Choosing the Path of Loving Kindness
By Kate Kerry Spencer, author of Smoke: A Story of Love, Lies, and Cigarettes
Some moments in life shake you to your core and take your breath away. In these moments, the only way out is to find a path through. If you’re a hiker, then you know if you ever find yourself lost in the woods, you should almost always seek to take the path of least resistance to conserve energy and strength. This means stepping over, not up, walking around and not scaling whatever obstacles you encounter.
The same concept applies to the rough terrain of life’s most gut wrenching moments. In these moments, the path of least resistance, the one that will provide healing is often the path of forgiveness. I had such a moment recently.
I was sitting in my husband’s hospital room where he had spent many weeks undergoing tests to determine if he might qualify for a heart transplant. After 10 months of relentless medical crises including near-fatal pneumonia, heart and kidney failure, emergency spinal fusion and emergency ICD explant surgery, he was beyond lucky to have survived even into the possibility of a heart transplant. And now, he had passed all the tests to qualify for that surgery.
As soon as the transplant team knew for certain that my husband was a candidate, the orientation process began. Although it takes time to find a compatible donor heart, the transplant itself is a daunting enough experience to call for an orientation that starts early and is ongoing.
Our trainer, a bright, funny, fiercely dedicated woman spent the first hour talking us through what lay ahead. What we learned in that hour distilled down to these directives:
You will wait. One day, you will get the call. You will be no more than three hours away from the hospital. You will come to the hospital immediately, you will not stop to eat or drink anything. You will be prepared for surgery and in that preparation, you will be aware that if anything is wrong with the donor heart, the transplant will not happen. In that event, you will go home. You will wait for another call. It may come in weeks, or months, or years.
“But if all is well with everything, you will have the transplant,” the trainer said, in conclusion. "We will remove your heart and place the new one."
When she was finished, the trainer was quiet for a moment and then asked us if we had any questions or concerns.
My husband was mostly quiet, as he had read many of the materials several times. This was my first orientation, but I’d seen enough movies to have a sense of the urgency of getting to the hospital and being prepared. What I wasn’t prepared for in that moment—and what made me hold my breath against the oncoming flood of emotions—was the phrase . . .
“We will remove your heart and place the new one.”
The thing is, I’ve loved that old heart for years. It is the heart that helped my husband fly across the ice in hockey games, and that helped my husband encourage and support his father through decades of MS, and that survived over a dozen defibrillations in Tokyo when a frequent flyer blood clot stopped its beating. It is the heart that has beat in my husband’s chest from the moment of his conception and every day of his life since his birth. Imagining this heart being removed, wrapped in a bag, and disposed of as waste, was wrenching to me.
“I want his old heart,” I told the trainer. “It’s been a really good heart, it’s just tired. When you take his old heart out, can you give it to me to bury?”
She looked utterly startled for about 10 seconds and then looked me straight in the eyes, her own eyes at the borderline of tears.
“No one has ever asked me that question before,” she said. “By the time people get to transplant, they feel betrayed by their hearts and they want them out of their bodies as soon as possible.”
“Can you give me his heart?”
She took a deep breath and leaned in towards me.
“I will have to study that,” she said, in the way that kind people do to buy more time. But honestly, given her flexible, quick-fire brain and the level of genuine caring I had witnessed in her up to that point, I believed she would study my question even if she knew the probable answer from the start.
Make no mistake. I want that new heart for my husband. But in the indeterminate time that he waits for a healthy heart, I want him to forgive the one he came into the world with, both for its sake and for his own. The two are intrinsically bound together, one impacting the other second by second, physically and emotionally. The human heart is more than just an organ; it powers the forces that can change the world. One of those forces is forgiveness.
The trick to offering yourself forgiveness is to see yourself as you would see your child, or as the child you once were. Photos help, both the ones we have in our memories and the ones we keep in albums, or frames, or phones.
One of the best gifts I ever received is a photograph of my husband when he was a toddler. He is standing in the front yard of his childhood home holding a garden hose. My then soon-to-be mother in law gave me the photo. She also gave me the story that went with it, of how her son and his dad would play a game of hide and seek together with the hose, the son always looking for the water that was hiding somewhere deep within the hose, the father turning on the outside faucet just enough to make the little boy shriek with joy every time the water came out of hiding.
I loved that picture from the moment I saw it, loved the look on that boy’s face, and the stout, sturdy little chest and legs that stood so confidently in that black and white yard. I have looked at that photo in the changing light of years, sometimes deliberately when I was feeling tender, and sometimes inadvertently, when I was annoyed or angry with my husband and then, out of the corner of my eye, I’d see that boy and something would shift and soften in me, the change of heart that comes in the face of innocence. We were all children once, with new, willing hearts. No longer children, we can still rediscover that willingness to wonder, to love and to forgive.
So find that photo in your life. You know the one. And if you can’t find the photo, picture it in your mind, even if you are just now seeing it there for the first time. Then silently repeat this simple sentence, a tiny benediction, for your heart’s healing:
“May I forgive everyone, everything, beginning with myself.”
Saying this phrase doesn’t deny the pain of being hurt, betrayed or abandoned by someone or something you believed you could trust and depend on. Nor does it imply that we ourselves have not inflicted pain, deliberately or not, on others or ourselves. It simply acknowledges that at the heart of every wound and loss is a piece of us longing to be made whole. We can find that wholeness through forgiveness.
We can also find that wholeness through love. The conversation my husband and I had with the transplant trainer that night made me think of all the people in the world who have turned against their bodies, who actively hate a diseased organ, or a physical limitation, or even the shape of their nose or the drape of their skin.
There’s a noisy part of our culture that makes it easy for people to turn against themselves. That’s just one of the reasons I love this song by Alessia Cara, an anthem for the beauty in each of us.
About Kate
Kate Kerry Spencer is a Pacific Northwest writer, editor, and publisher. Learn more about her upcoming memoir, Smoke: A Story of Love, Lies and Cigarettes.
Smoke is the story of fatal consolations--tobacco, denial and deceit--and the second chances that can come to us in the most unlikely places. For this mother and daughter it was a rehab center where the two women wrestled with cigarettes, scrambled brains and each other--and in the process, found the long way back to love.