

was necessary for life to have meaning; only because God gives us an

essence, gives us function or purpose, does life even have a chance

at being meaningful. Because, as Camus suggested, God does not

exist—then life is meaningless.

For Camus, all one can do is realize that the game of life is

absurd and find joy in it anyway. Camus used the example of

the myth of Sisyphus—a man who was cursed by the gods to

endlessly roll a rock up a hill, only to have it always fall down

once he reached the top.

Camus argued that all that Sisyphus can do (and, indeed, what he

should do) is decide to “find meaning” in rock rolling and take joy

in it anyway, despite its absurdity.

Objective and Subjective Meaning

This brings us to the suggestion that life can have a subjective

meaning—a meaning that derives from our own purposes, plans,

attitudes, intentions, and mental states. One can have a meaningful life

by accomplishing goals, fulfilling desires, or attaining and promoting

virtues that one sees as worthwhile or significant.

For example, perhaps you think caring for others is important, and you

involve yourself in charities and organizations that do so. Perhaps you

value family and find meaning in raising your children. Perhaps there is

a political cause that you find worth pursuing and are engaged in that.

The idea is that we can have a meaningful life by accomplishing things

that we see as meaningful. It’s not an objective meaning, but it’s a

meaning all the same.