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An alternative perspective always exists alongside our pain.

Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, A Death in Venice , warns us: "He who has looked upon beauty is already marked out for death." A bit of exaggeration, perhaps, but the idea just might hold some truth for men and women who set their sights on loftier things than the rest of us. Last week I attended the moving memorial service in Baltimore for one of my school chums, Matthew Daniel. We had studied together for the Catholic priesthood, but both of us changed course – I after six years in the seminary, he just weeks away from final ordination. Like many men with advanced degrees in philosophy and theology, his learning wasn’t easy to apply to the secular marketplace, and he therefore gravitated to teaching. He did it well, of course. One of his students said of him: He understood the life of a cadet at Charlotte Hall Military Academy. I learned more in his English class than any other due to his teaching ability . . . a gentleman and true scholar. Mathew Daniel also did some writing. One of his short stories was read at the memorial service, a narrative that demonstrated both his sense of humor and his spirituality. An accomplished violinist, Mathew Daniel was also sensitive enough and caring enough to once lie on the floor next to his pet cat to sooth it as it breathed its last. I was prompted to write about my friend because this Wednesday marks the death in Baltimore of another man whose gaze was set on the transcendent, Edgar Allan Poe. He died on October 7, 1849, at the age of 40. You know Poe well. He’s one of the most famous figures in American literature, celebrated for pioneering poetry like "The Raven" and a raft of macabre short stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” I’m writing about these two men not only because they both died in Baltimore, but also because they both shared a singular vision that set them apart. That vision was given voice in a poem by Poe titled “Alone.” From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw— At Mathew Daniel’s memorial service, a version of the Lord’s Prayer was prayed that comes to us from the liturgy of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia. I offer it here, in memory of two men who saw life not as others saw: Eternal Spirit, Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver, Source of all that is and that shall be, Father and Mother of us all, Loving God, in whom is heaven: The hallowing of your name echo through the universe! The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world! Your heavenly will be done by all created beings! Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth. With the bread we need for today, feed us. In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us. In times of temptation and test, strengthen us. From trials too great to endure, spare us. From the grip of all that is evil, free us. For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and forever. Amen.

It began way back when we were kids: “I’m not going to be your friend anymore.” We’ve all been there, that first bone-bruising experience of exclusion. It seems to be rampant among romantic relationships today, based on the premise: "When you don't fill my needs any longer, I will dump you." This anticipation is often back-of-mind these days even as young people proclaim vows before a gathering of encouraging witnesses. When we see others only through the filter of our own needs, complex human beings become commodities. This form of self-love has been called “Fish Love.” Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski tells this story: “I asked a young man why he's eating fish. The man says, ‘Because I love fish.’ “I replied: ‘You don't love the fish — you love yourself, and because the fish tastes good to you, you took it out of the water, killed it, and ate it.’” Fish Love" isn't really love at all — it's self-love lurking behind a mask. You're not loving the other for their own sake; you're loving what they do for you. Think of the man or woman who marries because “I don’t want to get old and die alone.” This can describe the way many of us approach love, whether we’re aware of it or not. Because our affection is typically reimbursed by sensory reciprocity. When we’re with someone we’re attracted to, our acts of love – spoken or physical – generate feedback. They speak words of affection to us, perhaps. Their eyes light up. They smile. There is kissing, and kissing back. A lot of what feels like "loving” them is actually the reward of the communications feedback loop: being received, being responded to. Call it love if you want to, but love validated by sensory reciprocity. Death does away with the feedback loop. The voice doesn't answer. The face doesn't react. What's left is whatever didn't rely on reciprocity. Some people discover there was very little left. The relationship was mostly transactional – the Fish Love analogy. But many people come to know the opposite: the love is still there, even stronger than before, because it's no longer looking for a reward. It stands alone, undiluted. This is a true love bond that continues and often deepens. Research has shown this to happen. People don't "get over" the departed one – they shift the relationship to internal manifestation versus sensory — a sense of the person's continued presence. What does this tell us? The truest love doesn't need the body. It can be the very thing that shows what love actually is. Rabbi Twerski went on to note that people mistakenly think we give to those we love, when really it's this: we come to love those to whom we give. Real love is generated by giving, not by receiving. Where have we heard this before?

This past week, I commemorated my two dads: the yahrzeit of my biological father on Tuesday and on Thursday the birth date of my father-in-law, who saw me as a son. I say “two dads” because my birth father, Peter Yaremko, died the year after I married. My second dad, Joe Caruso, stepped in to take his place in my life. Like Dickens’ famous opening line describing “the best of times and the worst of times,” my two dads were as strikingly similar as they were resoundingly dissimilar. Each had limited education, because as young men they were required to bring an additional salary into their families. Each was good with his hands, familiar with what went on under the hood of a car, and accustomed to moonlighting for extra money. My father was a cop – physically imposing around lawbreakers and comfortable patrolling city streets at night. My father-in-law, an office worker, weighed in at 135 pounds and once cracked a bone in his arm attempting to throw a softball. To supplement his policeman’s pay, my father would take day jobs as an ironworker, raising buildings. To supplement his clerk’s pay, my father-in-law sang and played keyboards with a weekend band – The Top Hatters – at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and senior centers. My father brought his crude street ballet home with him. In his house, distrust of the larger world outside was a persistent odor, with the tools of conflict commonplace: guns, handcuffs, batons and badges and brass-buttoned uniforms. My father-in-law’s living room, on the other hand, was dominated by a baby grand, sheet music, and a shelf of vinyls. His closet held tuxedos and top hats, the tools of his weekend trade. When I was recruited by IBM, a mentor gave me this advice: "You will work for good managers and bad managers. Learn from both – the good and the bad – and you will be a great manager." Looking back, I realize how singularly fortunate I was to experience fatherhood in stereo. Most guys get a single blueprint for what a man, a husband, a father is supposed to be. I was given two – entirely mismatched, yet somehow painting the same portrait. One of the few compliments my father had for me came when he read my first by-lined newspaper story: “At least you can write.” But it was my father-in-law who moved me to write this poem: A Good Joe Because every day he gave a quarter or whatever jingly change from his jacket pocket to the homeless men between his office and car, they learned his name was Joe. Don’t call them bums, he’d correct his pals from the office. They’re not bums, just down on their luck. The men smiled and called on the God of them all to bless him and his. If you visit that black asphalt alley where the men congregated between hours of panhandling, you won’t see them anymore, Joe and the men he was kind to. They’re all dead and gone now. But something lingers after all the windblown decades. If affection has an aroma, it’s here, reminiscent of men down on their luck and a hapless man himself just getting by as best he could. A poem for my father? I can’t write to a prompt. (Image by Chris Edwards & Nathan Rush)

She was the only woman I know who dressed in drag.

The programs in which I teach people how to write poetry to ease emotional trauma all seem to share something in common. When the participants write their own poem, they often confess a deep and lasting sadness: about being betrayed, about suffering childhood abuse, about spousal disrespect. They seem to be mourners, muddling through life the best they can. But not very happy about it. In one of the weekend retreats I guide, a woman returned from a writing period excited to share the poem she had drafted. She read to the circle of twenty other participants a moving poem about how her husband of thirty-two years had betrayed her. You could have heard a pin drop in the room until another woman’s hand shot up and she exclaimed, “I could have written that.” And then a second woman raised her hand and said, “I could have written that.” Their’s is a kind of bereavement that isn't recognized or acknowledged as grief by the victim or by our society as a whole. Have you ever, for example, sent a sympathy card to a friend who’s in a marriage where she isn’t respected, or to a friend who’s been deprived of a happy childhood because of abuse? Likely not, because these emotional traumas aren’t considered a loss to be grieved – as a death is. Instead, such a loss is treated as – for all intents and purposes – insignificant. At most, we express sympathy and urge the victim to move on. This leaves the victim isolated and doubting the legitimacy of their own pain. As author Freya Bromley writes, “I don’t believe there is such a thing as moving on. We only move through and carry it with us.” I agree. The truth is, when a loved one dies, when a spouse betrays, when a family member refuses to have anything to do with us, we are forever changed. Nora Ephron , who wrote " Sleepless in Seattle" and "When Harry Met Sally," writes this in her book, Heartburn , about her husband’s adultery: “A whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. It becomes impossible to look back at anything that’s happened without wondering what was really going on.” Most people have never considered the emotional trauma they're carrying as grief. But they are, in fact, mourners. Simply naming such an experience as grief is itself an intervention that can deliver emotional or psychological relief. Betrayal by someone we trusted most, suffering the traumatic memories of childhood abuse, unceasing spousal disrespect – they put us in a state of bereavement over the loss of our wholeness as a human being worthy of respect. The word "bereavement" comes from Old English, which translates to being “robbed or violently stripped of something valuable." The word captures the abrupt and unwanted nature of grief, reflecting how a significant loss can feel like a sudden denial of a foundational part of our life. Torn apart. Simply hearing this language can go a long way toward reducing the self-blame these mourners often attach to their feeling. As Henri Nouwen told us in his 1972 book, The Wounded Healer , healing our emotional wounds doesn't demand we share dramatic personal pain. But we should be willing to see our suffering as percolating up from the depth of the human condition that all people share. (Photo by Alina Chernovolova)

There is a certain consolation to being a person of faith. Such people live in the certainty – or at least the hope – that they are created and sustained by a greater power. I count myself among them. So my question is, why do we strive so heartily for mere material things? One famous modern mystic wrote this: "There is nothing further to look for except the deepening of this life we already possess. Be content. Be content.” This is ancient wisdom. And a wisdom not necessarily the exclusive domain of the religiously minded. Roman philosopher Seneca wrote: "It is not the one who has too little, but the one who craves more that is poor." And Saint Paul notes in his letter to the early church at Philippi: “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, to be content." There is science behind the mysticism. One study linked high religiosity or spirituality with greater life satisfaction, meaning, and psychological well-being, and lower depression and fear of death. Another study essentially said if you're secure in being "created and sustained by the divine," you need less “stuff” to steady you against death. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not preaching passivity. “Contentment acts. Complacency watches,” author Carla Gasser tells us. “Contentment chooses. Complacency ignores." Like so many other facets of our day-to-day actions, contentment itself is a choice. It’s basically a matter of accepting the reality of situations we cannot change – without complaint or resentment. This is what Seneca was driving at: that wealth is never the measure — the craving is. Contentment isn't the absence of want; it's no longer being ruled by it. And Paul? He “learned” it. Contentment isn't a state of sloth. It's a skill acquired through hardship (he'd just spoken of his hunger, need, and abasement). This is about as far from lackadaisical as we can get. Paul explained how he learned to be content when he wrote his letter to the church at Corinth. In answer to his prayer for relief from the "thorn" that was tormenting him, Paul heard the divine reply: “My grace is sufficient for you.” Seneca also fleshed out his aphorism in a way that would probably not sit too well with today’s billionaire class: "Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and second, to have what is enough." Let me resolve my own opening question of why we strive so heartily for mere material things by quoting C.S. Lewis: “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither."

The Ancient Remedy for Today’s Emotional Trauma

I used to think these words chiseled into the Temple of Apollo in ancient Delphi are simplistic. Of course I know myself. I’ve been living with me my whole life. But it’s made me ask myself: do I believe in an image of myself that I’ve unconsciously created in the minds of others out of fear of rejection? And if I let go of this image, who’s left? I was shaped by others. All of us are. My father, who never thought enough of me to make me an intimate part of his life, was one. My Catholic upbringing and its traditions ground the lens of my worldview. A career in the corporate world broke my free-wheeling creativity the way you do a bucking young stallion. Today I’m still clay in the hands of movies, op-ed pieces, social media influencers, advertisers, chance comments by people whose approval I crave. So who am I? That’s the bad news. The good news is that I’m not alone in this quandary. Discovering you’re a stranger to your "real self" has been a persistent theme in literature, philosophy, and spirituality. Monk and mystic Thomas Merton packed his journals with his struggle to free himself of social masks, ego, self-doubt – even as he passed his days enveloped in the silence and solitude of the cloister. Long before Merton, Augustine of Hippo was a pioneer of the introspective autobiography. We can say his entire spiritual journey was a search for his true identity in relation to the transcendent. Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish writer who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943, wrote in her diary: "The ultimate and highest aspiration is to strip oneself of everything petty and superficial and to become a completely transparent instrument." Carl Jung made the "real self" his life's work – to integrate the hidden parts of the psyche and discover his true self rather than the persona society invited. Søren Kierkegaard argued that most people live in a state of despair. They either refuse to be themselves, with all their inborn motives, vanities, and wants, or actively try to be someone else. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised us to “live the questions” instead of the packaged answers, trusting that the authentic self will emerge. Thoreau's little adventure at Walden Pond cut away cultural clutter to find the essential, aiming to meet his soul face-to-face without the interference of societal convention. Shall I go on? It’s a comfort to know I am not alone in this journey to the self. But it’s also daunting to realize the painful work ahead that awaits me. Now I know how Frodo felt taking his first, Hobbit-sized step toward the vast, dark realm of Mordor.