Listening

I am a quiet person. In fact, just yesterday a friend told me that I am the quietest person she knows. I’m not shy or nervous. I can talk in front of large crowds without sweating and love to chat with people who will listen. But right there, that is the problem. When life gets hard, no one listens.

 I have become quieter as I’ve grown older. As a sassy teenager, I learned to keep my mouth shut or dad might be in just the wrong mood and shut it for me, as he did to my mother. I became bulimic. It was only the first life-changing illness that I have experienced and recovered from but it set the tone for the secrecy required to maintain a stoic reputation in the face of adversity. The mouth shutting, the silencing of what is too hard for others to hear.

I married a wonderful man. He contracted Gillaume-Barre Syndrome while we were travelling in Europe. There were no support groups and when the novelty of his illness wore off, even family members went back to their lives leaving us alone to recover together. But we couldn’t recover together, we fell apart and divorced, each leaving a few key pieces of ourselves with the other. I tried to talk about it but no one wanted to hear. I buried my grief, burned a bonfire in silence and moved on. I had to re-learn how to live. 

 But the real silence didn’t hit me until I head these words: “You have cancer. Sorry, it’s not the good kind.”

 Really? There’s a good kind? I thought. I just said, “fine, whatever it takes, I’ll do it.” By then I had learned that once the glory of the illness has passed, no one wants to hear about it and I withdrew even farther. But to my surprise, in the stillness I learned to listen. It started by listening to my friend Jen, who also had breast cancer, as she talked her way through a losing battle. My own bald head started to grow hair as she crept toward her passing. When she couldn’t speak any longer, I listened with my heart to her profound message of acceptance. Acceptance of what is, for both of us. 

Today I find myself listening to my mother as she breaths deeply again after battling the virus, I hear her breath instead of her needy words. I am grateful for her breath and my heart lets go of the mother she isn’t. At work, when I sit on a cool tile bathroom floor of the assisted living memory unit, waiting for an 92yo woman to allow me to take her soiled adult briefs off and clean her, I am surrounded by the silence of patience. I listen to her eyes. Her look slowly...slowly turns from aggressive suspicion to trust, even though she doesn’t remember me. 

My friend Kip told me recently that he thought my longest relationship with emotion is centered around trauma. I wrote it down and think about what that means almost every day. 

 This is why I am here; this is why I need to write. Because talk is cheap but words are powerful and I need someone to listen to me in the way I have been learning to listen. I have experienced so many difficult things in my life and it seems almost unbelievable when I make a list. 

Thank you for listening. I look forward to listening to you too.