How To Be Here

What new and good thing is going to come out of even this?

When you ask this question, you have taken something that was out of your control and reframed it as another opportunity to take part in the ongoing creation of the world.

Death. Disease. Disaster. Whatever it is, you will have to grieve it. And maybe be angry about it. Or be in shock. Or shake your fists at the heavens for the injustice of it.

That’s normal and healthy and often needed.

But then, as you move through it, as time does its healing work, you begin to look for how even this has potential. Even this is a blinking line.

Breath (#ulink_cdfdf7df-27ef-53b6-bc1f-6a320f1be44c)

I once watched a doctor hold my newborn son upside down by the ankles and give him a shake.

I was shocked.

What? You can do that to a baby?

Because up until that moment I was under the impression that babies were incredibly fragile, like a high-grade combination of porcelain and glass. But the doctor handled him when he first entered the world like he was made of rubber. He did this, I quickly learned, for a very specific reason: He was trying to help my son take his first breath. Because if you don’t take a breath in those first few seconds when you arrive, you have a very serious problem.

And so my boy in all his shiny pink glory hung there, upside down, with strange liquids exiting his various orifices, and then he coughed and gasped and took his first breath.

Remembering that day takes me to another day, this one a decade later. It was a Friday night, August 22, 2008, and my family and I were visiting my grandma Eileen. My grandma and I had been great friends since I was young. When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, she and I had lunch together every Friday for a decade. We, as they say, rolled deep.

But when we went to visit her that evening in August, everything was different. She was in her mid-eighties and her health had been declining over the past year and she’d been moved to a different part of the nursing home where she lived. We knew we were getting close to the end, but I still wasn’t expecting what we experienced when we entered her room. She was lying in bed, her eyes closed, taking long, slow breaths, but something about her was absent.

It was like she was in the room, but not in the room. Here, but already gone.

If you’ve ever been in the room with someone who is dying, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s a physical body right there in front of you, but something’s missing. Spirit, soul, presence, essence—whatever words you use for it, there’s a startling vacancy you feel in being with someone you’ve been with so many times before and yet that person isn’t there anymore.

I froze in the doorway, watching her lying on the bed, as it began to sink in that she was at the end of her life. You know someone is going to die because you know we’re all going to die—you know it in your brain. But then there’s a moment when that truth drops from your brain to your heart, like an elevator in free fall, and lands with a thud.

My wife Kristen, however, walked right over to the bed, sat down next to Grandma, took Grandma’s hands in her own, and leaned in over her heart and began to speak to her:

Grandma, we’re here with you now. We see that you’re going to be leaving us soon. We love you and we have loved being with you all these years and now we’re letting you go …

It was so moving.

We spent a few hours with Grandma that evening, and then we left and within a few hours she died.

There is a moment when you arrive and you take your first breath, and then there is a moment when you take your last breath and you leave.

For thousands of years humans have been aware that our lives intimately and ultimately depend on our breath, which is a physical reflection of a deeper, unseen reality. It isn’t just breath we’re each given—it’s life itself.

Before anything else can be said about you, you have received a gift. God / the universe / ultimate reality / being itself—whatever word you want to use for source—has given you life.

Are you breathing?

Are you here?

Did you just take a breath?

Are you about to take another?

Do you have a habit of regularly doing this?

Gift.

Gift.

Gift.

Whatever else has happened in your life—failure, pain, heartache, abuse, loss—the first thing that can be said about you is that you have received a gift.

Often you’ll meet people who have long lists of ways they’ve been slighted, reasons the universe has been unfair to them, times they got the short end of the stick or were dealt a bad hand of cards.

While we grieve and feel and lament and express whatever it is that is brewing within us, a truth courses through the veins of all our bumps and bruises, and it is this: We have received.

You’re here,

you’re breathing,

and you have received a gift,

a generous, extraordinary, mysterious, inexplicable gift.

Alert and Awake (#ulink_77285b42-0a4d-54f5-8209-1c7d2ff87cc1)

I once visited a man named John who was dying of cancer. I’d never met him before, but a mutual friend had asked me to see him at his house. He was lying in a hospital bed in his living room when I came in, his body frail and ravaged. And yet his eyes were clear and full of shimmering life. After we shook hands and I sat down, he told me,

People just don’t get it

as he smiled and then repeated,

People just don’t get it.

He said that phrase over and over and over again for the next hour, in between bursts of conversation. When I asked him what he meant by it, he said that people don’t understand how precious and incredible life is. He said he hadn’t understood this truth until he knew that it was being taken from him.

Because that’s how it works, doesn’t it?

Suffering and loss have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that life is.

You’re driving down the road arguing with someone you love about something stupid when a car almost runs you off the road—and suddenly your hearts are pounding as you turn to each other and say, That was close! And you aren’t arguing anymore.

You’re frustrated with your kid and then you hear about someone else’s kid being in the hospital, and when you get home you hold your kid extra close.

You go to a funeral and you sit there grieving the death of this person you loved but when you leave you realize that mixed in with your sadness is a strange sort of energy that comes from a renewed awareness that you’re here and this is your life and it’s good and it’s a sacred gift.

Why do we react in these ways? Because deep down we know that all we have is a gift.