It was 1988 and a friend of mine, Michael, was in the hospital. He had been diagnosed with AIDS and back then, it meant that he wouldn’t be here for much longer. There were no cocktails to fight the virus and the only drug available was reportedly killing people at the same time that it was prolonging their lives. A very bad and terrifying reality.
Michael had contracted an AIDS related opportunistic infection called Pneumocystis Pneumonia. He knew that his days were limited and he was thinking about how to live the rest of his short life. He made some phone calls while I was there and he made dates and times for people he knew to visit him. After he called one particular person, I was surprised. “I thought you didn’t like him very much,” I said.
“I don’t,” he said, “but what if making peace with him is the last thing I have to do here? I don’t want to miss anything.”
Over the next week, Michael saw friends who were dear to him but he also saw a few who were not. He had a few difficult conversations but each time someone left, he looked lighter and more at peace. He had made the choice between war and peace. He had opened his heart to release the blame and embrace compassion. He didn’t want to take any dark energy with him when it was time to go.
I was fascinated by what he was doing. One afternoon, when I had left his room and I was walking down the hospital corridor on my way to the elevators, I stopped. What if I did what Michael was doing right now? What if I didn’t wait until I was on my death bed? What if I made sure that each time I left someone, nothing was left unsaid? I decided to treat each phone call or meeting as if it were the last one, as if I would never see that person again and I didn’t want anything hanging in the air. If something was off, I decided to look inside instead of blaming someone else.
Pema Chodron said, “Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now, we feel like a piece of shit and we’re not squeamish about taking a good look.”
That became my spiritual practice and it still is. I don’t wait to say what I want to say. Within reason of course. If something that I have to say will be unnecessarily hurtful, I work it out for myself. I don’t want to use truth as a weapon. I want to use it as a compassionate way to honor a friendship. I do my best to open my heart, even in times of conflict and when I do, I can see the people who drive me crazy as my teachers. I’ve learned that I don’t have to agree with someone to make peace with them. They don’t have to agree with me. The only thing we have to agree upon is that we want to end the conflict.
I had a friend who was ill and I visited her regularly. I acted as if this were the last time I would ever see her and one day it was true. When her lungs gave out and she died, I felt complete with her, not because it had all gone smoothly. It hadn’t. She was a powerful woman in the film industry and she had a short fuse. I had been the recipient of her anger more than once but each time, I had decided to let it go. I followed a Buddhist philosophy: If there are people who we see as obnoxious, threatening or worthy of contempt, we could discover a lot about those very aspects of ourselves that we can’t face.
My friend offended a lot of people during her career and when she was gone, she left some relationships up in the air. Several of her people hadn’t spoken with her in a long time and once she was gone, there was no way to reconcile. She had not done what Michael had done. Sometimes telling the truth is hard. I don’t know how that had affected her but I saw the upset in the people who had known and loved her.
In our world of insane politics, there is a twisted belief that the way to find peace is to go to war. They say we need more guns to fight guns. More violence to fight violence. More killing to fight killing. More fear to fight fear. To me, that’s an upside down way of looking at things. The saying goes that we “cultivate” compassion as if it were a flower that needs water, air and constant attention.
When we plant a rose garden, we start by clearing the ground of weeds so the flowers don’t have to fight their way to open up. We give them water and food. If we don’t, they die a hard death. If we do, they will die eventually like all living things, but they will be glorious and beautiful for as long as they are meant to live.
This is profoundly beautiful, deep, and resonant. Thank you for sharing 🙏🏻💙