I was speaking with a friend whose husband died of a protracted illness during which she was the sole caretaker. She had retired from her job in order to care for and be with him, and though they never gave up hope that he could live for many more years, he died 18 months ago, and she misses him terribly.
At one point in our conversation, she confessed that she was plagued with painful memories of times she wishes she had been more attentive. When she told me this, I was shocked. I’d known her for the last few years of his life, and I had seen how she took care of him night and day, her life revolving around whatever his needs were at the time. “I’m sure that even in those moments when you were burned out or just didn’t know what to do, you were still doing the best you could,” I said. “But how do I know I did my best?” She asked. “How do I know I couldn’t have done better?” She was prosecuting herself, and I was in the role of the defense attorney, trying to convince her of her innocence. “Your intention was always to make things better for him,” I answered. “But I didn’t always do that!” She argued back.
She was haunted because of her guilt–guilt I would call toxic. Guilt is healthy and important to feel and atone for when we have broken an agreement with ourselves or someone else. But toxic guilt means we feel horrible about ourselves when there isn’t an agreement that was broken or real violation. The belief that she had to make everything better had a long history that went back to the messages she’d gotten from her mother when she was a little girl. She was assuming that by not being ever-patient and ever-loving–that is, super-human–she had betrayed him and therefore herself, as well. She was holding herself to a standard that even Mother Theresa most likely didn’t achieve at all times.
So I thought about this. How do you take yourself off the hook when you look back and see what you did as inadequate or even harmful, though you didn’t intend it that way? This is the theme that keeps coming up in these blogs–the theme of self-forgiveness. I knew that defending her against her own self-judgment wasn’t going to do anything but loop. And then I remembered that Einstein had said that a problem is never solved at the level at which it was created. I was determined to help her feel better about herself so she could continue healing her grief without being sabotaged by self-blame. “So what’s the other level?” She asked, with a skeptical look on her face.
I shared Rumi’s famous words: “Beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Even when you were exhausted or frustrated, you never stopped loving him. I’m sure he knew that. And it’s the love, not the doing, that matters.” I said. “As long as you keep yourself on the level of right and wrong and needing to judge, you’re screwed.” That adversarial way of looking at things might work in the courtroom, but it’s a killer when it comes to compassion and forgiveness. That’s what she needed to remember and remind herself. In the field of compassion there is no judge or jury. There is only the open heart that allows us and others to be less that perfect–that is, to be truly human. As Eric Berne once said, “I’m not okay. You’re not okay, and that’s okay.” And I would add, it’s the love, always the love, that matters.
