Dear Reader,
Well, I finally found time in between medical appointments to write answers to your questions. I am an advice columnist, after all!
Meanwhile, nothing new to report on the medical front. I'll keep you informed. -- ct
Dear Cary,
I would love to get some advice on dealing with anger when you can't address the person you are angry with directly.
I spent a few weeks with my sister and her family as well as my mother this past summer for a much-anticipated reunion of sorts. My sister moved to Singapore last year, I live in Germany, and meeting up on Cape Cod was something I really looked forward to. Particularly because I work long hours for the Army and most of my leave is spent flying home to visit my parents. My father has dementia and is in a nursing home. Travel has been exchanged for family priorities over the past few years and for the most part I'm fine with that.
Still, during the two weeks at the beach house, during which I had a great time with my little niece and nephew, I noticed that my sister and her husband were fighting a lot more than normal. There was so much tension between them that I finally asked my sister what the deal was.
Turns out he cheated on her with two different colleagues and both affairs occurred at the same time their children, now 4 and 1, were conceived.
I listened to her talk about how angry she was, and am the only person she has shared this with. She said she would never tell my brother-in-law that I knew.
So here's the deal. It's been two months and I am incredibly angry.
Part of that might be because I don't have the opportunity to say, Hey, pal, that thing you did? Not so great. Or just a simple "I know." Instead we're looking at years of family trips where I'm going to stifle my thoughts and feelings and just play nice. My brother-in-law is a very sensitive guy who always is emoting about everything. He is a highly educated (Ph.D.), ponytailed poet who is highly critical of others. His opinions about other family members' choices are always freely given, which is why I can foresee this being difficult. He doesn't deal with illness very well either, can hardly bring himself to visit my father, and I was already angry about that. Angry about a lot of things, actually, that I just have swallowed because I believe in the high road. Suffice it to say that I'm flabbergasted by how judgmental he is of others when all the while he was doing this.
But now ... I saw my sister's pain. I am worried about the future of my little niece and nephew. Trips planned to see them in Asia? I have lost interest now because I can't see myself not having "the talk" at some point.
I need advice. Assuming we're a family for life, I need to know how I can constructively deal with this. I can see myself at 90 finally telling someone and, yuck, I don't want to carry this. That sounds self-absorbed, I realize, and this isn't about me. But still ...
Angry
Dear Angry,
Forgiving him does not mean that you approve of what he did. It means that you unlock the boundless human compassion that lives within you. It means you come to see him as just one more imperfect human doing his best to get what he needs and find wholeness.
It means you let go of the urge to throw him out of a moving car.
Surely it would be gratifying to throw him out of a moving car. Feel free to meditate on that. It may have some brief therapeutic benefit. After all, you can tell yourself, it's not his body tumbling with sickening flips and thuds along the gravelly shoulder of a freeway at 70 miles per hour. It's the body of his tragic incompleteness. It's the body of our shared human flaws.
But going down that road is a lost cause. For as you meditate on this image, your boundless human compassion will kick in, you will empathize with that body being torn and broken by the impact of the highway, and you will have a millisecond of revulsion.
Then you'll feel all dirty inside. He's your sister's husband and the father of your niece and nephew, after all.
So. We all have such thoughts. We move beyond them. You have to find your way into a moment of forgiveness in which this resentment rises into the air and disappears. You have to experience this. It might happen in a conversation with your brother-in-law. That may or may not be the best course of action. (If you decide to do that, however, I caution you to talk it over with your sister first. She may be concerned about how he will react if he learns that she told you.) No matter what overt action you take, the letting go has to happen within you. And it won't come through understanding what happened. That's not how it works. We arrive at forgiveness through a somewhat mysterious process. We pray, we meditate, we play rugby about it. It can take years. One day it lifts. If we practice, we can shorten these intervals. We can inoculate ourselves against these things by remaining in a state of constant awareness of our own flawed nature. But it remains a mystery and comes upon us unexpectedly.
My recent cancer diagnosis caused me to let go of certain resentments. I was thrown into situations where my resentment lifted; I seized moments, too, under this pressure, to resolve certain long-standing issues.
You may be prevented from letting go of this because of unshakable moral conviction. Surely he violated his marriage vows. Surely his actions caused pain to others. But they flow from something we all share: our hunger and incompleteness, our tragic fragmentation of the spirit. If you can come to see that, then you can see these reprehensible acts as expressions of his flawed nature rather than as acts against your sister.
Without knowing exactly how this is going to play out, I suggest you treat it with seriousness and urgency. Seek fervently for release. Throw yourself into the effort. Face this with the desperation of a man who knows it's a life-or-death situation. You have already imagined what a shame that would be to carry this with you until you are 90. So begin now.
Start with what you know. Whatever you have done in the past to move on, to cleanse yourself of attachments and beliefs that no longer serve you, turn to that practice now. It may be religion or exercise, martial arts, philosophical meditation and thought, hiking, sailing, scuba diving, music.
Whatever practices you have, turn to them urgently, for resentment can be deadly. It can poison relationships, ruin families, catalyze addictive behaviors and deaden us to our own innocence. Throw yourself into this. Find its root in your own spirit and tear it out. Let it go. Let it rise into the air and disappear.
Somehow, eventually, you must forgive this man his weakness and move on.
Makes a great gift. Can be personalized for the giftee of your choice. Signed first editions on sale now.
What? You want more advice?
Dear Reader,
Nothing new on the medical front. Holding steady until surgery Dec. 17. I plan to write daily through the 15th. Then I'll be out of commission for a an unspecified number of days, and will get back to writing as soon as possible after the surgery. The logistics will take some figuring. Maybe I'll use the iPhone. And I'll let you know where I am in case you want to bring fruit.
Dear Cary,
I'm not the most articulate person but I read this column most days and today I want to throw a little problem of mine out there.
I have read questions of life and death and everything in-between here, but mine involves the use and abuse of my cellphone.
What troubles me is when people, well, almost always family, my three sisters in particular, call and do not leave a voice message but expect me to respond to a missed call.
My message says if you want a call-back please leave a message. Still, I have been chastised for not returning calls from a simply dialed-in number.
And I stand my ground. I use my phone for my business five days a week and get many calls and messages. I always return voice-mail messages and answer my phone most of the time. On my time off I don't carry it with me on walks, at movies, in the bathroom, while driving, whatever, but I check in for messages regularly and return calls when I can.
I have stated to them that it is not personal if I do not answer the phone when it rings but they don't seem to hear my side. Writing this, I realize that it is not my problem but the caller who won't leave a message and expects a quick call-back. But I have not found a peaceful solution or a way to not be defensive about this. Honestly, I realize that this is a small problem in the scheme of things but it is a recurring theme in my life and I am troubled by the negative input I get for it.
Is this a cellphone etiquette thing that I missed? I usually call my mom back in that circumstance because she is older and may need me in an emergency. Otherwise, is this an obligation I am missing?
Now that it's written, it does seem rather peevish and nothing funny about it but again, the little things can hold us back, dammit.
Thank you.
Please Leave a Message
Dear Please Leave a Message,
We're all busy constructing hoops for each other to jump through. We say, Here is the hoop you must jump through to reach me.
See how you have to scrunch down to get through it? It diminishes you, doesn't it? I stand on a chair with my whip and I observe you scrunching down to get through the hoop. Nice job. Now maybe I will call you back if I think it's important.
When your phone rings and it's your sister, do you say to yourself, "Well, she did not leave a message, so she must not want to talk to me"?
That must be why she called: because she does not want to talk to me.
That makes sense.
Or she must not want to talk to me strongly enough to follow my rule.
She must not want to jump through my hoop.
New rule: Everyone is holy and deserving of our love, even people who do not follow our cellphone-answering and callback rules.
It is a lot of work having all these rules. I ought to have a police force. Then if people leave the door open at the cafe, or people talk on their cellphone next to me in the wrong manner, my police would intervene.
They would have to intervene silently. I don't want to know about it. I don't want a scene.
On the other hand, I want certain people to know that they have been intervened with, that they were wrong about whatever it was.
I have rules for where to put the sponges in the kitchen sink. It's not enough to just have the sponges put where they belong. I want the misplacer of the sponges to hear about it. I want the satisfaction.
I would be a demanding emperor. It would suck up all my time.
I would get sick of all my rules and complain. I would blame other people for how much time running my empire is taking. Someone would say, but sir, these are all your rules.
That person would get thrown in the river.
People would form opinions. They would say, "ruthless dictator." "Petty tyrant."
They would get thrown in the river.
Soon the river would be clogged with bodies and I'd ask, Who clogged the river with bodies? Someone would answer, But you did, your highness!
That person would be thrown into the river.
This would not end well.
So I abdicate. I step down from the throne. I celebrate the holiness of every individual, even the one who takes calls "during a religious service."
Look closely at the caption of the "photo" (that's a cheesy stock image, no?) for the Reuters story by Patricia Reaney quoted above and you will see that someone doesn't know an etiquette lapse from a pair of tight pants.
For a long time I was a copy editor. I worked for King Kaufman. We had rules. You had to follow them. That was heaven. We made sure you knew the difference between etiquette lapses and tight pants.
However, giving me the power to make rules about usage was a little like giving bourbon to an alcoholic.
It's just the rule thing. I have too many.
I have rules for the stars. I have rules for the sun, how bright it should be, where the clouds should be placed.
I have rules for how you should walk down the street. I see some people and I think they're walking all wrong. They're too close to the edge of the sidewalk or they're waiting for the bus in the wrong spot or they're leaning out too far into traffic when I'm driving by, or they are not watching carefully walking down the street because they're on their iPhone. I have rules about when you are allowed to talk on your phone in my presence, and if you don't follow my rules then a little alarm bell goes off inside me and you have been marked. You have been downgraded. I put a little mark on you in my head. So now my head is full of people who have been marked.
It is my spiritual quest to stop making up rules for people. It is my spiritual quest to try to see everyone as holy. The driver in front of me who does not go when the light turns green does not seem to be holy. She seems to be an obstacle. But people are not obstacles. We make them into objects when we are living in our little control booth but people are full of light and joy. If some small elderly person of surprising agility steps in front of me on the bus, it is not very spiritual of me to elbow an old lady in the neck just because she cut in front in the bus line. She has been shopping in the open air market and she has many bags. It is ingenious how she has all the bags tied together so she can carry them in one hand and elbow people out of the way with the other.
The old lady who cuts in front of me in the bus line is holy. She is a creature of light. But she does not seem that way. I could knock her over with my elbow (I could do this rather unobtrusively, I think) but then I would not seem holy. I would not be following my new rule: Do not elbow the old ladies out of the way on the bus.
So I know what you mean about people not obeying our rules. We don't even follow our own rules ourselves. Our rules get us into trouble. They lead us into contradiction. They arise from illusion.
If we have rules for people, then what we are saying is that they must obey. But who is the emperor?
A child puts on a crown and pretends to be the emperor. You! To the guardhouse! You! Bend before me. Bring me jelly beans. Bring me my Xbox. Bring me tribute from the Apple Store.
Right now, as I get ready for surgery on Dec. 17, I am preparing to be both an emperor and a child. I will be in the hands of a team of skilled surgeons who will slice into my body with sharp tools and remove things. I will be hooked up to machines that listen to me, machines that hear things in me that I cannot even hear. I will be helpless. At the same time, I will be like an emperor. People will attend to my every need. They will come and check on me. I will be like a child emperor, powerless but doted upon. Bring me that. Raise my pillow. Raise my bed.
So will I act imperiously? Will I say to the surgeon who wants to save my life, "You'd better leave a message or I won't call you back!"? Ha! World-renown surgeon, I say: You'd better follow my rules or you're out!
Ha ha.
Get my drift?
Everyone is holy. The knives are holy. The tumor is holy. We are all bathed in unearthly light.
Leave me a message. I'll call you back.
Makes a great gift. Can be personalized for the giftee of your choice. Signed first editions on sale now.
What? You want more advice?
Dear Reader,
Another CT scan today, at the UCSF radiology lab at Mission Bay in the old China Basin building, followed by the strict admonition to avoid caffeine, which has placed a gummy caffeine-withdrawal membrane over the visible world, and made thoughts extremely hard to come by.
While lying supine on the CT machine slab that cranked my carcass back and forth inside the doughnut, my only thought of any dimension at all was that inside that booth where they were watching the images of my insides, looks of horror crossed their faces: "What in God's name is that?! one said. "What is that?"
Some primordial thing living on my thigh bone perhaps, munching contentedly on my sartorius muscle, idly snapping my adductor longus, planting a garden, growing snap peas and turnips. Or my long-lost car keys, that leather wallet not seen for years: There it is! Thank God for modern medical imaging!
That's the state you get in.
Nothing much more than that. Nothing but my ardent complaint that all this medical business and the attendant life issues, i.e., getting my stuff in order so I can languish in the hospital for four weeks or more without sinking the ship of state is seriously cutting into the writing time.
Plus: Strangely enervating, all this sitting in medical offices and getting stuck with needles.
But that's the job. Nothing to do but roll with it. It could be curiously liberating if seen in the right light.
Just where is that right light? Could you shine it just a little this way please?
Ah. Better. Life. Another day. Not bad.
Makes a great gift. Can be personalized for the giftee of your choice. Signed first editions on sale now.
What? You want more advice?
Dear Reader,
You get cancer, you make changes. I switched to green tea.
I switched to green tea and my elbow stopped hurting. It's like cancer cured my elbow.
I try to be witty and breezy and it falls flat like we are in church. We are in church, in a way. Church of the no-bullshit life-or-death situation.
So I'll say this: My heart goes out to all my fellow patients now, as I can see how this stuff can mess with a person.
We walk around without a care in the world and then all of a sudden we've got appointments. Like all of a sudden you're a receptionist taking calls for the disease. The disease is running things; we're just its minions.
But we are creeping up on it too, creeping up on it with a big hammer and tongs, about to deliver a crushing blow.
The pain in my sacrum is like a dull-witted, half-drunk person knocking me with his backpack while we stand in line for the men's room. It is thick and persistent like a salesman trying to sell me something I never heard of. It is idiotic and unrelenting.
But it is not sharp or tormenting.
People say they are sorry I am sick but I am not sick like with the flu. It is more like being forced to wear a belt that has a lump in it. That is what it is like. It is like a lump pressing against me all the time. It is annoying and one wants to get rid of it but there's no drama. So far there are only appointments -- endless appointments.
I have arranged my life to avoid interruptions. I seclude. I announce I'm going into the box and then I'm gone. But now I have to take calls from doctors' offices. It throws me off. It took me all day to get to this point and now again I'm past deadline.
Plus they switched colorectal surgeons on us. I never met the first colorectal surgeon but I was getting used to her name. Now we have to get used to somebody else we've never met.
No complaints. We'll do this thing. They'll take out the lump and sew me up and I'll do rehab and try to charm the nurses.
Piece of cake.
p.s. Tomorrow I'll try really hard to actually answer a letter. But the calls! The constant phone calls!
Makes a great gift. Can be personalized for the giftee of your choice. Signed first editions on sale now.
What? You want more advice?
Dear Reader,
An hour before deadline I am lying prone on the floor of my office listening to Béla Bartók's Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 Op. 21, played by David Oistrakh on violin and Frida Bauer on piano. I am not making much headway. I am rehearsing. I must rehearse both prone and supine. Read on.
It is sometimes like this. You will forgive me, I hope, for not being more effervescent this afternoon. I just received news that surgery for my sacral chordoma (which, as the linked article makes clear, is not something to be sat on, ha ha ha) -- is scheduled for Wed., Dec. 16, after which I will remain hospitalized for four to six weeks, meaning it will be Wed., Jan. 13 of next year soonest, before I am out among the ambulatory. Then recovery continues with rehab for perhaps two to three months.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah and Happy New Year!
I am chuckling as I say this. I have a dark sense of humor and a remarkably resilient optimism. I am ready. Of course, that is easy to say now. The hard part starts in two weeks.
Yesterday evening in a surgeon's office we received the full and rather mind-blowing scope of the performance. That's all I seem capable of saying for now: It's a triple-header, a true extra-innings affair of some 16 hours' duration.
After taking a couple of days to digest the anatomical facts of the matter, I will offer them to you, with the proviso that they are not for the squeamish. As my wife joked on the sidewalk after our consultation, "They really are, literally, going to rip you a new one."
The above seems essentially correct. So you will please excuse my brevity as we move from the psychological matters about which I seem to have relative fluency and ease of communication, to the anatomical, about which I seem to be, for the moment, rather tongue-tied.
Surely words will come eventually.
Meanwhile, please accept this brief update on my unenviable position.
p.s. I still think that "Chordoma" sounds like a 1970s Chrysler two-door convertible.
Makes a great gift. Can be personalized for the giftee of your choice. Signed first editions on sale now.
What? You want more advice?
Dear Reader,
Nothing new to report on the cancer today. I am feeling fine and we are still talking with doctors to determine the best plan for treatment. I remain optimistic that this chordoma can be removed safely and that a full recovery is possible. There are risks, of course, but until shown otherwise, I am planning to be just fine.
Again, your letters of encouragement and support have been priceless to me. I will keep you informed.
Dear Cary,
My partner and I have been together for many years and recently became engaged. Although we've always been serious and for years planned on spending our lives together, my doubts about wanting to make a life together have been steadily increasing. This has nothing to do with a lack of love or passion, both of which are abundant in our relationship, but a total difference in lifestyles.
We met in college at the height of drunkenness and irresponsibility and managed to create a meaningful relationship nonetheless. Since then, we've had a difficult time finding common interests. I like to run, hike, ski, read, write, etc. He likes to drink, hang out in bars (one in particular), and, well, drink.
It's not that he's ever mean or untrustworthy, and in fact is everyone's favorite happy-go-lucky and, yes, inebriated guy, but my increasing pleas to cut the crap and grow up have fallen on drunken ears. My tantrums have turned into a feeling of hopelessness and anger. I go into states of complete rage and have even acted violently toward him lately when he comes home slurring his words. I've threatened with everything I can think of and get almost no reaction. At times he promises to change and says he's trying, but each time he comes home with beer on his breath I feel so hurt and angry.
I love him deeply and feel unwilling to live my life without him, but I really don't know how this can go on. We still have good times in between all the fighting, but it seems fewer and far between. I feel so frustrated that I've been asking him to change his behaviors for many years and things have only gotten worse. On the other hand, I've gotten worse too and I fear my abusive behavior continues to drive him further over the edge.
Recently, I've taken a vow to myself that I won't react in that negative way anymore, that the drinking problem is his and if I'm upset I need to remove myself from the situation in a positive way and let him deal with his problems. Clearly, no amount of yelling, berating or violent shoving fazes him or helps the situation. The other day, he took the day off from work to do schoolwork (we both work full-time and are both in grad school full-time). When I arrived home at 5 on a Monday, he was falling down drunk. I was so furious, but I had taken my vow, so I told him I was angry, but couldn't be around him and asked him to please find someplace else to sober up and spend the night. I also asked him to give me space to think for a few days and that he couldn't stay here for the next few days. Obviously this all sounds really bad, I know. But I'm wondering, is it even possible that this relationship could be saved or should we cut our losses and try to heal ourselves alone?
Drinker's Partner
Dear Drinker's Partner,
To be honest, what you call a difference in lifestyles is the fact that he drinks alcoholically and you do not. Alcoholism is not a lifestyle. It is a disease. It is something he is in the grip of. He needs help. But only he can decide to get the help he needs. That is the sad truth of it.
Alcoholics and non-alcoholics can live together but only if the alcoholic quits drinking and gets treatment. If he continues to drink, it's going to get worse and worse and it's not going to end well. So you were wise to suggest he leave.
He's going to have to stop drinking.
Until he does, things will keep getting worse.
Therefore, I would put all marriage plans on hold until your partner has entered some kind of program, is doing the program regularly, and has been free of alcohol for at least one year.
I wonder how these words affect you. Though your first reaction may be shock, it is often a relief to hear the truth: Your partner is an alcoholic. Now you can take steps to deal with this reality. You can begin living according to this new truth.
Al-Anon is a support group for friends, family and loved ones of alcoholics. As it is a relief to hear the truth from me, it is also a relief to hear from others who have been through the same thing you have been through. I suggest you attend a few meetings of Al-Anon and see what you can glean from the proceedings. You need not declare yourself. You can just go and listen and see if what you hear makes sense to you. Right now you may feel like the only person you know in a situation like this. If you go to an Al-Anon meeting you will hear stories similar to yours, you will meet people similar to you, and will see that your partner's pattern of behavior, though seemingly unique, is actually familiar and predictable.
I note that you are in graduate school and also working full-time. That is a big load. Clearly you do not have the time you need to deal with the emotional issues in front of you. You must find a way to carve out some time for taking care of yourself. Having your partner out of your house will give you some time to be alone. That will help. But it will probably not be enough. You may need to ease off on the workload, by working fewer hours and/or by taking a lighter class load for a semester or two.
The reason you need the time is that you now have a project before you that involves working to acquire knowledge but does not involve thinking as much as feeling. It is analogous to intellectual work, in that you set out to acquire knowledge, process that knowledge and produce something with it. But the knowledge you acquire in this situation comes from within; it is emotional knowledge, knowledge about yourself. It is just as important as knowledge gained from books and lectures but it is slower and more slippery to acquire. It is also harder to articulate. It is transformational in nature; that is, by acquiring it, you cause changes in yourself. These changes are gradual. They occur like changes in the natural world -- quietly, gracefully. They cannot be hurried any more than a tree or flower can be hurried. It's a different paradigm. It requires, I suppose, a degree of trust: You are heading for a new kind of understanding, and you must trust that circumstances have brought you to this and that you will be OK as you go through it.
I do feel I can say this with confidence: You will be OK. You are not the alcoholic. You may have other personality characteristics you were unaware of that led you to become involved with an alcoholic. But your problems are not his.
I urge you to take this knowledge in. Accept the fact that you are at a turning point. Accept the fact that the coming phase will involve learning that is not intellectual but that still demands as much of you as any seminar.
Urge your partner to get help but do not make any deals with him. Urge him to get help and then back off and watch what he does. If he gets help he may live a long and happy life, and he may return to you. Or he may not. It is impossible to know.
You have reached a turning point. You are facing the truth. No matter what happens, you can hardly go wrong from here.
What? You want more advice?
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