That doesn’t mean other people aren’t genuinely grieving the deaths of people they only knew through their music or films or books. We live in a celebrity-oriented culture, so even though we don’t actually know famous people, we admire them and feel connected to them.

I don’t experience their deaths as personal losses, but I understand and accept that other people do. That grief, whether it lasts 5 minutes, 5 months, or a lifetime, is valid. What interests me is why we seem so much more comfortable expressing that grief than we are dealing with grief when it’s up close and personal.

When someone on my Nextdoor app posted, “I can’t imagine life without Dolly Parton,” the other day, it made me stop.

What?

This person didn’t know her. She liked her. I thought she was a great, talented person too. But she couldn't imagine life without her?

The comment tells me everything I need to know about our profound denial about death.

The same three people who said nothing to me about Bix also tell me a lot: they are talking about Dolly Parton on social media, expressing their distress at her passing. Easy peasy.

A friend said something to me today that made me think more about this. “Maybe these people didn’t say anything to you about Bix because they were afraid you might cry,” she said. “People feel uncomfortable about crying.” Or, perhaps even more telling, they were afraid they might cry.

If that’s true, and it seems plausible to me, it says something about how uncomfortable we are with real grief. Because I might cry? So what? I was already crying. Saying his name wasn’t going to remind me that my son had died. I haven’t forgotten. And if you cried too, what would be so terrible about that?

It’s easy to talk about the death of a celebrity because they have no attachment to us, really. We loved their music. We loved their movies. We loved their books, plays, whatever they did. We loved them, but we didn’t know them.

Celebrity deaths give us a safe outlet for grief. It’s always been easier for people to cry over a stranger than to confront the terrifying reality of real personal loss. It’s a low-stakes game because it doesn’t actually change their daily lives, and that’s okay.

When we publicly grieve a celebrity, we are allowing ourselves to experience death and loss from a safe distance. We can talk about what the person meant to us without worrying about saying the wrong thing because the grieving family isn’t sitting across the table from us.

Real grief asks something of us that can be hard to give. It asks us to sit with someone who may cry, risk crying ourselves, be uncomfortable, and understand that we can’t make it better. Is that what we’re afraid of?

Sometimes we feel connected with a celebrity because of a particular time in our life, or because we’ve gone through something similar to what we believe they went through, or what we’re told they’ve been through. We relate. This emotional attachment might inspire us in our own career paths or hobbies. Even thinking about certain fictional stories, celebrities, or famous people we love can support our self-esteem and improve our mood. I guess it can be a buffer against loneliness, although that just seems so strange to me.

We may also be mourning a part of our lives that the celebrity represents—our youth, our past, the music we loved growing up, the culture that has now been replaced with another we don’t recognize. The death becomes a marker of time passing.

Because of the Internet, we sometimes think we have more insight into celebrities' personal lives than we probably do, since even seemingly authentic celebrities present a façade to the public. Dolly Parton was a mysterious person, if you really think about it. We don’t actually know much about her, and everything we think we know is projection. Everything.

There’s also something interesting called the “availability heuristic.” That’s a mouthful. Sometimes when people who were famous when we were growing up die, it may make us feel like everybody is dying. That’s distressing. The generation we grew up with is dying, and that means we’re going to die too.

Well, I have news for you. You’re going to die.

Public grieving for celebrities also allows us to express ourselves. We can show our dramatic feelings in public in a safe space. Maybe it’s because we just don’t talk about death enough in general. We don’t have many rituals around it anymore, so we end up putting flowers on the graves of people we don’t even know.

We’ve pushed death to the fringes of our lives and have lost community spaces and daily rituals that help us carry grief when it matters. In many other cultures, death is viewed as a constant, natural companion to life, but in Western society it’s treated like a hidden medical failure or strange and unexpected error. Traditional rituals once brought communities together to sit with grieving people for days, weeks, or sometimes months. Of course we can’t do that now, but we can post a picture of a celebrity on Facebook and be boo-hoo sad.

A celebrity death at 80 just feels natural to me. When a celebrity passes after finishing a career and living a long life, we can keep experiencing the art they created and the words they wrote. I listen to Ram Dass all the time. He’s alive to me because he’s in my heart and in my soul. He speaks to me.

Dolly Parton lived a massive, full life. She left a lot of music behind that we can listen to forever and ever, until we die.

What I keep coming back to is the strange disparity between the two kinds of grief. We can say we’re devastated about someone we never met without worrying that we’re making anyone uncomfortable. We can cry together about Dolly Parton. We can tell stories about her. We can say her name over and over. We can post photographs, songs, and memories. Nobody says, “Don’t mention Dolly. You might make her fans cry.”

But when someone’s child dies, we worry that saying his name might make his mother cry. That’s really weird and disturbing. It tells me a lot about how we regard death in our culture and our own ability to deal with it. If someone who has known me for 50 years “doesn’t know what to say” about my son’s death and then I see their post mourning with great emotion over the death of Dolly Parton…give me a break.

Maybe our enormous public response to celebrity deaths and our discomfort around personal grief are two sides of the same thing. We aren’t comfortable with death at all. But somehow we need to express some feeling about death, and celebrity deaths make it easy for us. We can show our great compassion with no risk.

The fanfare will die down over a few days. It usually does. People move on to the next thing. So grieve for Dolly, grieve out loud…for a minute, a day, or forever. But also recognize the grief that might live right next door, or in the next room.

When you enter the spiritual community, as I did in full force after my son Bix died, you come across all sorts of people on the same path but at different markers. Now, to be clear, I was on a spiritual path before Bix died, but a traumatic loss plunks you down onto a spiritual superhighway so hard you’re rubbing your behind when you finally get up and start walking. It’s not a gently winding path in the country anymore, filled with beads and kaftans. And when you meet people on that highway, you find both profoundly enlightening people and those who make spiritual bypassing a regular practice.

For those new to the term, spiritual bypassing uses spirituality rather than religion to avoid facing painful emotions, unresolved psychological wounds, basic real-world responsibilities, and your own flaws. You don’t necessarily have to change those flaws, but if you want to grow spiritually, you might consider working on them, as I’ve been forced to do so many times in life, including long before Bix was born, when Bix was born (a baby will bring you into the here and now faster than a rabbit can run from a yappy little dog), and when his body died.

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At any rate, there’s someone in my life whom I’ll refer to as a colleague. Recently she presented an opening for me to think about the danger of certain kinds of mantras. She told me that hers is: Everything is working out in my favor. Not especially original, but popular.

Everything is working out in my favor.

“Everything is working out in my favor” is a well-worn manifestation because it assumes that the universe, fate, God, spirit, or source will deliver what we want regardless of our actions. Who doesn’t want that? We’re in control, not the universe…that’s sort of funny until it’s not.

The pain comes when we cling to the way we think things ought to be, instead of what’s really happening, because the universe usually has a different idea of “favor” that may look very different from our idea. More often than not, things have a way of “working out” in unexpected, surprising, or unwanted ways.

We’ve misunderstood the assignment if we think everything is just right and the universe or God isn’t asking us to look at ourselves and our ego when things go south. If we avoid the fact that shit isn’t working out for us the way we think we want it to, and we refuse to look at ourselves, learn from it, and adjust our behavior and responses, we’re just caught in a self-defeating loop of karmic turmoil.

Using the sacred sound of a mantra for luck, abundance, or specific worldly outcomes and objects also operates at the lowest level of practice. It keeps a person bound to the illusion rather than freeing the heart and the soul. It’s the ego swapping one set of thoughts for another.

A mantra that’s abundance- or luck-focused can also become a way to avoid accountability. If the person saying the mantra succeeds in getting what they want, it’s proof (to them) that they are divinely aligned and chosen and everyone else is an unenlightened schmuck.

If they fail to get what they want, or hurt others along the way, they can dismiss it as a spiritual lesson they don’t have to learn—it’s for the other people to deal with. Or, they might decide that the universe is clearing away things that don’t serve them and vacuuming up any negative energy from people who are holding them back; i.e., who are asking them to be accountable for their actions.

Adjusting our behavior requires us to admit that we didn’t know everything we thought we knew, or that we made a mistake, or that we were wrong and have to correct it and do something differently. Fragile egos often view a mistake as total annihilation, and a fragile ego just can’t let that happen.

This same colleague has often described to me the painful relationship she has with her mother. Mom is cold, judgmental, always right, a perfectionist, and controlling, she laments. Every single feature of the mother she describes is one she possesses and demonstrates to the outside world. Is it an effort to inflict on those around her the things she suffered? I am not a psychologist, so I’ll leave it there.

Will she dismiss disasters as “everything working out in my favor”? Time will tell. Does it matter? It does in the sense that I’ve noticed it so much that I’m writing about it. I have to stop and think: Do I do this too? While I understand that the universe unfolds according to law (the law of the universe), I don’t think I use that as an excuse to blame my screwups on other people’s karma, deny my own ignorance, or control other people. I’ve got other problems. I can’t even make my bed…

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But yes, there have been many times in my life when I’ve wished, hoped, prayed, and mantra’d for specific outcomes, for favor, for abundance. It’s a newbie mistake I can still fall into, because it’s also human nature. I have to catch myself. Even if I get what I want, it may only be “in my favor” in the short run. Clinging to hoped-for future outcomes rips us out of reality, while focusing on the present moment with no attachment to outcomes aligns us with peace and the way things are. It’s easier to do the next right thing, which is ideally based on our values, integrity, and alignment right here and right now.

Ram Dass often talked about Dharma (right action or duty), which means that if you’re a parent, the next right thing might be to get your child to school or to make him or her lunch. If you’re a student, the next right thing might be to study. If you are a friend, it might mean it's time to listen. If you are new to a job that you have limited experience doing, it might be to humble yourself and seek wise counsel from trustworthy people who have demonstrated success doing that job.

Pema Chödrön would say the “right” thing feels grounded, clean, and honest—heart-driven. The “wrong” thing often feels frantic, manipulative, or an urge to escape discomfort—ego-driven.

When in doubt, the next right thing is always the choice that causes the least amount of aggression, deceit, or harm to yourself and others.

Have goals, but don’t cling to any outcome. Just do the next right thing. That is what I tell myself even if the next right thing is uncomfortable and humbling. The outcome has to be what it is, and I will suffer less if I’m not pinning every action, hope, and worry on a specific happy ending my ego has designed.

If and when things go south for my friend, and they may (or may not), will she say that the universe didn’t intend her to do the job she is doing now, so it’s all good? And damn the mess that’s left behind? Not one spiritual leader has ever suggested we are not responsible for our actions.

My teacher, Ram Dass, taught that using spiritual logic as if “everything is an illusion” or “that’s your karma” or “your feelings are not my problem” to justify being unkind, controlling, or unprofessional is a trap of the spiritual ego. Saying someone else’s hurt is “their problem” after treating them disrespectfully is an act of separation. Spiritual philosophy is rooted in interconnectedness: the realization that what we do to another, we do to ourselves.

Ram Dass would say we’re missing the entire curriculum when we treat the universe as a concierge instead of a curriculum. Thinking everything is working out for me means accepting all of it, the horrific, the painful, the failures, the mistakes, the ignorance, as part of the soul’s learning. Accept that I may have failed, that I don’t know everything, and that I need to seek advice and learn from the right people, people who I may not feel comfortable around because they challenge the view of myself, my authority, and my knowledge—or remind me of my mother or sister or whoever caused me pain as a child. I’m a big girl now. I can handle it.

If we only accept the parts of the universe’s curriculum that we think we have control over, or those that make us look right or smart or sophisticated, we’re treating the universe like hotel room-service. Eventually it’s going to stop delivering. It’s not going to make our bed anymore.

I think it’s better to say, look, my ego is terrified again, and embrace that with warmth, compassion, and even amusement. “Look how hard my ego is working to stay safe,” I can say to myself.

It’s a chance to take hold of one of Ram Dass’ central teachings: the best way to alleviate suffering in the world is to work on ourselves. Look where our ego is taking charge, and be kind to it, but let our heart open too. Embrace the parts of ourselves we don’t feel secure about and surrender to them.

Another teacher, Pema Chödrön, would say lean into the shakiness. Don’t avoid the groundless nature of reality. True freedom is leaning into discomfort, insecurity, confusion. In her beautiful book When Things Fall Apart, which I read so many years ago and again after my son died, she talks about those places where we feel scared, wrong, or broken. Those are the places where genuine spiritual awakening can begin.

The mantra becomes a dangerous armor if we use it to ignore those places. If we have to control everything to make the mantra true, that’s not spirituality. That’s anxiety wearing Lululemon Aligns.

True spirituality doesn’t control reality. It surrenders to it. Saying “everything is working out in my favor” is only true if you are willing to look at a devastating failure, a massive mistake, a crushing loss, or grief and say: this is part of my path, and I’m going to learn from it. I’m going to feel compassionate toward my ego and let it go at the same time.

I didn’t say “everything is working out in my favor” when Bix died because, uh, well, I didn’t think everything was working out in my favor. Not even the most enlightened guru would say such a thing in the early stages of grief. It seemed like everything was not working out in my favor. I did, however, surrender to the universe, to God, and ask, "What do You want from me?" I was pissed, believe me. But I also wanted to know how I should move forward from that place. I wanted to learn. I was humbled, brought to my knees. I don’t want anyone else to wait for something like that to happen to fall to their knees.

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What if you’re dealing with someone who uses a mantra as an excuse to be an asshole, dismissive, controlling, or disrespectful? We can’t force someone to wake up from a delusion that makes them feel safe. That’s not our job. Just as we have no right to take away someone’s suffering, we have no moral right to take away someone’s spiritual safety net.

We can, however, set our boundary and stop enabling them, step back, and let them handle the things they insist they have under control. I don’t always know what I’m doing either. I’ve been wrong and made a mess of things, and it’s actually a relief to admit it. Maybe my colleague will find a way there. Maybe she won’t.

Sometimes we have to protect our own peace and walk away from these predicaments and use them for our own learning, for our own personal work.

Everything is working out in our favor, including the failure, the mistakes, the trauma. All of it, as Ram Dass says. Many of these favors require a response of one kind or another. It’s up to us to do it and walk away from those who don’t, while keeping our hearts open.

Maybe the favors are trying to teach us something. If we are willing to listen.

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I’ve been described as highly efficient or highly productive. Since I started writing books freelance in 1999, I have written more than 50, all published by major publishers. I’m a collaborative writer. Call it what you want. You can call it ghostwriting if you want. I don’t really care. I’m a collaborative writer. I don’t write self-published books. I don’t write books that are never published or published by tiny digital publishers that go defunct after a few years. Why does it matter? Because major publishers come with major requirements that are harder to meet than self-publishing or small digital publishing, and I have always met them.

My reselling business started the same year I transitioned from editor and publisher to writer. I also raised a son for 15 years, until his body died, and did all the things people do to keep a family together and maintain a home, along with many “extras” like throwing dinner and cocktail parties, traveling, cooking, and maintaining many different homes over the years, one an 1871 brownstone and another we built from the ground up.

Today, I continue to work with clients and write books, write my own stuff (including here in Substack), teach, resell, learn new things, memorize lines, and act in plays at community theaters in my area. I keep a home, pay bills, cook dinner, and do the grocery shopping. I take care of a husband and four cats.

But there are some things I just cannot do.

I can’t make the bed, fold the laundry, or declutter my desk.

Why? My father used to call me the Inspector General. I valued order and neatness.

It’s the ultimate paradox: I want a neat and tidy room, but I just can’t seem to do what it takes to get it.

Why can’t I do these things? Why can’t I make the bed, fold laundry, or organize papers when I can sit down and write a 75,000-word book on a tight deadline or memorize a script or make Thanksgiving for 25 people?

It turns out grief has a profound impact on the brain’s executive functioning. It’s entirely natural that certain tasks can feel impossible, even for someone who is highly productive. When you lose someone you love, the mental energy required to process the loss can take up a massive amount of cognitive bandwidth, leaving less fuel for other activities, especially specific ones. Even though it has been almost four years, my bandwidth is still being pressed to its limits.

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I wonder whether certain tasks, perhaps unconsciously tied to my son and to what my life was like four years ago, trigger a survival response that leads me to avoid them. It probably has something to do with the profound loss of my normal sense of purpose. What is the point of doing something that seems so trivial and stupid, even though not doing it makes my life less comfortable?

Part of the explanation is scientific, for you scientists out there. The amygdala, the part of the brain involved in processing threat and emotion, often remains highly reactive after trauma, keeping the body in a subtle state of vigilance. That means the nervous system keeps reacting to reminders of what happened (like seeing my son’s bed, where I sometimes retreat and even sleep), the clothes in my closet that represent “before” and “after,” and the papers on my desk. I’m not sure why unfolded laundry makes the cut, but there must be a reason. A “freeze response” can manifest as physical heaviness or an inability to move toward certain tasks. For example, that darn bed I can’t make.

There’s also something called cognitive overload. Our brains have a limited amount of working memory and mental energy. Processing a profound loss often consumes a large share of our background processing power.

That means I also forget things, like the fact that I’m supposed to have a writers’ lunch on the third Tuesday of every month. I’m an adult, and apparently remembering it is part of being one.

Remembering isn't actually part of being an adult, or at least it’s not proof that I’m failing at being one. Remembering things like that competes with significant tasks I can do that are vital to the life I’m living, like writing, thinking about complex subjects, making an argument, memorizing lines, shopping, cooking, and listing items for resale.

But still, why can’t I remember breakfast? Maybe it’s because my brain relies heavily on long-established pathways and external structures, and on the complex, high-level work I’ve done for years. That’s actually easier for me than seemingly simple tasks because it’s familiar and well-practiced—and it’s also a safe haven. That sounds weird, doesn’t it? You would think tasks with clear, linear rules would be easier.

Which brings me back to the bed. It’s beyond scientific; it’s also psychological and, for me, spiritual.

Making a bed is a linear, process-driven task. It is emotionally neutral...or is it?

Bedrooms are personal spaces. The bed is personal. My son’s room, where he slept, is deeply personal. The main bedroom, which I share with a grief-stricken husband who spends most of his time there, sleeping, is likewise a profoundly sorrowful space. A bed isn’t just a bed when someone who belonged in your house is no longer there, and I mean that both physically and metaphorically. Do you understand what I am saying?

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And then there are the papers on my desk.

Receipts, letters, forms, cards, and books on my desk are portals to the unknown. Each piece holds a potential emotional mystery or surprise. Either way, sorting through a pile is a landmine; I don’t know what’s underneath the stack. I don’t know if it’s something I wrote four years ago. I don’t know if it’s a bill I forgot to pay. Although I don’t forget to pay my bills. I’m still living in my house, and nobody’s turned the lights off yet. I also have a lot of that stuff automated with bill pay.

Personal papers and books constantly force me to make decisions. Do I keep this for sentimental reasons? Donate? Give to a friend? Shred? Toss it? File it? Digitize it? Or place it all in the fire pit in the backyard, drench it with kerosene, toss a match on it, and watch it burn while I do a fire dance?

Someone also has to explain what’s going on with the clothing and jewelry in my closet. Sorting through a closet isn’t just looking at clothes; sometimes it’s sorting through versions of who you used to be.

Whenever I think about doing any of these tasks, I feel overwhelmingly tired.

What does that mean?

Apparently, exhaustion like this is also part of a freeze response. Doesn’t that sound exciting? Wow, that’s great. Happy Holidays!

I’m already using a massive amount of daily energy just to exist, create, love my family, run a business, write, study, cook dinner, act, and carry the weight of my son’s loss.

So here are some things I can give myself radical permission to do (and so can you):

I give myself absolute, permanent permission to leave the bed just as it is because an unmade bed isn’t hurting anyone. I can hide the desk clutter. If I’m looking at a pile, I can put it in a box and say the threat is gone until I’m ready to deal with it. And maybe I’ll never be ready. That does not mean an unpiled desk is morally superior to my piled one (even though I know there are those who like to think so).

I can delegate without guilt. I can get somebody else to help me, like a trusted friend or my husband. That probably won’t work out too well, but I can get a cleaning lady to help me clean the house. I have one, and I’m so grateful for her.

The other thing you might be saying is, “Oh, it’s been four years, lady. Make your bed.”

I mean, I have made the bed more than a few times in four years. But I will tell you that when you lose a child, your brain’s internal map of reality is altered. I didn’t need a scientist to tell me that, but apparently that’s what they say. My brain still manages that absence every day, and it takes energy.

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The amygdala doesn’t really know what day it is. It doesn’t care about the calendar.

There’s also the myth of a grief or trauma timeline. Societal expectations often mislead by suggesting that grief should improve within a year or two. I remember driving with my cousin a couple of months after Bix died, and she told me, “Oh, next year you’ll feel much better.”

Well, she was right in one way. My emotions softened, joy returned, and daily crying bouts turned into weekly ones, then monthly, and so on. But there are places where I’m still stuck.

It’s just like my friend saying, “Well, if you’re an adult, you remember we have our breakfast every third Tuesday.” But if you’re an adult who has lost a 15-year-old son, you won’t always remember that breakfast is every third Tuesday. The solution, if I am truly committed to joining this breakfast, is to put it on my calendar, which can also feel like one more hoop I have to jump through. Don’t you get tired of the hoops? I do.

Maybe my brain is making a strategic choice to protect me, my creativity, and my spirit. That’s my excuse for not making the bed, organizing my papers, or keeping my closet neat, seasonally organized, and color-coordinated.

I’ve always felt better in a neat environment, so it bugs me that I get completely exhausted just thinking about going through papers and straightening certain spaces in my house. They’re not all messy, just my spaces. My personal spaces. The public spaces are always neat and tidy. That’s another confession, I guess. A tell.

There’s an agonizing conflict between my psychological need for a calm environment and my neurobiological defense mechanisms. Say that three times fast.

So, what more can I do? What could you do if you have the same dilemma?

Sweep and hide. Box and store. Close the door.

Why not give ourselves permission to let some of our personal spaces be messy, rather than letting every unfinished task become evidence against our moral or spiritual worth?

Our value as productive people is separate from the state of the bed, the desk, and the closet.

I guess the core lesson is that even though I’ve come so far and I refuse to wallow in my grief, there are still things my body and brain do without my permission. Sorrow still rears its head and kicks up the dust—no pun intended.

My brain is choosing creation over housekeeping, and self-compassion has to override the logic that says I should be able to do certain things simply because I used to do them or because others can.

I’m allowed to decide where my limited energy is better spent.

You’re allowed to do that too.

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The first is that death is a transition. Even though we can’t see our loved one, our child, they haven’t disappeared. They’ve moved to a new chapter. I had a hard time with this when Bix died because his absence was so evident, as with any loss of a child. There was a vacancy that was wide and deep, bottomless, dark.

Living out loud was not a cliché when it came to the Bixter. He was fun. He could be boisterous and contemplative, but no matter his mood, he had an extra big presence. We had a morning routine that I enjoyed. As he took his shower and fixed his hair (was anyone else’s 15-year-old son obsessed with their hair?) I would make him iced coffee for breakfast. He was 15, old enough, in my opinion (the only one that counts), to have an iced coffee: coffee, a squirt of caramel sauce, and whole milk – no extra sugar, as there was enough in the caramel. He would have that on his way to school with his dad. Sometimes I’d make him a breakfast burrito, but more often than not, he would wait until lunch to eat.

We had our main meal of the day when he returned from the home school we sent him to, and we’d discuss what he’d worked on as we ate. It was a special time. Bix especially liked it when I made sesame noodles from leftover spaghetti from the night before. Then we’d do something outside: work on a learning project, do some gardening or other yard work, go to the shops, or the beach. In the afternoon, he might hang out with his friends or, three times a week, go to lacrosse practice at the local high school, where he played long stick defense, number 34. Trust me, it was very difficult to accept that he was still there in those early days of his transition, but today I know it for a fact. He is here.

The second point is that love endures. The deep bond you shared with your child doesn’t end, and it is a two-way street. It is alive and real, and it can never be broken. We all loved each other very much. Bix and I had a tight bond, as did Randy, my husband and Bix’s dad. That love continues unabated and indeed grows in depth and meaning. The relationship continues.

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The third idea is impermanence on the earth plane. There is a season, as Ecclesiastes says and as Pete Seeger popularized in a lovely song. Everything solid is impermanent, even rocks. We are impermanent. As the days, weeks, and months pass, it will change form, and the sharp pain you may feel will dull over time. It ebbs and flows, of course, but the wound heals, and the scar fades. Our love for our child remains and also evolves, growing ever deeper and more profound. We know everything that is energy (and everything is energy) will transition but never disappear. Leaves fall off trees in autumn, disintegrate, and return to nourish the earth. The tree's energy goes back to the universe; it's still there, in the forest. You can feel it. Pain evolves, cycles, and changes, but never goes away, and that’s okay. Pain becomes grace, suffering becomes grace. Grace becomes compassion and love.

Finally, breathing intentionally can help. It’s especially useful during a panic attack or as a practice to set you up for success in the morning, evening, or anytime you can steal away for a few minutes. It’s a way to breathe through the pain instead of fighting it or running away.

When Bix first died, I was off my kilter. I wrote about that the other day. There came a time when mindful breathing, specifically Tonglen breathing, helped me through times when I thought I would lose my cool. Sometimes I would be so overcome with grief that I thought I would collapse from a tsunami of indelible grief, and stopping to practice intentional breathing helped. It has stopped me on several occasions from breaking down and from expressing anger in unhelpful ways to the people around me and to myself.

I remember once I was in the grocery store and became so overcome thinking about how it used to be, Bix and me going around Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s picking up interesting-looking condiments or premade foods we wanted to try, cuts of meat we wanted to cook, exotic salad fixings...and that can’t happen anymore, at least in the same way. One day I just started crying in the aisle. Tonglen breathing helped me in the short term, but if practiced regularly, it helps in the long haul too.

Breathe in through your nose the heavy, dark, or painful feelings (such as grief, fear, or physical pain) with the wish to take that suffering away from others.

Then, breathe out through your mouth while sending light energy, love, joy, or comfort, with the intention of bringing peace and happiness to everyone, including yourself.

This helps us cultivate deep compassion, overcome selfishness, and open the heart to difficult emotions without fear.

To begin, stop what you’re doing and rest for a moment. Try to clear your head. As you begin to breathe in, try to imagine taking in all the dark, heavy smoke that represents your pain. Breathe in deeply. As you slowly exhale, imagine light, love, happiness, laughter, and most of all, peace.

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As you continue to breathe in and out, imagine the pain and joy of everyone. In and out, in and out.

This technique helps regulate your nervous system, and you will also begin to feel calmer in the short run. Over time, if you decide to make this a daily practice, you’ll find you are calmer, can embrace your sadness with compassion, and move into acceptance. This doesn’t mean you won’t feel sadness, pain, or even anger, but breathing and understanding the other three foundational principles of life can help us live with those feelings rather than be consumed by them. Acceptance is peace.

I don’t think spiritual growth requires deliberately subjecting ourselves to people, situations, or experiences we dislike simply because we dislike them. In fact, I think there’s a spiritual trap in thinking that way. The feeling that if I’m sufficiently evolved, nothing should ever bother me, and so if I feel an aversion, I need to override it by exposing myself to it, instead of just asking myself why I have that aversion and working on it without exposing myself to it. Do you see the difference? Does that make any sense?

Aversion is just information. It’s not necessarily an instruction telling you to go and do something.

This is a question that confused me for a while, especially since what bothered me changed after Bix died. I had a higher tolerance for some things and people and less for others. Weird. There was also something confusing about a teaching of Ram Dass’ that made me wonder about this. It was something in a speech. Someone told him, “I can’t live in New York City, what is your advice?” And his advice was, well, “You need to go live in New York City.” It always stayed with me. It struck me, puzzled me. Does this mean that if I hate something, I have to deal with it or I will remain spiritually defunct?

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As I thought about it and studied more, I concluded that what he meant is that running away from things you dislike does not always bring you peace. If you believe you need a quiet place to be calm, it might mean your peace is very fragile—and entirely dependent on outer circumstances. Moving to the city could help you face loud, hard things, see where you still get mad or scared, and then work on those things. But I don’t actually think he meant the person had to pull up roots and find a tiny apartment in Manhattan they probably couldn’t afford. I don’t know if you’ve checked rent in Manhattan lately (or maybe you pay it now).

It’s not easy to find an affordable place in a nice part of the city with a working toilet. Maybe this person could take out a second mortgage, stay in a midtown hotel for a week, and see how it goes first. I lived in New York for 30+ years and found a great deal of peace there. The hum of the city, the breathtaking range of humanity, the culture(s), and the visual excitement captivated me. But I also found peace in the country, in the mountains, and at the beach. Location isn’t my Achilles heel; people and specific situations are.

At any rate, it’s not really about that. I don’t think you have to go toward things that hurt or break your heart. I do think it’s about how you watch your anger and anxiety when things are loud or messy, or too quiet—whatever it is you have an aversion to. Ask yourself what the root cause is: why is this person or that environment throwing me off?

You can also accept it. Ram Dass had an expression, “and that too.”

Ram Dass meant that you should accept all parts of life, good and the bad, without putting up a fight. He did not say you should intentionally seek out the bad in favor of the good. Bad and good happen in the course of life; no sense looking for trouble. When you’re in an unpleasant situation, instead of getting mad or turning a feeling into behavior, we can say, “and that too,” to remind ourselves that joy and pain belong to life on the human plane.

Don’t push the hard feelings away; acknowledge them. Allow your sadness, anger, and pain to sit next to your joy and peace. Suffering comes from clinging to the way we think things ought to be, not how they actually are. This is what really causes our pain. “And that too” can help end our attachment to outcomes. Life is a school, and we designed our curriculum for ourselves. How we react can change it—but acceptance brings peace and comes before behavior. Letting anger become destructive behavior isn’t going to rack up good karma.

When you feel upset or uncomfortable, identify it. “I’m feeling anxious (or whatever) right now,” without giving it a negative value. Breathe in and out slowly. Quietly to yourself, say, “And that too.” Next, look around and see if you can’t find something pleasant in the situation, or find another person to talk to. Excuse yourself with an open heart. Don’t try to fix your pain. If you acknowledge it and move on to something more restful for your soul and your mind, it will dissipate more quickly than you think.

Let me talk about some things I'm averse to.

On Tuesday, I published a piece about sound sensitivity and emotional backlash. I have sound sensitivity. It would be very foolish for me to expose myself to sounds that agitate me.

I don’t think Ram Dass or any spiritual teacher would want me to damage my nervous system by exposing myself to sounds that present a quantifiable biological challenge to me. That’s not a spiritual hurdle I need to cross. His advice about moving to the city applies to psychological preferences, not to physiological things that could overwhelm us or harm our health.

Annoyance, judgment, and impatience with city noise or chaos can be worked through mentally—they can be used as information about other things that are really bothering us. But sound sensitivity that causes immediate, involuntary nervous system distress should be avoided. It’s like a food you’re allergic to—you shouldn’t eat it, you could get very sick, you could die. That would be foolish. Eating tree nuts when you have an allergy to them would not be a spiritual championship-winning move.

What about people you have an aversion to? No, you don’t have to be friends with people you don’t like. Treat them with kindness and love the soul behind the behavior. But don’t put yourself in their path if you don't need to. That’s not spiritual growth. Spiritual growth is about honesty, not pretending. You can wish someone well spiritually and not hang out with them. You can set clear boundaries with people, and you can also do your spiritual work on why they trigger you. That’s what Ram Dass meant when he said working on yourself is the best thing you can do to alleviate suffering in the world.

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Keeping an open heart, especially around those we don’t feel good about, contains some magic. Untangling my own triggers and reflections around difficult people, or people I have an aversion to for whatever reason, is information meant to keep me safe. But I can stop projecting my own wounds onto other people with an open heart. They’re not responsible for my pain. When I feel good and calm, I am of service to other people, and that’s how I need to be.

Working on healing my own wounds means I won’t project them onto other people, or expect other people to be responsible for them.

So no, you don’t have to engage with or face things you have an aversion to. But you do have to think about why, and that’s just good information to have when identifying your triggers.

I’ll tell a story about someone I was hesitant about, but it’s too helpful not to share. I had been asked to work on a volunteer project that involved someone I had concerns about. The person was known for being unreliable and having substance abuse problems. I did not want to expose myself to that, because addictive people have, in my experience, been agitating to my nervous system. So I declined the project. But then, on another project, I was thrown into working with this person. Ok, God, I’m listening. I am keeping my heart open. Over time, this person would come to me and talk. He was so civil and sweet. I was open to it.

As the weeks went on, he shared a lot about what he had overcome. He looked me in the eye one day and said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” and I said, “Because God has a sense of humor.” He didn’t know what I meant, but I did. God was having a good laugh over my insistence that this person wasn’t a good fit for me. We’ve since become very good friends. If we leave ourselves open to people without necessarily intentionally exposing ourselves to them, these kinds of things happen. See what happens. Go with the flow. Miracles of the universe will happen.

There is another person who is in the full throes of alcohol abuse. There are other problems there too—he is a nasty drunk, a crashing bore, and a narcissist. I witnessed him have a one-sided shouting match in a public parking lot not long ago, his victim standing there, mute, trying to figure out what he had done wrong (nothing). Everyone around heard the loud, drunken, angry rants. It was ugly. This is bad karma, and while I wish this person well, he is not welcome in my home, and I don't want to socialize with him. I know why he makes me uncomfortable: he is nasty when drunk, self-involved, uninterested in people outside of himself and his wife, and he has a hair-trigger temper.

Ram Dass doesn’t expect me to expose myself to him or have him in my home as a sign of my spiritual advancement. In fact, he often talked about setting fierce boundaries, noting that you don’t have to invite everyone to dinner just because you see the divine in them. I will keep an open heart and pray for this man’s peace because it is obvious an ocean of fear, anger, and resentment is churning inside of him and has been for some time.

One of my new BFF’s, Krishnamurti, believed in something called intelligence. He wrote that if you are aware and awake, you can observe your relationships clearly, and so will be able to naturally walk away from a toxic person without needing to build an angry, defensive wall in your mind toward them.

What would Jesus do? When people became hostile, aggressive, or unsafe, He routinely left the room or village (Luke 4:28-30). When dealing with people who were self-involved, demanding, or had clear bad intentions, Jesus refused to engage or simply left (Matthew 16:4). Jesus also taught his disciples that if an environment was hostile or unwelcoming, they should not stay and suffer (Matthew 10:14).

“Love your enemy” does not mean giving them unfettered access to your life or your home. In the great spiritual traditions, truly loving this kind of man means wishing for his sobriety and deliverance from his addiction and whatever demons caused it—none of which requires me to sit him down with him in my living room or next to him in a bar. Welcoming a nasty drunk into social settings enables their delusion that their behavior is acceptable. It’s not. Setting a hard boundary is sometimes the most loving, truth-filled thing we can do for an addict and for ourselves.

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Ram Dass has important teachings on being a compassionate witness when we watch the movie of someone’s life as they self-destruct. One of his core principles is that we have no right to take away someone else’s suffering, nor can we save them from it. By trying to force change on someone, you actually strip them of any dignity they may have left. I know many people find this wisdom counterintuitive—aren’t we supposed to save people? Yes, when we see an immediate injustice, we should fight against it with an open heart. We should try to save someone from a burning building. But when someone is self-destructive, we can’t really help them until they are ready to come up for air. It’s not our place to decide when that should be.

Drop the rescue mission. That’s your ego talking. “Aren’t I morally superior, aren’t I the fixer of problems?” True compassion and love mean letting go of control, focusing on your own peace, and trusting the other person will eventually find their way. If they don’t, well, can we trust that this is part of their curriculum, their journey?

Try not to judge their actions, but observe the situation as a quiet reflection, which allows them to see, if they are looking, where they are caught. The addiction, the temper, and the narcissism are the “spacesuit” or the “role” the person is trapped in at the moment. As a witness, we can see it, but we can also understand that the soul underneath is still an integral part of the universe, and it’s teaching us something through that person. What do we see in them that we have to work on in ourselves?

I can’t get out of this so fast because there are things we have to do or predicaments we find ourselves in that do lead to spiritual growth. Ganga Stone, the late founder of God’s Love, We Deliver, and author of the book I acquired, edited, and published at Warner Books in 1996, Start the Conversation: The Book About Death You Were Hoping to Find, told me a story about Muktananda, her guru, and how he made her clean the toilets in the ashram when she lived there.

I remember telling her how I thought that sounded pretty distasteful, and she said, no, it was what she needed, and Muktananda knew it. “I was this privileged white woman from Manhattan. It was an ego-crushing job that I actually came to appreciate,” she told me. Ganga spent two years on her intense spiritual retreat at Swami Muktananda’s ashram in Ganeshpuri, India, in the mid-to-late 1970s. During those two years, she immersed herself in Seva, or service, cleaning toilets, doing the laundry, and washing the ashram’s stone floors.

This story beautifully illustrates Seva (selfless service) and how a Guru uses specific, uncomfortable tasks to crush the ego. There is a spiritual difference between Ganga scrubbing toilets under Muktananda’s guidance and exposing yourself intentionally to dangerous situations or allowing a volatile, abusive person into your home. The distinction lies in the nature of the container, the presence of safety, and the root of the discomfort.

Cleaning toilets challenges pride, entitlement, and attachment to status—something Muktananda Americans may be especially prone to (just saying…). It deals with inner resistance. Facing a volatile, screaming individual deals with outer safety, psychological abuse, and unpredictable danger. Ganga was in a structured ashram under the watchful eye of a peaceful teacher whom she trusted for her spiritual evolution. The parking lot shout-down was uncontained, chaotic, and destructive. Spiritual growth requires a foundation of psychological safety; chaos traumatizes.

Ganga also translated her ashram lessons into her incredible work founding God’s Love We Deliver, working with people dying of AIDS through her course on death and writing a book about it.

You can see the difference between scrubbing the toilets in an ashram and allowing a volatile narcissist into your living room, right?

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I have always had sound sensitivity. There are certain sounds and tones of voice that bother me, and others that don’t. I can listen to my husband practicing the trumpet loudly, or with a mute, in the next room, and it doesn’t bother me in the least. I can sit in a busy Dunkin Donuts, buzzing with coffee shop conversations, and I’m in the rhythm. But there are styles of jazz, like bebop or techno music, that I can’t listen to. Some accents, like a Long Island or a broad Brooklyn accent, agitate me, and I don’t enjoy listening to them, so I don’t attend theatrical productions if I know an actor has that sort of accent. New England accents? I find them comforting. Chewing food, crunching ice, nail biting…get the commitment papers ready.

Sound sensitivity is a real condition. According to what I’ve read, it’s especially common among neurodivergent and autistic people, but it can also run in families whose members are not on the spectrum. PTSD and stress make sound sensitivity worse. Those conditions are covered under the “she lost her child” tab at the library. My sensitivity to sounds remains at a fever pitch (haha, that was a good one, Karen), which is why I am careful about protecting myself from situations where I know I will hear sounds that will bother me. The tone, not the content. I can listen to opinions I disagree with all day if they’re expressed in a tone I find pleasant.

Back to the story. She was asking me a lot of questions and needed numbers I couldn’t easily get my hands on, and it was making me crazier and crazier. I was running around the house trying to dig up bank statements and account numbers while she kept asking more and more questions in her singsong automaton voice, even though she was a “real person.” Her voice was at a frequency only small dogs, Persian cats, and traumatized people could hear. The singsong squawk alongside a demand for me to do math problems was just too much. Is it just me, or does grief make mathing more difficult? I felt like I was in a movie and this was the torture scene—because it was. We’re all in a movie.

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I think we need better training for people in customer service roles that do not involve taking the human out of the being.

At some point, I lost it and started screaming at her out of frustration. Who knows what important missives my rant contained. I can’t remember; I was in a fugue state. There was definitely some ideation stuck in there too. Big mistake, KK. About twenty minutes after I slammed the phone down, two police officers were knocking on my door doing a welfare check. A man and a woman. The guy was tall and built like a brick wall. The woman was small, almost fragile-looking, except for the firearm on her hip. Interesting couple. But I bet she was a quick draw and ran faster than the big dude. Luckily, I didn’t find out. The woman stayed standing outside at the ready; the man came in. He was very nice, very compassionate.

I told him the story of Bix and why I overreacted to the bank rep, who had obviously been trained to call the police if a customer sounded in danger, and I probably did because I was, but not in the way she thought. He seemed to understand what I was telling him, but he stayed for a while and was kind of hesitant to leave. But honestly, these sort of bland-functionary-needs-information scenarios are just the sort that can set people on edge when they’re in grief, and I was still in profound, deep grief. At that point I hadn’t started on my spiritual journey; I was just trying to get through the day. The officer gave me some resources, which I already had, since I had actually started grief counseling at Tidewell, a hospice here in Florida. Then they finally left.

My brain was already running at full capacity, processing the loss of my son. My emotional cup was already entirely full, and a sensory trigger, stacked on top of a pile of demands involving numbers, made it spill over. My reaction wasn’t a personal attack on the bank rep. It was the sound triggering my already taxed nervous system. The fight-or-flight reaction took over, and my emotions got the better of me. It happens. The yelling, the ideation were expressions of intense agony and a desperate need for the noise to stop.

This happened almost four years ago. I’ve come a long way. The wound was still fresh back then. I no longer yell at customer service reps, even though there are still voices that bother me and hoops I don’t want to jump through. I don’t because I have no desire to. My anger has dissipated. Getting angry is not going to make the rep talk in a less annoying manner or result in her request for more numbers. My anger isn’t going to liberate her, or anyone else I encounter, from whatever their suffering is.

I see the situation now as both the bank rep and the cops genuinely caring. It was a wake-up call for me. Who was I? What was I becoming, and who did I want to be? Not that. Not that bat shit crazy lady on the phone, but I knew enough not to feel guilty, nor did I beat myself up. I cried. I got back to my papers, called the bank again, and gave someone else, with a tone of voice that wasn’t bothersome to my brain, what they needed. Task accomplished. It was the first time I understood that I didn’t want to fall into the trap of thinking all my behavior is acceptable because my son died, something I’d noticed in online grief groups I’d started to join. It was an opening for me, and I took it.

There are things I can do to lessen the physiological impact of agitating sounds on my system, but as far as situations where my heart closes around certain people, I realize it’s because I’m judging, and judgment is related to fear.

I’m sharing this somewhat embarrassing story because if it helps to hear that I shouted at a bank teller and slid into crisis-level ideation over a common request for information, then I feel I’ve accomplished something important this week. You’re allowed to snap at someone, too. It happens, and we can use it as information to do things differently the next time. You can apologize later, including and most importantly to yourself.

I want to remove the shame if you’re carrying it. You are not a bad person. Grief is an edge, and overreaction is sometimes the hemming tape we need to cling to it. You’re full up trying to organize your brain and body around what happened to your family. I know some people will read this and think, well, I’d never do that; I have manners. Good for you. Genuinely. That’s nice to know. Have a nice day.

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For everyone else: your brain does find its way back to better order over time. It really does. In the meantime, if you have to deal with the public, utility companies, the IRS, insurance carriers, or banks, enlist a friend to help or at least sit with you while you make the call or the visit. Gather all the paperwork you might need before you dial the phone. Make sure you’ve slept. And be kind to yourself.

Some tasks stink, and they put you in situations you’d rather not be in, but the person on the other end of them doesn’t have to be part of the drama. The question is, where is our heart in the process? Can we open our hearts even when we’re in an uncomfortable or unpleasant place?

Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century math whiz and philosopher, said that all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. There’s another side to that. It’s not just the practice of sitting in silence—it’s also the practice of keeping our mouths shut when we’re not alone.

Isabella, the cat we recently adopted, tells me (in her own cosmic feline way) that we won’t tell anyone anything until it’s actually happened, and sometimes we won’t even tell them then. That’s one reason I love this dear fluffy feline. I cannot tell you how often not doing that has bitten me in the rear, and I don’t quite understand why I have to keep learning this lesson. I guess it’s because I want to be transparent; I want to trust people. How about you?

It’s funny because I don’t like answering a lot of personal or professional questions. After 44 years in publishing, I’ve just started to talk about it, but I rarely talk about my life as a writer. That’s one reason this Substack is about grief, not about writing. Aren’t there enough Substacks about writing? I think there are.

Anyway, I do tend to share my feelings about other things I’m thinking about. I’m not an oversharer per se; I just realized that sometimes I share the wrong things with the wrong people. We all do. Sometimes I just want to get something off my chest and talk it through. And I have to be careful about who I trust. Do you feel that way sometimes, when you feel betrayed?

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Here’s the thing about that: often, when you share your feelings or ask someone a question, two things can happen. One is that you don’t really know who you’re telling—they may have information about what you’re saying to them, and they’re not going to disclose it (I’ve been on the other side of that in professional settings, which is one reason I left office work and its politics for writing—good decision. I have a lot to show for it). That leads to a feeling of humiliation when you find out they knew something they didn’t share with you after you’ve shared with them. That person is not the friend you thought they were. Facts.

For example: I told someone I was going to put myself forward for a volunteer project—I had decided at the last minute—and I could tell by her response that she either didn’t think it was a good idea or knew something about the project. That’s because she had already been selected for the project. Maybe I put her in a difficult position. But the stakes were very low; no, they were nonexistent. She should have told me at the very least, so I wouldn’t have wasted my time, which is pretty valuable, actually. So is yours. I was going to find out anyway. That person and people like that are not good friends.

Consequently, I no longer trust that person, and that’s a good thing, as my friend Martha Stewart used to say. I learned something about this person that will help me in the future. I will wish her well, and we will be friendly, but it’s not a friendship anymore. I don’t even have to tell her. Nothing needs to be said. She’ll feel the shift, or she won’t. I’m okay with it either way. The silent withdrawal is the boundary. Loss of trust is a gift of clear sight. We can now see the dynamic for exactly what it is.

Since my son died, I’ve become much better at accepting the way things are, not how I think they ought to be (so you’d think I’d know better about sharing, right?). Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to bitch when crummy things happen; I’ll just be more careful about how much and with whom I’m bitching. Those thoughts and irritations are just passing through on their way out the door, but the environment in which they happen still shouldn’t be toxic.

Then there’s the other idea of sharing feelings or fears with people: they often expect you’re doing it because you want advice, even when you don’t. You’re just sharing a feeling to release it. But not everyone is the right listener.

Each of us brings our own feelings and fears to a personal exchange. Often, the advice or lectures we get in return for sharing are confessions about the other person’s anxieties and insecurities and have nothing to do with usable information for us. That’s why the old expression “take it with a grain of salt” still holds. People’s advice comes in a package filled with their own junk.

Knowing when to keep your mouth shut is learning to discern who your trusted people are. It’s also understanding that you don’t have to say anything to anyone anymore. You don’t owe anyone an explanation or any information. You can keep things to yourself, and that’s okay.

It’s not just about what I choose to share. There’s also the issue of people not wanting to tell me things because they think it will hurt my feelings. Maybe it will, but so what? It’s better than being deceived or falsely “protected.”

Grieving people are fragile, so I forgive those who think we need to be shielded from information. But this is a big but: it also makes me not trust those people. Once I learn that they think I’m too fragile to hear something that could hurt—well, it’s a two-way street with that person. I won’t tell them anything either. We can be friends… but it’s not going to be the same because it’s no longer an honest relationship.

Trying to protect us from feelings we will end up having isn’t truly a kindness, even if that’s the intention. It’s worse to know someone thinks we’re so wounded or crazy or whatever that we can’t process the truth. Feelings are part of life, so trying to protect someone from feelings you don’t think they should experience is a fool’s game. People who have lost children have already felt all the feelings, anyway.

Ram Dass’ teaching that we have no right to try to take away another person’s suffering has never been clearer than in these situations. Now there is a caveat: we should not go out of our way to confess something we know will harm another person, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

Ultimately, some relationships have to be superficial. Those are fine relationships that serve a purpose. Sometimes we learn who those people are when we’re on the shore, and sometimes we don’t learn that until we’re in the ocean with them.

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We do need confidants: a therapist, one or two trusted friends, or a partner. The one person you can vent to without receiving unwanted, unsolicited advice, who is honest enough to tell you when you have spinach in your teeth and a booger in your nose. We need to get things off our chest, and we need to deal with reality.

Choose wisely, grievers.

How do you decide who to share with and who not to? Do you feel at peace with the people you’re sharing with? Do they make you feel safe? Admit to yourself that you know who the people are who aren’t symmetrical in what are supposedly meaningful conversations. You really do know who the people are who create more chaos than peace in your mind. Stop exposing yourself to them.

Guarding your feelings is not the same as keeping them bottled up, and the result is spiritually powerful. Sharing too many thoughts scatters your life force and creates doubt in your mind, which grieving people don’t need more of. Not everyone deserves access to your inner world, so setting boundaries around it actually strengthens your life force and purifies your spirit. Quietness connects you to the divine, the source. And that, my friend, is powerful. Holding back on emotional sharing allows you to observe the thought, acknowledge it, and then pass it through more easily.

How do you set up a quiet boundary without drama with those who drain your energy? Breathe. Take a minute before you share. If you still want to share after a short time out, go ahead. Write the letter, but don’t send it—old advice, but it’s still great. Respond to questions with flat, neutral answers. Don’t share emotional hooks like joys, vents, or personal updates. Keep conversations on the surface, like the weather or the price of eggs. Don’t ask them any questions. When you are with them, visualize an energetic field or light protecting you. Finally, drop your expectations—this is where the way things are versus the way you think they ought to be comes into play. Accept that they can’t offer the transparency or emotional honesty you seek.

See how it feels. It might feel very good. Over time, it will feel powerful.

Yes, I’m giving advice. Take it or leave it. You’re precious. You deserve protection. Some people forfeit their right to your confidence. And that’s okay.

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Isabella is a blue-point Ragdoll, three years old, “with papers,” the shelter worker boasted. She was relinquished by her human’s children. This human, who was 85 years old when she bought Isabella from a breeder as a kitten, was told by her children that they would take care of Isabella when their mother no longer could. But her children confessed to the shelter that they actually had no intention of keeping her, and that’s how this beautiful girl ended up there when her human checked out a few weeks ago at age 88.

We are so fortunate to have Isabella.

Welcome to your new home, your forever home.

We learn things every day, even when we thought we knew them. We are disappointed every day. We are disappointed in people, but Isabella and I know that it’s okay because everyone’s karma is different. We’re grateful ours isn’t so bad.

When I talked to Jane at the shelter, she told me: children tell their elderly parents this story every day. And they say to each other, “Let’s get Mom a puppy or a kitten to keep her company because we have no intention of visiting her.” They tell her: “We will take care of the cat/dog, Mom!” When the person dies, they take the pet to the nearest shelter. It’s especially true when it comes to purebreds like Isabella that it will be an easy adoption, so the kids don’t give dumping a cat like this another thought. Also confirmed by the shelter, and also not true.

You see, while Isabella is a gorgeous long-haired cat, long-haired cats require some special care over and above a short-haired cat, and some people just want a plain old cat, and there is nothing wrong with that. People mistakenly think that long-haired cats shed more than short-haired ones, and of course, they don’t. They shed less. We’ve been Persian owners for 40 years, so I wasn’t surprised when the shelter called to ask if we could possibly take Isabella. Believe it or not, they are a hard sell at shelters. How could we say no to her?

Shelters get multiple abandoned, house, and bred cats and kittens every day, including many beautiful cats relinquished by their human’s children. As I said, the children lie to Mom and encourage her to get the kitten to keep her company. This is often the case when elderly people are taken to a breeder or pet store, since shelters often have rules against adopting out kittens and puppies to elderly people. Shelter staff frequently witness the fallout of families encouraging a pet for companionship without thinking through the long-term commitment and consequences.

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Then there are people who buy kittens and puppies whose children warn them they will not take care of the animal when mom or dad can’t, and those animals are relinquished to shelters too. It’s the selfish need of a person who must have a kitten or a puppy versus an older pet who needs a home. I know the current vogue is to do what you want, but every action has a consequence. That’s how the universe works. But this piece isn’t about shelter animals. It’s about disappointment.

That’s the thing: people disappoint us. Isabella taught me this lesson once again. Unlike a cat, we can talk to people about our feelings of disappointment. That conversation may result in healing and increased mindfulness or consciousness on the part of the disappointer. It might not.

We will likewise disappoint people. Sometimes there’s little we can do about it, and sometimes it is directly caused by our actions.

We all have karma we are walking through.

The “punishment” for the children in Isabella’s case, if you want to think of the fallout this way, is not in the deceit itself. It’s the state of mind. By acting with cruelty, the adult children have trapped themselves in a lower state of consciousness, and that can cut them off from grace, peace, and love. It’s what happens to us when we act in ways that reflect our lower consciousness. None of us are immune.

Isabella is caught in the karmic web as well. While her abandonment looks cruel, Ram Dass would remind us that souls find each other across lifetimes. The kitten’s brief intersection with the mother may have served a deep, unseen spiritual purpose before she was taken to the shelter. Her intersection with us is a divine blessing as well. Everything is unfolding perfectly in the universe according to law. The cat is now my guru. That still doesn’t mean that an 85-year-old should buy a puppy. We still have the ability to think and consult our hearts and conscience before we act.

I’m not mad at the children. I feel blessed by them, even though I would not urge my 85-year-old mother, if I had one, to adopt a kitten unless I was for sure going to take it when she said goodbye to the human plane. As I said, many shelters don’t even allow elderly people to adopt kittens, but breeders and pet stores are in it for the money. Not judging, just stating a fact—profit motives change the dynamics of all transactions in both good and bad ways.

Anyway, the ability to see this as part of the cosmic chain means I am practicing what Ram Dass called “two planes of consciousness thinking” On one plane, the human behavior was cruel; on a higher plane, it was the exact, necessary choreography required to bring two souls together for a moment in time, and it was also necessary for Isabella to find her way to us. We arrive where we are for a reason, including Isabella. I don’t know the purpose or the meaning, and I’m comfortable with that. Losing a child puts you in a great position to accept and live with the mysteries of the universe yet to be revealed. I don’t need to know why right now; I only accept what is.

Consider looking at disappointments in this way: they are both sad and necessary. They are ways of learning about ourselves, what we expect that may not be realistic, and boundaries that must be set. Because ultimately, our disappointment stems from the way we think things ought to be and the way other people should behave, instead of how things are and how people do, in fact, behave. We can learn from this how we do not want to behave. The disappointing behavior of others raises our consciousness; that’s a gift.

Feeling hurt or angry about someone’s bad behavior is not a spiritual failing. It’s actually a healthy aversion to shitty behavior. Suffering happens when we cling to the feelings around disappointment. Embrace and acknowledge the feeling, but don’t allow another person’s behavior to turn you bitter. Accept that their karma is difficult; accept that they are trapped in their own cosmic web of pain, which manifests itself as unkindness. We can have deep compassion for hurtful people, but we can also remove them from our lives. “I wish you well,” you can say, “But I can’t play this game.”

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Especially as grieving people, this realization helps us accept how things are, who we don’t want to be, and who we want to strive to be.

Peace.

When I first lost Bix, I was lost. My brain fog was bad. I had just signed a lucrative contract with an uber-successful entrepreneur to write her memoir when he died. When I sign a contract, it is ironclad. My thirty-plus-year career is hinged on my reliability, consistency, and commitment. When I say I am going to do something, I do it—even though the death of a child could have been covered under the Act of God clause that is in every single book contract I have ever negotiated, which is way more than fifty, because I was an acquiring editor for years before I started writing books professionally in 1999. I could have backed out. I didn’t.

Back to brain fog. In the months (even these past 4 years) after Bix died, I would think I had returned calls or texts when I hadn’t. I didn’t answer every note I received after Bix died. I remember hearing a woman in a grief group I was in say, “Well, I’m from the South. We put on our big girl pants and write thank-you notes. That’s what I did.”

Now I’m supposed to feel humiliation and contrition because Southern women are superior to women from the Northeast? Thank you, grief group, for helping me understand.

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I am from the Northeast. I went to finishing school. I write thank-you notes. My son died. I didn’t write thank-you notes to every one of the hundreds of people who sent letters and cards to me (and for the record, greeting cards of any kind do not require a formal acknowledgment of receipt). I lost checks for a nonprofit we asked people to donate to, not to us (but they sent them to us anyway) because my husband and I both had brain fog. I accept it.

I did go on to write that book. I was on my client’s yacht a month after Bix died, taking notes and interviewing her without saying one word about my son. It was weird, lying in my stateroom at night, looking out at the Palm Beach night sky. The ship was docked there because it’s one of the few deep-water docks in Florida that can accommodate what are called “super yachts.” I was so sad because Bix would have relished the fact that his mom was on a fancy ship. Writing has given me such amazing gifts and put me in extraordinary situations.

This was a case where I hadn’t written a proposal for the book, so I had no roadmap to follow. Frankly, I could have used some help organizing my thoughts. It took me almost 4 years to start writing Substack essays about my grief journey. Thinking is hard when you’re in grief. Fortunately, I have a strong writing practice since I have been a professional writer and editor since 1982. I overthink just about everything.

Still, there were days when I was in tears because I could not organize my thoughts from A to B, let alone from A to F back to C before getting to Z, which is often the case with memoirs. Anyone who says writing nonfiction isn’t “creative” has no business teaching writing to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

I finished that book over the course of a year, but turned down other projects for the next two years. About a year ago, I agreed to write a proposal for a new client, and that went on to find a publisher (as all of my proposals do; my track record is batting 1000). I recently wrote another proposal for a long-time client, and that resulted in a two-book deal with one of the big five houses. I fell back on old skills and pressed forward, but I won’t say it wasn’t exhausting, because it was.

My own book gets stuck because my brain doesn’t formulate complex ideas as it once did. Grief changes your brain; it changes us at the cellular level. If the time comes when I cannot for the life of me organize a thought, you better believe I will use AI. Fortunately, I have had the privilege of education and years of experience. I’ve been in publishing since 1982 and have been writing full-time since 1999. Plus, the universe, God, DNA (whatever triggers you the least), has bestowed a natural ability in me so I could overcome most of my brain blocks.

But I get it. That’s why AI detectors worry me. People who want to express themselves who don’t have the kind of experience I have, but are aching to say something important, may now be afraid to do so.

I want to talk to people in deep grief as well as marginalized people who may not have the tools or the privilege I had. To those for whom English is a second or third language. To neurodivergent people, who often write in a consistent, precise syntax that AI scanners consistently misidentify as machine-generated. I want you to speak your truth.

I want to encourage everyone to express themselves, even if you need help. Don’t let Substack bully you. I hope and pray potential readers can see through this mess, and don’t punish or ignore people from marginalized and trauma communities who want to express themselves just because their essays didn’t come back tested (by an AI program) as “100% human.”

Are there any polite Southern belles out there who have been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art? If so, they have undoubtedly seen someone sitting in front of a masterwork, copying it. They are not forgers. They are not going to pass it off as the real thing. They are learning to paint, and to communicate through art. Emerging writers emulate styles too. When I was in college, we were tasked with writing in the style of Hemingway, Updike, and on and on—not to steal their style, but to learn, for God’s sake. The late journalist, literary critic, and writer William Zinsser said, in his classic book On Writing Well, that writing well is learned by imitation. Does anyone object to any of these modes of learning? What privileges them over other modes of learning? I’ll wait.

And what do you think I do for a living? I write books for and with other people, an accepted and respected profession in publishing. I know there are big fat snobs out there who think people should write their own books because I’ve met them. Good for you. I believe that writing a good letter is a skill everyone should have, but writing 75000 cohesive words is not a general skill that everyone should have. Some people need help, so they hire people like me to collaborate with them. Now people are collaborating with AI; people who cannot financially access people like me. I am glad for that if they have something important they need to get off their chests, or even if they don’t.

I listen to people and capture their distinct voice on the page. That’s what I am known for in the industry and one reason people hire me. It takes skill and creativity. Working on a nonfiction book is not like writing a college research paper. I’ve never had to sell an online book writing course, start a YouTube channel, or cultivate a social media following. I could remain a nobody because I’m good at what I do: capturing people’s voices and telling their stories in a narrative fashion (on deadline).

AI has a “voice” too, and that is what AI detectors identify (using AI). I can capture the AI voice and write something 100% by me that will come back in an AI test as 80-100% AI-generated. I’ll say it again: AI has a “voice” that is replicable by humans who are skilled enough to do so. That is to say, the AI program that tests for AI is imperfect. Machines make mistakes.

That’s something else to think about. We trust in AI to tell us about AI because we don’t like AI? Okay…

The worriers out there may have forgotten or didn’t know that AI exists because of humans, cannot currently exist without them, and everything AI knows is based on human output. AI also isn’t going anywhere, and if you use the internet, apps on your phone, or at-home devices like Alexa, you use AI. Technology is a funny thing; it improves and is replaced, but it never goes away. In 1945, the New York City elevator operators union went on strike to retaliate against the threat of self-service elevators. The strike hastened the technology it sought to stop. Sit with that for a minute.

I’m personally not worried about AI. It doesn’t threaten me or my job. I know it can help people. Like any tool, it can also be misused by humans. Humans…we just can’t control them to our liking!

I had the privilege of working with futurist and technology innovator Martine Rothblatt on a book called Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality, published in September of 2014, by St. Martin's Press. It’s a book about AI and ahead of its time, like everything Martine does. So I feel fairly informed about AI. And I recommend the book. I’ve been paid for the work, so don’t think I’m linking to it for financial reasons. I’m linking to it because there are many people who would do well to educate themselves about AI.

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That’s who I “worry” about. The people announcing on Substack and other formats that they are “so happy” that an AI program is getting “all the muck” off of Substack. Trust me, bro’ there is plenty of trash that’s 100% human-written all over the place, and protesting AI ain’t gonna get rid of it. People who feel this way are uninformed elitists, and they’re advertising it.

Not long ago, Martine said that “the real transformation won’t be in the technology. It’ll be in how we choose to use it. Will we let it deepen our empathy, expand our understanding, and preserve our legacy, or will we let it reinforce our biases, isolate us in echo chambers, and erase the very things that make us human? The dance isn’t about who leads. It’s about how we move together, with intention, with care, with a shared commitment to meaning. And in that movement, I believe we will discover not just smarter machines, but wiser humans.”

In the meantime, while we all work on getting wiser, AI can help people who haven’t been able to access a writing education for all the reasons I listed earlier. Their stuff may be the “slop” some arrogant fop is referring to when he proclaims with glee that an AI program is going to fix Substack’s AI problem.

Everyone should be able to speak their truth; it’s how we understand each other and realize we all are one, all different versions of the same source.

AI is one of many accessible tools people can use to communicate their stories. It can help them learn. People can read dozens of writing books and develop a daily writing practice. They can find a teacher (which costs money, so teachers aren't available to everyone). They can go back to school or take a night class or workshop. But they shouldn’t wait to publish their work if they have something to say, if AI can help them say it. And they don’t have to explain themselves, either.

The question is, can readers have compassion and look to a piece for its truth? Do we have any discernment at all? How tragic.

This is the first and last time I will make a statement about AI because it does have a connection to the grief community, as I’ve explained. Have a nice weekend.

The above junk mail came at just the right time. The Sharpie comment is 100% human.

It would be so cool to be more like Pema Chödrön or Ram Dass and less like Karen Kelly.

I used to think that true spiritual maturity meant floating effortlessly above life’s friction. It’s a toxic spiritual trap. “Oh, there’s a thought…how cute…bye thought. See you later, thought.” Hugging it out with my inner child never worked for me. I’m really bad at it. I believed that if I were truly evolved, I would be happy all the time because I could embrace my unhappiness as the base ego-bitch it is, and move on. I thought I would take rejection with a serene smile, view every slight as a “lesson from the universe,” and perfectly detach from my own ego.

It hasn’t worked out that way, at least so far.

The truth is, when it comes to certain things, I’m a big baby. My ego gets bruised; it hurts. As a result, there are things I don’t want to expose myself to or go through. And I feel good about that. I’m not a high-level, passionately detached being who can absorb a public slight and transform it into instant enlightenment. I can be a dumb fuck when it comes to life lessons, and honestly? There are some lessons I just don’t want to learn right now. Some games I just don’t want to play.

But I don’t have to. Neither do you.

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We are told we should never stop learning, and I agree. I learn things every day, and I intentionally seek knowledge I don’t have. But some spiritual classrooms are or should be voluntary. And some of them are faulty. Be careful who your teachers are.

It can also hurt more than help to subject yourself to lessons that don’t have to be learned this second. At a certain point, not every test is worth taking. I am a 67-year-old human being whose heart is already carrying a massive, permanent weight. I don’t have to listen to lectures I didn’t sign up for.

When you walk through the loss of a child, your emotional bandwidth shrinks. You have no surplus currency to pay for unnecessary, superficial nonsense. Putting myself in positions to be hurt does not make me a better person; it makes me a wounded one. So, yes, grieving people can and should avoid additional pain. There. I said it. It’s not “strong” to expose yourself to nasty bitches. It doesn’t prove your worth.

Yet, for a long time, I kept putting myself into positions that bruised me. Rejections lead to conversations in my head: “Professionals are rejected all the time, Karen. You’re just being weak and sensitive. If you were really passionate…If you were truly an artist…if you were actually serious…”

For example, recently I gave my time and volunteered my professional labor as a writing teacher for a local organization, after which my students were unceremoniously excluded from a showcase. Other teachers were encouraged to enlist their students. I felt a familiar, sharp sting. The explanation didn’t seem rational: since my students were from the fall, and the other teachers’ classes were from the summer session, only they could be included. Um…that’s because they taught their classes in the summer and mine were taught in the fall. Whatever.

My inner critic immediately tried to weaponize my own spiritual language against me. It told me that because I felt resentful, I was a spiritual failure. It told me that I should subject myself to difficult voluntary situations anyway to “grow my humility.”

There is a difference between spiritual humility and emotional humiliation. Humility is realizing you are a beautiful “nobody” who doesn’t need external validation to exist. Humiliation is forcing yourself to walk into spaces that actively devalue you, just to prove you can take the punch. And yes, I also know it is a product of the ego. That’s why we can also allow ourselves to feel overpowered by feelings of humiliation, which are, of course, only feelings. Again, I get that. We can process them and move through them, but we do not have to create a backlog by exposing ourselves to new humiliations. We have to be intentional about what we are choosing to do and why.

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I used to think that with these rejections, the universe was wagging its finger at me and saying, “You need to be brought down a notch.” I’ve spent my life looking at high horses, not riding them, so that can’t be it. Now, I believe that the universe is saying maybe it’s time to do something else and stop offering my raw, grieving heart up to be scratched by casual acquaintances who don’t truly see me because I am blurry in those situations.

I don’t know if I will ever be sharp in certain circumstances. Do I mourn that? Yes, of course I do. Is that okay? Yes.

I am not walking away from certain things because I think I am better than anyone. They are finding joy and community in building their identities in certain places, and that is a beautiful thing for them. I’m leaving because I am the one who is too fragile right now. This isn’t me outgrowing the room; this is me admitting that the room hurts, and I need to go home. I don’t want to be around the insecurities of other people. I’ve got enough of my own.

Ram Dass and Pema Chödrön didn’t become spiritual giants because they stopped feeling anger, injustice, jealousy, or grief. They became who they were because they stopped pretending not to feel those things. They stopped playing politics with their own souls.

Pema’s work reminds us that our struggles don’t need to be resolved before we can find peace. It shows us how to turn toward our pain with tenderness and curiosity, and allow that tenderness to ripple outward. Pema never said we have to seek out painful situations. Life presents its own pains naturally; there is no need to go hunting for trouble. Just work with reality; don’t run from it or run into places you don’t have to go. One of her central Buddhist principles, cause no harm, includes ourselves.

We’re never alone in our anxiety, heartbreak, or uncertainty. By being honest with ourselves about these experiences, we can meet our humanity with compassion. True spiritual growth doesn’t demand that we become bulletproof. It only asks that we become radically honest. Sometimes, the most sacred thing you can do is look at your inner “big baby,” nod at your own fragile self-worth with complete compassion, and say, “I am choosing to stop putting myself in positions that reinforce unhappiness.”

You don’t have to stay on the chopping block to prove you’re strong. You can take your marbles and go home. Not because you are or aren’t enlightened, but because you have been through enough, and your personal peace is non-negotiable.

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I used to think that being a spiritual person meant staying in spaces that made me feel like shit and smiling contemplatively. After Bix died, I decided that quietly walking away from something was not the same as running away. This was especially true when I felt I was expected to think something was great that wasn’t (in my opinion), or that a performance was genius (when I thought it was monkeyish and over the top), and so on.

Losing my son lowered my tolerance for what seems fake to me. I don’t deny my opinions anymore, though I don’t feel the need to express them constantly. But I have just as much right to think something sucks as someone else has to think something is great.

It’s not that I believe most people are being fake, but I do think there is a certain fakeness in being “politic” or polite in various communities, and it’s tiresome.

Most of us are simply trying to get through the day without creating unnecessary conflict. We tell someone they were wonderful when we thought they were merely fine or even terrible. We clap like trained seals because everyone else is clapping. We compliment things we don’t particularly admire because it seems kinder than saying nothing at all.

Once my heart was broken open after Bix died, I asked myself how many times I want to sit and watch someone make faces and call it acting, and pretend it is. How many books do I want to read because everyone urged me to read them, even though I know I’m going to hate them?

I had a colleague in a newsroom I worked in who gave me a copy of The Kite Runner. I get that it’s a great book because everyone says so. It’s on lists of great books I am supposed to revere. I know there will be people reading this who have read The Kite Runner. I don’t want to read the fucking Kite Runner. Yet every day he’d ask me if I had read it yet. I know he wanted to share his enthusiasm for it, but why can’t he do that without me having to read it? Someday maybe I’ll read it, but I’ve got a pile of books I want to read first. Please, I’m begging you out there, please don’t tell me I have to read The Kite Runner. I don’t have to. Do you see what I mean?

The other thing I notice is that the lower the stakes, the more political and power-hungry people become. They want authority over things I can’t really imagine. I’ve seen it in publishing, volunteer organizations, churches, community theater, neighborhood groups, and just about anywhere else people gather to share a common interest. It’s human nature. We organize ourselves into tribes and develop reality-TV hierarchies, alliances, rivalries, and unwritten rules.

Before anyone decides I’m talking about “those people,” let me save you the trouble. I’m talking about me too. I like being appreciated. I enjoy hearing that I did a good job. I have an ego, just like everyone else.

After quietly stepping away from an HOA committee I chaired, specific writing projects, and certain relationships, I didn’t expect to hear “Don’t go! We need you!” In fact, I assumed they wouldn’t. Anyone who has worked in an office for a number of years, as I have, knows that after the sheet cake going-away party, nobody remembers you were there on Friday and now not there on Monday. Nobody really misses you.

I find that comforting.

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The people who truly love us don’t need weekly meetings or volunteer projects to remember us. They’re woven into our lives in a completely different way. Everyone else is simply moving through the same revolving door we are.

Realizing that has made it much easier for me to say no.

Ram Dass once suggested silently saying to someone, “I love you, but I’m not going to play your game.” I’ve always liked that because it leaves everyone’s dignity intact. You can do what you need to do with people as long as your heart is open.

Loving people and joining them are not always the same thing. Wishing someone well doesn’t obligate me to keep walking beside them. Sometimes the kindest thing I can do for them and for me is to step aside, let them continue on their path, and trust that I can continue on mine without apology.

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I haven’t been sleeping well. When that happens, I start asking myself questions like, “What am I doing here? Why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing?” I want to be clear about what kind of question this is, because I know how it can sound out of context. This isn’t “I don’t want to be here anymore.” It’s closer to “What is this here actually for, now that so much has changed?” A purpose question, not an exit question. Most parents who’ve lost a child ask themselves some version of this. So do plenty of people who haven’t. For me, though, the questions carry weight. How should I be spending my time? What am I actually FOR?

A few days later, I was back in the produce section of my local grocery store when I started to think about all the food writing I’d done for both books and magazine articles. I smiled, wondering if anyone still made any of the recipes I had developed over those years, including a mole soup and a hot chocolate made with sweet potato. People used to clip recipes from magazines and newspapers. I have an entire album of clipped recipes my mother saved. We don’t do that anymore because we have the internet. But maybe someone’s index card box, somewhere, still has one of my recipes.

Do people still read The Secret of the Secret, a book I wrote almost twenty years ago? They must. I still get the occasional royalty check. I wonder what they think when they read it. Do they read Start the Conversation by Ganga Stone, a book about death I had acquired and shepherded to publication when I edited books instead of writing them? I reread Ganga’s book recently. It’s a strange irony that I once helped bring into the world the very book I would need for myself decades later, for reasons I couldn’t have imagined then.

I’ve collaborated on more than fifty books. I’ve written and tested more recipes than I can count. I know a lot of people. I got married. I made friends. I had a son. By any reasonable measure, I must have had an impact somewhere along the line.

Here’s the part I don’t usually say out loud: some of that impact probably hasn’t been positive.

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I have said unkind things. Funny, sometimes. Sharp, usually. I remember once, some guys were going on about a woman’s body, her low-cut tops, all of it, and I said, “Well, if I paid that much for mine, I guess I’d show them off, too.” Funny. Bitchy. I said it and meant it, and part of me still thinks it landed exactly where I wanted it to. But still…must you, Karen? A wise man once said nothing, as a friend of mine always says.

There was also a time when someone wanted to publish a mediocre piece of writing because “everyone had heard of” the topic. “Well, everyone’s heard of syphilis too, but no one wants it,” I said. That one still makes me laugh.

Here’s the part that unsettles me more than the snarky lines do. People have told me, more than once, that something I said to them helped. Changed something. Stuck. And I don’t remember saying it. Not the words, not the moment, sometimes not even the situation or setting.

And I do try to be encouraging. Life is hard. Lifting someone is easy and only takes a second. I tell people they look beautiful when it strikes me. I’ve told a stranger behind the register that her earrings were the best thing I’d seen all week. Or that I appreciate work someone did no matter where it happens. None of it takes more than five seconds. I have no way of knowing what any of it becomes in someone else’s life, and that’s exactly the point. It doesn’t need to be tracked to matter.

That should tell you something about how legacy is actually built. It’s not the stuff you’re proud enough to remember. It’s not curated. Someone is out there right now carrying a sentence you don’t recall saying, and it’s doing work in their life that you’ll never get credit for (or never get to take back).

I’m not going to pretend those moments came out of nowhere. Most of the time, when I was unkind, it was because someone had hurt me first, or because I was afraid. Fear dressed up as wit is still fear.

Here’s the other thing I don’t say out loud much: I was a nice little girl who learned not to be. That’s not something to brag about, although I see it today dressed up as something to be proud of, in the Boss Babe world, where snark gets marketed as confidence and cynicism gets sold as swagger. Cynicism, judgment, sarcasm: I inherited those the way you inherit anything in a family, absorbed so early that you mistake them for your own personality instead of recognizing them as somebody else’s legacy and hurt, handed to you before you were old enough to refuse them. I thought it was intelligence. Now I understand it as just a bad habit, an old one, older than me.

Something shifted after Bix died, and I can’t undo it.

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The old version of me still rears her ugly head, mostly when I’m tired. I’ve already mentioned I haven’t been sleeping. Grief does that. It leaves you with its own legacy: a disrupted nervous system, wrecked sleep, questions at 3 a.m. that don’t let go easily. When I’m tired enough, everything hurts. People hurt. The games we play with each other hurt, and I find I don’t want to play them anymore. I want to be kind, but I also want to tell the truth.

For instance, I used to be more than happy to talk to people about publishing, and I still am, but I have also stopped pretending it’s easy or that the odds are for them instead of against them. And I know people don’t want to hear that. How do I encourage people and still tell the truth? I encourage them to write their stories and leave it at that.

The softening didn’t happen in a noble moment of grace, but in exhaustion. I got too tired to keep handing down what had been passed down to me. I can still be clever. I’ve just started asking myself what it costs and whether it’s worth the price. Sometimes it will be. Most times, not.

That’s the strange arithmetic of losing a child. It doesn’t make you a saint. It makes you someone who has run out of patience with unnecessary cruelty, including your own. But once in a while, the darkness comes, and I have to remember the wise men.

Here is the thing I circle back to: the reason I was thinking about that recipe and those books this morning, instead of anything useful, is that legacy isn’t what we build on purpose. It’s not the dedication page, the byline, or the thing we hoped people would remember. It’s not the times that we perform as a Good Person.

It’s the recipe someone still makes without knowing your name. It’s the sentence in a book that changed how a stranger thought about something, with no idea who put it there. And it’s also the sharp thing you said to someone twelve years ago that they still think about sometimes, even though you don’t remember saying it.

We leave an impact behind constantly, in both directions, whether we intend to or not. Most of us also carry a legacy we never asked for, passed down before we had any say in it: patterns, behaviors, and reflexes mistaken for personality. But we’re grown-ups now, and we can change that.

Most of us only audit the good side of what we’re building. We like to think of legacy as the highlight reel. We don’t usually sit with the other ledgers. The one we inherited without consent. The one we’re handing off the same way, unless we catch ourselves. I’m sitting with all of it today, and it’s not comfortable. It’s not supposed to be.

Bix didn’t write fifty books. He didn’t have decades to build a legacy the way I have. Yet the impact he had on people is no smaller than mine. After he died, three teenage boys showed up at my door. One of them told me that Bix had saved his life.

Losing him taught me what I didn’t ask to learn: legacy is never about output. It’s never about how much you produce or how many people know your name. It’s about what’s left in someone else after you’ve been in the room with them, however briefly. That means the nasty comment counts, too. It means the impact is happening right now, today, in whatever room you’re in, whether or not you’re paying attention.

I believe, more than almost anything else these days, that where you are and when you are there can shift the entire trajectory of a life, yours or someone else’s, in ways too subtle to notice as they happen. A compliment lands on the one day somebody needed it. A small kindness to a child becomes the thing they remember at forty, when they’re deciding whether to be kind themselves.

Sliding Doors is a movie about one woman and one train she does or doesn’t catch. Two entirely different lives unspool from that one split-second event. A clever premise for a film. Also, a profound spiritual lesson.

Ram Dass, my teacher, spent most of his life trying to help people understand that we affect the world in every moment, whether we mean to or not, because none of us are as separate as we seem. He didn’t treat that as a nice idea for a greeting card. He meant it as a fact about how the universe is built. Late in his life, after the stroke that nearly killed him, he talked about what he called fierce grace, the idea that the worst thing that happens to you can be the very thing that cracks you open to more connection rather than less.

Like Ram Dass, I didn’t choose my curriculum. It was assigned.

Ram Dass still had a stroke. Bix still died. Nobody hands you a different curriculum because you got tired of the one you were given. What changes is what you do with it once it’s in your hands. That’s where awakening lives. Not in erasing the assignment, but in how consciously you meet it. It’s all unfolding perfectly, somehow, which is a strange place to stand.

Ram Dass often described the path as continuous and unglamorous: take every experience, including the negative ones, as mere steps on the path, grist for the mill, and proceed. Suffering, he said, is part of our training program for becoming wise. But here’s the part people leave out when they quote him: once you’re actually on the path, tired or not, you don’t get to step off it.

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You may take a detour, but you get back on track eventually. That’s how awakening works. Even on days when it feels like a cruel joke, or when you’d trade every ounce of insight for one full night’s sleep. You don’t get to un-know what you know.

Understanding that we’re all connected and that it’s all unfolding exactly as it should, including the suffering, isn’t a state you visit and leave. Once you’re on the path, you see your role in easing the suffering you can, because we were never as separate as we looked to begin with.

Pema Chödrön offers a similar idea with a simpler image: a pebble in a pond, the ripples continuing long after you’ve stopped watching. Jack Kornfield tends to convey it through story rather than doctrine, but the point is the same one Ram Dass was making. None of them treats interconnection as a nice sentiment. They treat it as the actual physics of being alive around other people, with cause and effect running in directions too small and too fast for us to ever fully track.

I know this is true in the other direction, too, because I’ve lived it. My son was in a certain place at a certain time with a certain person. That combination, nothing else, is what took him. Not a lesson. Not a reason. Just where he happened to be when the moment arrived. It was his curriculum and mine at once. It is also our shared legacy. It is part of the legacy of everyone who knew him.

If place and time can do that, if they can be the entire mechanism behind the worst thing that has ever happened to me, then they can just as easily be the entire mechanism behind something good. I have to believe both halves of that. Neither one makes sense without the other. In 24 hours, there is dark and light. This is the way the universe works in all aspects.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion here. Trying to “have an impact” is its own kind of ego, a way of making kindness performative, seen, remembered, and credited. That’s not what I mean.

What I mean is closer to just being in love, as a state, not a strategy. Not performing kindness for the ledger. Not tracking what it does. The same way the good impact I can’t remember making apparently happened anyway, without me trying, without me even watching. Maybe that’s the actual aim: not managing your legacy, but shedding the part of you that needs to manage it at all, so what’s left is just love, moving through you into whoever happens to be standing there. Raise the room. Alleviate what suffering you can, just by the state you’re in when you walk into it.

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Bonus Recipes From My Archives

I unearthed a couple of old recipes, and they still stand—according to my reel feed, they might even be trendy again. Enjoy.

Mole-Inspired Soup

The great Mexican food authority Diana Kennedy says the best-known moles are those from Puebla and Oaxaca, and contain small amounts of chocolate. They are complicated sauces, requiring cooks to spend many hours scraping pulp from a variety of chilies and grinding nuts and seeds, two other hallmark ingredients of this celebratory sauce. While this soup is neither authentic nor time-consuming to make, it honors the spirit, tradition, and flavors of mole. It’s garnished with shredded turkey since mole is traditionally made with this poultry, as well as with almonds and raisins, two other ingredients used in traditional moles. The soup can also be garnished with avocado cubes and minced red onion. The result is a healthy, hearty, and complex-tasting soup.

Serves 4 as a main course, 6 as a starter

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons red onion, chopped

1/3 cup roasted sweet red pepper puree*

1-inch piece of dried ancho chili

1 1/2-teaspoons chipotle chili in adobo sauce

1/3-cup natural peanut butter (no salt or sugar added)

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon allspice or cinnamon

2 tablespoons pure cocoa (not Dutch process)

Sea salt

Freshly ground pepper

1 15.5-ounce can of black beans, drained and rinsed

5 cups mushroom broth (or turkey broth)

1/3-ounce 75% dark chocolate

1-cup fresh corn

For garnish:

4 tablespoons plain yogurt

4 teaspoons currants or raisins

16 toasted almonds, roughly chopped

1 cup shredded turkey

Cubed avocado (optional)

Minced red onion (optional)

* To make red pepper puree, place 2-3 roasted sweet red peppers in a blender and whir for about 1 to 2 minutes until pureed.

Heat the oil in a stock or soup pot and sauté the red onions over medium-high heat until just wilted, about 2-3 minutes. Lower the heat to medium-low and add the red pepper puree, ancho chili, chipotle in adobo, peanut butter, cumin, allspice (or cinnamon), and cocoa. Cook for about 1-2 minutes.

Add the beans and one cup of the stock, then stir to blend. Carefully transfer the mixture to a blender and blend until smooth. Pour the thick, smooth mixture back into the stockpot. Add two cups of stock to the blender and whir to loosen any remaining mixture. Pour that stock back into the pot, then add the two remaining cups of stock. Use a whisk to blend the liquid until smooth. Add the 70% chocolate. It will melt quickly, so continue whisking to incorporate it into the soup. Add the fresh corn and let it cook through, about 5-6 minutes.

Serve immediately or keep over low heat until ready to serve. The soup can also be stored in a covered container in the refrigerator overnight, then gently reheated and served the next day.

Garnish each bowl of soup with 1 tablespoon of yogurt, 1 teaspoon of currants or raisins, 4 chopped almonds, and 1/4 cup shredded turkey.

Mayan Style Hot Chocolate*

Serves 4

See if your friends and family can guess what the secret ingredient is. Mine couldn’t. And my husband, Randy, a self-proclaimed choco-holic, said this is the best hot chocolate he has ever had. Agreed – it’s unbelievably delicious.

3/4 cup pureed sweet potato (about one small sweet potato)

3 cups organic milk or organic soy or nut milk (I use cow’s milk)

1/2-cup water

6 1/2 ounces 75% chocolate, broken up

1/2-teaspoon cinnamon

1/8-teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

Peel and cube the sweet potato, and simmer in water until soft – about 10 minutes.

In a blender, puree the sweet potato with one cup of the milk until the mixture is completely smooth and liquefied – about 1 minute.

Put the puree, the remaining milk, chocolate, and spices into a saucepan over medium-low heat. Whist until the chocolate melts. Don’t let the liquid come to a boil. Serve hot in mugs.

* This mixture can also be used in an ice cream maker to make chocolate sorbet.

I’m fortunate to live near the beach, where the universe speaks clearly.

A lament I often see in grief groups is parents asking if their children are still “here” in some form. Where are they? Are they with me? Where did they go? Heartbreaking. I have asked these questions myself. I still ask them, even though I have some answers. These are questions that transcend time and space, history and science, knowing and unknowing. And yet there is always someone in these groups, sometimes more than one, who is compelled to display their pain in a hurtful way: “I don’t believe in God. Your child is dead. Your child is gone. God does not exist. The all-powerful universe in your mind is a fairy tale, except for what scientists know about it from space travel and telescopic observation.”

These statements are as hurtful and alarming as when someone imposes unsolicited specific religious beliefs on a grieving person. Maybe more so. They invalidate personal pain by forcing a specific worldview that dismisses the unique way a person processes loss. A directive like “there is no God” can make the grieving person feel alienated and isolated just as religious proclamations can. Nonbelievers can impose an emotional burden by forcing a vulnerable person to defend their worldview in a crisis just as fiercely as an enthusiastic believer can. Finally, such statements disrupt safe spaces like grief groups, which only work when participants feel safe, heard, and free from judgment or mandates.

If you don’t believe me, go inside a child-loss grief group and spend a little time there.

Other things I’ve heard: “I stopped believing in God when my child died.” “There’s no such thing as a higher power.” “There’s no old man with a white beard pulling the strings from a cloud.” “My church traumatized me, and I got out as soon as I could when I learned from insert-name-of-hand-picked-scientist-here that God is just a man-made story.”

Ah-ha. This admission reveals a profound, hidden truth about how beliefs are formed. While many non-believers claim their worldview is built on cold, hard logic, the reality is that for many, atheism is a coping mechanism for childhood trauma, a shield against religious abuse, and a psychological bid for absolute safety from it.

Data consistently shows that a massive percentage of people who leave religion do so because of Religious Trauma Syndrome or direct emotional abuse suffered within a church community. It results in confusion between a personal relationship with Source, God, Gaia, the Universe, call it/him/her whatever makes you happy (spirituality), and Big R Religion.

When we look closely at the loudest voices shouting that “dead is the end,” we begin to see that “logic” is often just a shield hiding an unhealed wound. Take Madalyn Murray O'Hair, arguably the most famous and aggressive atheist in American history. She didn't arrive at her militant stance through a quiet, neutral study of astrophysics. O’Hair’s fury was deeply personal, rooted in rejection by a man who refused to marry her and validate their child because of the rigid religious doctrines of the Catholic Church. Her life became a crusade to tear down the system she felt had wounded her. Madalyn would overturn bingo tables in church halls; her tantrums made public for all to see. She would berate any debater on TV. Imagine if social media existed when he was alive. But really, a cowardly man used the Catholic Church as cover for his infidelity and then abandonment of her and their child. O’Hair insisted on holding the blameless accountable.

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As the trauma-sufferer develops, declaring “God doesn’t exist” might be the only way their psyche can find safety. It is an act of self-defense. If there is no God, then the abusive system that terrorized them loses its power. Their aggressive stance against your belief isn’t actually an argument about the universe; it could be a manifestation of unhealed childhood trauma. When they see you trusting in a loving Creator, which is not a spiritual bypass, it triggers their unresolved pain, and they lash out to protect themselves from the “monster” they believe religion to be, which doesn’t have much to do with what is going on in the Universe or the spirit, of course.

The idea of a supreme Source or a “Creator God” implies a vast, untamable wildness in the universe that cannot be controlled or predicted by human mathematics. To a specific psychological personality type, that lack of control is terrifying.

Believing that humans are the highest order of intelligence allows the scientific ego to feel completely secure. If we are the ones who will eventually explain everything, then we are in control of the universe. It turns the human mind into the ultimate anchor, protecting them from the existential vulnerability of a cosmos they cannot master.

Where is the evidence, the data, that secularism, secular humanism, and atheism have made the world a better place? Yes, many wars are fought over religion, but I also know this is often a human pretext, just like Madelyn Murray O’Hair’s officer lover did. One of the ugliest genocidal wars going on right now in real time is based on a secular political ideology couched as representative of an ancient religion. It isn’t.

There is a specific kind of person who reacts to the vast, terrifying mysteries of existence by adopting a patronizing intellectual pose. You’ve probably met them online, at dinner parties, or lurking in the comments sections of grief forums and right here on Substack. They aren’t actual scientists (guffaw!) or deep philosophers (chortle). They are proud secularists or casual atheists who practice scientism (another ism) or rationalism (yup) and carry an absolute, unshakable faith that human logic will eventually explain everything. To them, the human soul is just a silly, illogical puzzle we haven’t solved yet, and consciousness is a chemical algorithm waiting to be mapped out. They view the entire cosmos as a math problem that mankind will inevitably master given enough time.

It is a mindset that prides itself on being “smart” and “superior” (as every other ism tends to do), but when you lose a child, its fundamental bankruptcy is exposed. An atheist I know who has lost a son is angry and triggered by any talk of God or the source of the universe, specifically because of the stated experience he had in a church when he was a child. Indeed, he does everything in his power to prevent God from being discussed in public forums. If he’s secure in his knowledge, why the vitriol? Why is he threatened? Doesn’t he know that church doctrines are manmade (unlike the Truth, which is cosmic and hasn’t changed for millions of years), just as the scientific method is manmade? And therefore fallible?

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Getting back to those in grief groups confronted with the anger and suffering of people traumatized by organized religion. Grief doesn’t live in some hypothetical future tense where science finally has all the answers. When your world fractures into a million pieces, the casual arrogance of people who treat your agony as a biological math problem isn’t just annoying. It can feel like a cold brush-off from a worldview that is, at its core, just another rigid, unfeeling, and bigoted “ism” like racism, sexism, and nationalism. Isms are based on the idea that a certain group (in this case, humans) holds systemic power, sets cultural rules, and is viewed as the “standard” for what is normal, good, or rational. In the humanists’ view, “mankind” is the top of the food chain.

We are told by modern culture that Humanism is a philosophy of ultimate compassion, a celebration of human reason, and a liberation from the dogmatic, fearful superstitions of old. We are told it is a safe, rational place to land.

But when humanism collides with the catastrophic loss of a child, its mask slips. You quickly realize that humanism isn’t always an objective window into reality. Like any other “ism,” it carries its own rigid dogmas, intellectual bigotry, and the capacity to inflict profound suffering on those already drowning.

Humanism explicitly crowns the human mind and its favorite tool, the scientific method, as the ultimate judge of what is real. It demands empirical, testable, and replicable data before it will allow you to believe anything.

But grief does not live in a laboratory. And scientists make mistakes. All the time. Stephen Hawking’s most notable scientific errors and oversimplifications include the Black Hole Information Paradox, his description of Hawking Radiation, and his Primordial Black Hole Dark Matter hypothesis. Einstein was wrong about a static universe, quantum entanglement, black holes, and gravitational waves. Linus Pauling, Charles Darwin (one of the gods of secular humanists), Fred Hoyle, and Thomas Edison also made big mistakes and miscalculations. I can go on, but I won’t.

Looking at a weeping mother or father and handing them a textbook on evolutionary biology isn’t rational; it’s inhumane. Just as it is life-wise cruel to tell a grieving mother her question about where her child is unserious and illogical. It prioritizes the abstract, man-made rules of an intellectually fallible system over the immediate, visceral reality of love and pain. It turns “science” into a dogmatic church and its proponents into a new priesthood that polices how we are allowed to feel if we’re truly intelligent and rational.

Why does someone in deep, suffocating grief need to care about this? Why should a grieving parent even bother analyzing the philosophical flaws in an “ism”?

They shouldn’t have to. The only reason it matters is that this rigid, “smart” mindset dominates our modern culture, acting like an invisible electric fence that shocks us when we try to heal. It penetrates into grief groups, as I noted at the top of this piece.

A rainbow in front of our old lakehouse.

When you lose a child, the belief that they still exist in some form isn’t an intellectual hobby or a philosophical debate. It is our oxygen. It is the thin thread that keeps us attached to sanity and survival. It may also be Truth. Our souls are healing a catastrophic wound by maintaining a connection to our child across the veil.

When someone barges into that fragile, sacred space and aggressively insists that “dead is the end,” they aren’t merely sharing an opinion. To a grieving parent’s psyche, that statement feels like a violent attempt to rip away the oxygen tank, a second execution of our child. That is not a person living “their best life” despite claims to the contrary.

Skeptics have told me I am just comforting myself. It’s a good thing I don’t feel the need to make them feel better. But I admit it. I am open to the mystery, but I also know I may be confirming my own biases—just as atheists confirm theirs when they pick and choose their experts.

I have had many cosmic experiences that help me understand that humans are a minor player in the universe. But if we are all just guessing, if we are all just choosing a bias to help us cope with the vast unknowability of death, then I am going to choose the bias toward love and mystery. More will be revealed.

The secular mindset is biased toward finality, materialism, and the “dead is the end” view because it is terrified of being tricked. It seeks control, predictability, and the safety of a laboratory. This bias protects the ego from being wrong. I am comfortable living in the mystery but also knowing we’re not the be-all and end-all of what’s going on in the cosmos. Have you seen us lately? We can’t possibly be the best thing going in the cosmos.

My bias protects my heart, honors my child, and keeps a sacred bond alive. It allows me to access things in the universe that are hidden from nonbelievers. I choose the bias that lets me talk to my child and hear from him. I choose the bias that keeps me breathing. My colleague’s bias leads to a cold, empty room. My bias leads me back to my child.

Bix and I continue our relationship. It has deepened since he left the earth plane.

To the rigid humanist, talking to a child who has passed away is dismissed as a delusion, a weak coping mechanism, or a refusal to accept reality. But love doesn’t obey the laws of thermodynamics. No wonder the atheists I know who have lost spouses and children are so openly lonely and angry. I have compassion for them because I understand how painful that emptiness is.

Why must we demand a receipt from the universe before we allow ourselves to extend our love into the unseen? We don’t.

When we give up the bigotry of needing to be “scientifically correct” about our grief, a vast, softer, and more compassionate landscape opens up. We admit that human beings and the tools we have invented over the last few centuries don’t come close to representing the absolute boundary of the cosmic plane.

The spiritual teacher Ram Dass used to say that we must polish the mirror of our minds, free of anger, to truly see. When we encounter people locked in the aggressive stance of nonexistence, we don’t have to fight them on their terms. We can recognize that they are simply blind to the light of the soul, desperately clinging to a tiny, man-made box because the mystery terrifies them. We don’t have to let a blind person describe the sunrise to us.

We can loosen our grip on their expectations. We can step out of the sterile laboratory of the mind and into the ancient, sacred rhythm of human intuition.

Talking to your child, feeling their presence, and staying fully open to the possibility that they have returned to a grander Source isn’t an escape from reality. It is the natural, healing extension of a bond that death cannot sever and that love makes infinite.

Humanism tells us to look into the mirror of the human mind for all our answers. But when you are grieving a child, that mirror is shattered. It is time to stop trying to fix the mirror, stop worshiping the “ism,” and simply look out into the beautiful, mysterious dark. And speak their name.

Remember, humans developed the scientific method. Which means it is imperfect. Love is not.

If you’re interested in a different take on grief and healing than you may see elsewhere, please consider subscribing. It’s free. Peace.

Some yummies for a recent party. There’s more you can’t see. Still, it wasn’t enough.

We enter grief groups seeking sanctuary, but often find a theater of resentment. In online forums and in the circles of folding chairs where bereaved parents gather, I hear a recurring, agonizing refrain. It is a collective cry for a world that refuses to bend to our catastrophic new reality. I understand that because I felt it too in the weeks and even months after Bix died. But I didn’t want to drown in it. I knew that from the start.

I listened to the stories and recognized the pain, but I also saw the trap we build for ourselves. First, there is resentment of ordinary life. One mother in a group recently shared her fury: “Everyone else around me just lives their life like nothing ever happened. My sister and her boyfriend go on these vacations. My boyfriend gets out of bed and goes out with his friends. I’m stuck. My world was destroyed when my daughter died, and it pisses me off that they are functioning.” Underneath her rage lies a silent, impossible demand: Because my world stopped, yours should too.

To be clear, I repeat: I understand the pain. It seemed weird to me too, to see people going about their business after Bix died.

Then there is the martyr narrative. Another parent posted in a private online grief forum: “Grieving sucks because we have to learn to suffer in silence because no one wants to hear about our child.” It sounds profound, but it is a double falsehood. We do not have to suffer in silence—we can speak our child’s name whenever we choose. If people don’t like it, so what? It’s their problem. Unless we have a silent demand that they must listen to and offer us something in return. Because tucked inside that complaint is the entitled assumption that the world is obligated to drop everything and accommodate our need to talk about our loss on demand. It isn’t.

It’s also true that people are uncomfortable around grieving parents talking about their dead children because we don’t talk about death enough in this culture.

We see this twist again when people say, “I learned to hide my emotions because that is what society expects.” My honest question is: Why should society accommodate us, and, practically, how could it? What are we actually asking for? Again, I am in agreement that we, as a society, avoid discussions of death at all costs. The price of avoidance is high.

The overarching prayer or wish in this feeling is that general kindness is often lacking, and it is a good idea to assume everyone is carrying something heavy because they are, and act accordingly in all social transactions. That doesn’t mean walking on eggshells. It simply means acting with an open heart.

However, when we don’t define what we need to the people around us, friction turns into psychological warfare. Assuming that everyone can fulfill these needs also sets us up for unhappiness, because not everyone will be able to provide what we need emotionally.

I watched a bitter online fight unfold between two people. One friend lived far away but insisted she was doing her best to be there for her friend by calling, checking in, sending cards, and praying. The grieving mother lashed out, blocking and unblocking her on social media, screaming that the friend wasn’t “there enough”—yet never once defining what the “right way” to be there looked like. The other woman was understandably confused. “What do you want from me?” she asked. “YOU SHOULD KNOW!” shouted the woman in all caps. She should?

When we lose a child, we become desperate for accommodation. But on a psychological and spiritual level, we have to look in the mirror and ask: Are we expecting too much?

My teacher, Ram Dass, spent decades talking about how each of our paths is unique. He often reminded us that we can’t force another person to walk our spiritual curriculum, nor can we demand that they inhabit our emotional plane. When we get angry that others are “just living their lives,” we’re fighting their karma. Expecting a clumsy, fast-moving world to pause its axis because our world was shattered is a recipe for permanent bitterness. If we expect the world to meet us in our grief, at least some of the time, we have an obligation to be clear about what that means and be willing to accept that it will not always be provided by others.

But there is another side to this ledger. While grief can tempt us to demand unreasonable accommodations from the outside world, it also offers us a profound, unexpected gift: it wakes us up. It shatters the lifelong habit of over-accommodating everyone else.

Before my son Bix died, I was a chronic accommodator. I smoothed the edges, bent my schedule, and swallowed my preferences to make sure everyone around me was comfortable. Then the worst happened. When your world is leveled, you suddenly find you no longer have the energy to fund other people’s convenience.

I felt this shift track perfectly during a recent interaction. A friend asked if I could rearrange our plans for a second time because someone else wanted her to do something at the same time. In the past, I would have folded.

Instead, I heard myself say: “I can accommodate you, which I’ve already done, but I can’t accommodate someone I don’t know. I can’t do it. I’ll go alone, or I’ll go with you at the time I’ve already rescheduled for you once. But I won’t rearrange my schedule a second time for someone else.” When I hung up, I was proud of myself. It felt clean. It felt good.

Grief forces us to confront a serious question: How much should we accommodate others, and how much should we expect of ourselves? Do we actually have to put everyone else’s needs ahead of our own all the time?

When you stop playing the accommodate-everyone game, you start to see how absurd that self-imposed expectation truly is. I recently threw a party. True to my nature, I made sure there was a massive spread for every potential dietary restriction—meat-eaters, vegans, vegetarians, gluten-free, dairy-free, fish-free, and so on. Something for everyone. Abundance. When I mentioned to one guest that a specific salad contained nuts, she glared at me with pure, indignant fury, as if to say, How dare you make this salad with nuts? “I can’t eat that,” she barked. There were dozens of other nut-free dishes on the table. Five years ago, I would have run to the fridge to see if I could make another salad. On this day, I simply directed her to the 4 or 5 dishes that accommodated her gluten-free, meat-free, nut-free, and dairy-free needs.

Pema Chödrön and Jack Kornfield both call the trap of overaccommodation “idiot compassion.” It means avoiding conflict and enabling other people’s ridiculous expectations to keep the peace. It isn’t true kindness; it’s codependency. True spiritual maturity requires what Kornfield calls fierce compassion—the ability to draw a clear line and say no to the world with an open heart so you can say yes to your own soul.

Many years ago, in the 1980s, I had a friend who lived in the fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (it’s not all glamorous up there; there are still old buildings on the side streets). I’d climb the stairs to visit on occasion, and when I left, she would ask me to take a bag of trash down the stairs and toss it in the bin in the building's alley. As if it were my payment for being hosted in her tiny kitchen with its view of a brick wall. I would do it. And then I didn’t. But instead of telling her no, I just declined invitations to her place and instead only met her in a bar or a restaurant or at my house. That was cowardly of me.

Ultimately, reasonable accommodation is a two-way street that requires maturity and open communication from both sides.

On a spiritual level, true healing requires us to find the middle ground. We must stop weaponizing our grief to demand that the world stop spinning for us. But we also have to use the clarity born of our loss to stop letting the world trample our boundaries.

We owe the world honesty about what we need, and we don’t owe it our total compliance. Grief takes so much, but if we let it, it gives us back our humanity and our boundaries.

What are you asking for from others that might be impossible to meet, and what are you accommodating that you want to rethink?

The conversation happened before I’d even finished my morning coffee—a swift, unsolicited rejection of invitations I had no intention of extending. My friend, breathless from the frantic pace of her perceived schedule, began building a wall with a punch list I’ve become familiar with: She has an office job, grandchildren to visit, meetings to attend, and promises to keep; she couldn’t do this, she couldn’t manage that. It was a frantic effort to shield herself from a demand on her time that existed only in her mind.

When she asked how I was doing, I offered a vague answer about a task I had to finish. Then came the pivot that felt like a quiet slap: “Well, at least you keep yourself busy.”

My hackles went up.

To the modern ear, “being busy” is a high-status badge of honor. “Keeping busy,” however, carries a distinct, patronizing undertone. It sounds like an old lady knitting in a rocking chair, passing the hours before sunset...or death. It implies an empty calendar artificially inflated with meaningless filler, while the “busy” person valiantly forges ahead amid serious and meaningful demands. There is a sharp, quiet hurt in realizing that, because you don’t broadcast what you’re doing and refuse to weaponize your schedule against imaginary invitations, people assume your time is unimportant and is only superficially filled.

My reaction wasn’t just ego: bruised. I want to scream when I hear someone say “I’m so busy.” It’s rude. Also, everyone is busy. Busy is as American as apple pie.

The sting was also sharper because of where I was standing.

Grief led me to a radical, brutal overhaul of how I perceive time. The bandwidth for social performance narrowed. Psychologists call this the Dual-Process Model of grief. It is the exhausting daily need to oscillate between confronting the abyss of loss and performing the normal tasks necessary for basic living, such as showering or refueling the gas tank. It’s finding balance between the urge to stay under the covers and doing something that means something to your heart and soul. In this heavy terrain, even the most banal tasks require Herculean effort. So I get why my friend has anxiety about her time, and may judge the time of others.

It’s one of the reasons I rarely talk about being a collaborative writer. I’ve always dreaded the dinner-party question, “And what do you do?” When I do tell people, I usually get a comically blank look. People don’t understand, and I don’t feel like explaining. It’s not important to me whether they do or don’t “get it.” The only people who matter are those who hire me and those who publish the book: the author and the editor. It’s not worth the effort, outside my profession, to talk about my work, how I have spent many hours of my days.

Ignorance can also turn into insults, intended or not. One woman told me nonfiction writing wasn’t creative—she knew that, she said, because she had written research papers in college. In short, she reduced my entire professional life, along with the intense mental labor and the silent discipline of structuring books and making all sorts of subjects interesting to the average book reader, to the level of a freshman term paper. Why would I want to defend myself against such a ridiculous notion? I don’t. Explaining myself is tiresome. It’s also not necessary. This is something important for people in grief to know.

Sometimes I just want to rest. I don’t want to pretend that everything I do has deep, crushing meaning. I crave what feels like a trivial hangout, though it is vital to the human spirit. For me, this grace lives right across the street. The women who live there expect nothing from me. They aren’t “intellectuals” in the frantic, ego-driven sense my New York background conditioned me to seek. They have a vast capacity for love and zero interest in proving their worth. Sometimes the highest form of spiritual renewal is to sit on their back lanai, watch the sunset, and relax with people. My schedule is irrelevant, and the only thing that matters is being, versus being somebody.

Perhaps the real reason we care so much about being misinterpreted is that we can’t let go of the idea that we have to be “somebody.” The ego constructs a complex narrative of labels, or “who I am.” When someone seems to erase it or get it wrong, we feel threatened. In our society, identity and busyness equate to value, so if you are merely “keeping busy,” your identity looks blank, and your value feels diminished. That’s why we give ourselves labels, advertising our identity to try to achieve being understood. Needing to be understood is an attempt to control another person’s mind, a guaranteed recipe for anxiety.

When those hard-earned, sacred boundaries of rest, cooking, acting, reading, thinking, walking, or writing are misread as an empty calendar filled with trivialities, the mind fights violently to correct the reflection. My irritation stemmed from the same human frailty that fueled my friend’s anxiety: I wanted her to look at me and see me as significant as much as she wants me to see her as significant, and one of the measures we use is how we spend our time.

Pema Chödrön describes a concept called shenpa: the exact moment we get “hooked” by the world. It is that tightening sensation, the sudden urge to defend ourselves and strike back. The sting I felt being told it’s nice that I keep myself busy wasn’t a spiritual failure; it was my biological wiring screaming for the baseline dignity of being seen accurately.

In her book Outrageous Openness, Tosha Silver warns against the exhausting cultural trap of “doership,” or the frantic belief that we must constantly calculate and defend our worth.

I’m just as clumsy, fragile, and deeply hooked in that trap as my friend. She wasn’t trying to win a competition; she was overwhelmed, running on fumes from modern survival anxiety. Her comment wasn’t a calculated insult; it was the clumsy projection of a drowning person onto someone who seemed to be floating. As Ram Dass famously reminded us, we are all just walking each other home, usually stumbling in the dark.

Ram Dass once told a story about giving a lecture on the radical, consciousness-expanding nature of psychedelics. In the front row sat a 70-year-old woman wearing a hat covered in cherries, clutching a patent-leather pocketbook, looking entirely out of place in a room full of mostly hippie-fied young people. Yet as he spoke about shifts in awareness that the sacred medicine offered, she nodded along enthusiastically. Bewildered and curious, he spoke with her afterward, asking how she could possibly know these things. She leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “I crochet.”

We giggle because we get the point: methods are just methods. Crocheting, writing, navel gazing, lying in the grass, cooking a meal, or watching the sunset on a back lanai can be spaces for profound spiritual growth and creativity. Time well spent. I’d argue that sitting in that quiet space does more to generate peace in the world than standing aggressively on a street corner demanding it.

                                                            Busy, busy, busy

When Ram Dass spoke about becoming “Nobody,” he meant shifting our identity from the ego to pure, spacious consciousness. He argues that we have to be somebody, especially in our 20s and 30s, before we can become a nobody. For me, it’s about time. I’m in my 60s; I don’t want to struggle to be a “somebody” anymore—and I certainly don’t want to do it in my 70s, 80s, or 90s. Talk about exhausting.

Becoming a nobody doesn’t mean becoming a cosmic vegetable. It is emerging as an open space. When someone hurls a misunderstanding at you, there is no one for it to hit. It passes right through you. You become entirely unshakable because you have nothing left to protect. If someone thinks nonfiction writing isn’t creative, that is their sorry loss; it’s not my problem or the truth. If someone wants to believe that my daily tasks and interests fill a calendar, counting the days until I can shake off this aging suit and join my son, well, they may be right. So what?

My friend can’t hold up a perfect mirror for me right now because her hands are full of overwhelming panic. And that has to be okay.

The ultimate freedom is letting go of the expectation that people will understand us. Why do we need to be understood? Yet, I do have to remind myself that I don’t need to prove my days have gravity or value. I can witness my own labor. I can see my quiet, serious world. I can enjoy what I do without needing anyone else to understand or appreciate it. I have to allow others the freedom to spend their time as they do without judgment, and I’m good at that. I have to work on myself. I don’t always find it easy.

Tosha Silver teaches that the ultimate relief comes when we stop trying to change the outer world and instead offer up our internal reactions to the universe. I didn’t need to list my accomplishments to change my friend’s perception. Instead, I needed a prayer to loosen my grip on my ego’s need for validation: “Change me into someone who doesn’t need to be accurately mirrored by an overwhelmed world. Help me become someone who doesn’t need an external seal of approval.”

When you no longer need the world to validate your reality, you can just be and enjoy the time you spend without needing anyone else to understand it.

Peace.

                                          A lovely path turned into a painful walk.

I recently took a walk with a colleague. She’s confident and describes herself as knowledgeable and insightful. We were talking about theater and acting. Sometimes, when I talk about things, people think I’m asking for advice. I’m not, but they tend to offer it anyway. Why people assume you want advice simply because you’re talking about a subject is an essay for another day. At any rate, she told me, “You need to stop writing for six months to a year.” Writing is my livelihood and has been for more than 30 years, but she insisted I needed to stop making a living and “immerse myself in acting.” Why? So I could get cast in a community theater play (which is volunteer work).

The staggering absurdity of this advice was completely lost on her, though it left me upset and depressed for a couple of days as I allowed those feelings to run through me as I sorted it out in my mind. My first mistake was believing that confidence was a sign of expertise or knowledge. It’s not. Some of the most confident people I know are also the dumbest. We tend to believe people who say outlandish things with aggressive authority. Don’t. (Yes, I’m giving you advice.)

Second, I’ve already been cast in community-theater plays over the past 7 years. You can always learn something new, and I do, but that doesn’t mean forgoing meaningful (and profitable) work for something you do for fun. That led to a discussion of motivation (and an unsubtle eyebrow rise; trust me, we always see the raised eyebrow), the claim that every artistic endeavor must be driven by an inner passion so great it’s worth any sacrifice. Bullshit. First, it assumes I lack the correct motivation. Second, I’m not changing careers to go to Broadway.

It was a masterclass in the audacity of the uninvited, but it reminded me of a larger, much weirder pattern. When you’re going through a crisis or navigating deep vulnerability, people treat you like a broken machine that needs their particular brand of thoughtless maintenance.

The advice I’ve received throughout my life has ranged from the bizarrely trivial—like the community theater intervention—to the psychologically reckless. In fact, I can think of very little unsolicited “good advice” I’ve received from others, including “authority figures,” which may make me unusual. I’m not sure. What about you?

There’s certainly a great deal of bad advice about child loss. A woman in an organization I belong to insisted I needed to visit the exact site of the car crash that killed my son. Barb explained that she had heard an “expert” on NPR (uh-oh) say this and believed it must be a fact. Barb has never lost a child. She also seems to have no concept of traumatic triggers, PTSD, or the fragile state of a grieving parent’s nervous system. Barb didn’t seem to understand that standing at the spot where my son’s friend had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed into a tree would in any way help me process his death. Yet she was convinced of this because NPR has a veneer of impeccable intellectual authority; its expert had to be right. My feeling was that she was projecting a cinematic trope—a forced, dramatic moment of “closure” she imagined would “save” me.

My friend Marj suggested I embrace and befriend the young man driving the truck. I hold no ill will toward him. He has a hard road ahead for the rest of his life. It’s going to be difficult. I spoke briefly with his parents (who reached out to me) when the crash first happened, and they volunteered that he was in counseling. I was relieved. I wish him well, but there are no phony Oprah moments in a child’s death. I can send love his way and keep my boundary. Feel free to psychologize my decision, but keep it to yourselves. Marj is well-meaning but also has a theatrical view of child loss. It’s nothing like the movies.

When my son was killed, a dense, paralyzing brain fog settled over my life for more than a year. In that state, executive functioning is compromised; boundaries are frayed, and your internal radar is offline. You are changed forever at the cellular and the soul level. You’re also fighting simply to breathe. It is precisely during this period of profound disorientation that “experts” arrive, crawling out of the woodwork to hand you a toxic to-do list. They offer aggressive action items not to relieve your pain but to ease their own discomfort with what they see as your unfixable reality. They want to be seen as helpful.

As I did the grueling, agonizing work of surviving, I encountered a second potentially damaging source of bad advice. It came from the modern grief community, ironically. In reacting against a culture of toxic positivity, a vocal corner of the grief industry has overcorrected. Content creators and support groups often foster a culture that encourages, enables, and perpetuates continued suffering. They tell you it is okay to be miserable forever, implying that chronic suffering is the only honest measure of how much you loved the person you lost. They romanticize the wreckage, inviting you to pitch a tent and live in your misery permanently. “Just because you experience joy doesn’t mean you’re still not in pain and always will be” is the reassurance often expressed in these groups. “You will always suffer,” says another.

This counsel treats the griever as a passive victim and confuses validation with stagnation. There is a vital distinction between honoring a tragedy and fetishizing it. Choosing to stay miserable does not feel good, nor is it a tribute to my son. Choosing to remain static is a refusal of the profound transformation grief offers us. True healing is not about checking off a fixer’s box, nor is it about wallowing in an enabler’s quicksand. It is an active, fierce, and deeply independent labor.

Learning to navigate an onslaught of bad advice from well-meaning people eventually led me to reexamine my relationship with advice from the other side of the equation: as the person giving it. Having walked through the fire of traumatic loss and come out the other side, I now frequently hear from people seeking direction. They ask for my perspective, insight, experience, and hard-won wisdom. But human nature is complex; people often ask for directions only to keep driving down the wrong road. I am careful about advice around child loss, and I can only speak to my experience, which is neither up for debate nor foolproof.

This is also why I hesitate to give too much publishing advice—something I am also an authority on, having devoted my entire professional life to the business in nearly all of its aspects. In my experience, most people don’t want advice or honesty; they want you to secure an agent for them or tell them their book is brilliant and needs no revision or editing whatsoever. I can’t do that. I encourage, but I can’t lie.

In grief, often people don’t really want advice either; they just want someone to cry with, and that’s okay. I can do that, and you don’t have to pretend you want advice. I’m always up for a good cry.

I had to learn a vital lesson in emotional sovereignty: when I offer advice that has been explicitly requested and is ignored, I must let it go immediately. If I hold on to their choice and grow frustrated that they didn’t heed my ideas (which they asked for), I am letting their journey become my burden. Clinging to how someone else receives your words is just another way the ego tries to control an uncontrollable world. It is the flip side of the “Fixer” coin. If I demand that they take my advice, I am no better than the woman on the walk or the person pushing the crash-site visit. True wisdom means offering your truth with an open hand, then closing your hand and walking away. Otherwise, their unhealed chaos becomes your personal problem.

This is where the circle closes, and where the teachings of great spiritual leaders lend support.

Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized deep listening to the self, reminding us that no one outside our own skin knows the recipe for our healing. He taught that bad advice almost always stems from the giver’s unexamined fears and internal noise. When people project their anxieties onto you, the task is to recognize their comments as their clutter, smile at the absurdity, and return immediately to your own breath and pacing.

Similarly, Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön writes extensively about the toxicity of the “shoulds” people impose on us. She explains that society aggressively demands action plans and linear timelines because the world is terrified of unresolved pain. Spiritual maturity, Chödrön notes, means accepting that some things have no neat resolution. Anyone pushing a rigid script or an aggressive timeline, whether it is pressuring you to take a trip to a crash site or telling you that you’re fearless and brave for staying chronically miserable, is operating out of ignorance and fear.

Ultimately, I found my anchor in the wisdom of Ram Dass, who spoke of running the world’s input through your own spiritual heart. In one of his talks, he said something along the lines of, “If someone says to me, ‘Ram Dass, you’re a jerk,’ I run it through my heart and see if there’s anything I can use. If there’s nothing, I let it go.”

The intellect tries to rationalize what people tell us, but the intuitive heart knows the truth almost instantly. If a piece of advice feels tight, restrictive, or inherently wrong, it’s not your truth. Ram Dass advocated a practice of gentle non-cooperation: you don’t have to fight the advice-givers; you simply witness their anxiety, say “thank you,” and completely discard their noise. I used to do exactly this when I first had Bix, and people would offer unsolicited child-rearing advice: I’d nod my head and smile… and then do whatever I wanted. Worked like a charm.

Once you accept and love yourself, the opinions of others lose their power. You realize their disapproval reflects their own limitations and karma rather than a failing on your part. Run criticism couched as “advice” through your heart and see if it lands. If it doesn’t, carry on. If something bothers you, it’s probably something you should look at, as Ram Dass says. That’s work you can do on yourself.

More importantly, Ram Dass clarified the boundary between inevitable pain and self-inflicted suffering. Pain is the reality of the crash; it is the permanent hole left by my son’s absence. Suffering, however, is what happens when the mind clings—whether to a specific identity like “The Grieving One” or to the need to fix someone else who refuses to listen, or to an idea of the way things ought to be rather than accepting and working with how things are.

Grief is an aggressive, unwanted vehicle for awakening. It burns away who you used to be, but it does not demand that you remain a pile of ash, nor does it require you to manage anyone else’s fire.

Surviving child loss required me to defy everyone else’s expectations and strictly police my own energetic boundaries. I had to reject the fixers who wanted a quick happy-ending resolution, the enablers who wanted me to join a cult of permanent misery, and the temptation to fix those who aren’t ready to heal. Transformation through grief is the hardest work I’ve ever done. It is the active process of integrating a devastating loss into a completely rewritten identity (who do I think I am?), choosing to step back into the vastness of life while guarding my own heart against the audacity of the uninvited.

Sometimes I wish I had gotten better advice throughout my life and heeded usable wisdom more often. I’ve depended largely on myself and figured “it” out alone. I’ve solved many a traumatic problem on my own, and I’m still here, right now. And it’s pretty good. Exactly as I want it to be? No. I wish my son were alive. But I also know the universe is unfolding perfectly according to law.

“For something in you dies when you bear the unbearable, and it is only in that dark night of the soul that you are prepared to see as God sees, and to love as God loves.” - Ram Dass

A sign on a trail taken (by me) at Kripalu in Western Massachusetts many years ago.  

I woke up at my usual time the other day, about 530 am, fed Fluffy and Levi, and made myself a cup of coffee. Then I got right back into bed to enjoy it while doing the daily Wordle and Connections puzzles. My sister and I swap results every morning, and I was frustrated that I fell for a Connections trick. One wrong. Ugh.

As I was texting my results, I noticed a message from one of the women in a close-knit group chat I’m in that focuses on spiritual matters. Melanie was apologizing for her vent regarding a friend who endlessly asks for advice yet remains stubbornly stuck. Others in the group chimed in with identical stories of somatic exhaustion from providing requested but unheeded support. A pattern emerged. It was clear that energy-draining is not an imagined overreaction; it is a measurable psychological tax levied on empathetic and open people.

All of us have encountered individuals who seem wrapped in a perpetual cloud of crisis. They approach us with heavy hearts or panic, seeking commiseration, guidance, insight, or practical solutions. Moved by empathy, we invest our time, emotional labor, and intellect in crafting thoughtful advice and sharing knowledge and, in many cases, hard-won experience. Yet a strange phenomenon occurs: every solution meets a swift roadblock. Every open door is slammed shut. Every recommendation is met with disappointment or dismissal. This exhausting cycle isn’t a quest for resolution but for the adrenaline hit of a fraught emotional transaction. In modern psychological terms, these individuals are known as “help-rejecting complainers” or energy vampires.

To protect our mental well-being, we have to look beyond the surface of their complaints and advice-seeking, decode the spiritual and psychological mechanics of their suffering, and master the art of compassionate detachment.

The defining trait of a help-rejecting complainer is the psychological game identified by psychiatrist Eric Berne: “Yes, But...” The individual presents a problem, invites advice, and immediately counters with a reason the advice cannot be implemented. This behavior stems from learned helplessness and the externalization of blame. The individual isn’t seeking correction; they’re seeking connection through shared misery. By asking for advice and then rejecting it, the complainer shifts the burden of responsibility onto the advice-giver. If the situation remains terrible, it’s because their life is uniquely unfair and the advice was flawed or impossible, but never because they failed to act.

The hidden payoff of this behavior is validation. Their ego craves the status of a tragic victim, finding a twisted sense of comfort and moral superiority in being unfixable. This is unfortunately a common affliction in the grief community I’m in, and it is often happily supported, enabled, and encouraged by grief “experts” and “influencers.”

Unfortunately, interacting with someone trapped in this cycle inevitably leads to severe emotional depletion, often referred to as empathy fatigue. When we offer genuine help, our brains invest energy in anticipating a positive outcome or a sense of resolution. That’s on us. When that effort is repeatedly rejected, our reward systems experience a sharp deficit. We are left feeling frustrated, disappointed, stuck, and physically exhausted.

Help-rejecting complainers operate from what spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle calls the “pain-body,” an accumulation of old emotional trauma that demands negative energy to sustain itself. When someone is comfortable in their unhappiness, their ego has merged entirely with this pain-body. They reject practical advice because a genuine solution threatens to starve the very suffering that defines their identity. Spiritual author Michael Singer notes in The Untethered Soul that rather than pulling out the psychological thorn that causes them pain, these people prefer to build their entire lives around protecting it, and they demand that everyone around them help cushion it rather than remove it.

Photo I took in Rome in 2012.

Many of us have carried the burden of these draining interactions in isolation, wondering why a simple lunch or phone call leaves us feeling uniquely flattened. A friend, Marjorie, is always facing one crisis or another, and it has become hard for me to listen because the chaos seems so easily avoided. It would be for me, but obviously not for her. Admittedly, since Bix died, I have an especially difficult time listening to the craziness that Marj seems to attract. She embarks on projects that invite ever more complications. I’ve noticed that the turmoil then grows like a tumbleweed in the desert.

Over the years, she’s routinely asked for recommendations for household help, from cleaning people to handymen. There was a revolving door of these people, and I didn’t give it much thought at the beginning. Then I started to notice a pattern: the aftermath of my referral was always the same: Marj would complain that the work done didn’t meet her standards. One day, while I was visiting, she was speaking to a house painter. I had the uncomfortable privilege of observing the disrespectful way she treated him. I was taken aback.

A breakthrough realization occurred to me: it would be an act of sensible boundary-keeping to no longer participate in her loop of dissatisfactions or subject innocent people to her treatment. The liberating moment came a few days ago, when she asked again for a referral, this time for a handyman: “Marj, I don’t have a recommendation for anyone you’d be happy with.” It was clean and honest, and it effectively shut down the trap.

The boundary becomes infinitely more complex and painful when the subject is sacred. After Bix died, I undertook the brutal, transformative work of engaging in several therapeutic and spiritual modalities to integrate my immense grief into loving awareness. I was motivated to heal and to find meaning in the tragedy. It was a calling for me, beyond the intellect and straight from the heart, from Bix, who is always showing me the way.

A friend of a friend, Jane, had lost her own child twenty years earlier and had been suffering from chronic anhedonia, the total inability to feel pleasure, ever since. Our mutual friend asked if I would talk to Jane about my experiences and the work I had done. Apparently, Jane was anxious to meet me. Of course, I agreed to meet with her. I have met with many grieving mothers since Bix died. It is a privilege to share what I have learned on my journey when asked. I always say yes when called upon. To be clear, I don’t give unsolicited advice, and if you’re reading this, you’ve proactively opted in. Thank you, I’m grateful!

Anyway…Jane explicitly asked me for advice on how to navigate the dark landscape of child loss, one that she had been inhabiting for 20 years. Moved by our shared tragedy, I offered everything I had learned freely. She stared at me with puppy-dog eyes for the entire lunch. She asked for a second lunch a few weeks later. I was excited to learn what progress Jane had made.

She has made none.

Jane asked me to retell every story I had shared at our first lunch. She asked me all the same questions, and I dutifully answered. My answers were the same. The meal ended with Jane asking for a third lunch. I felt tired, drained. “Well, let’s stay in touch,” I said, without committing to anything definite.

About a month later, she reached out, and I reluctantly agreed to meet. It was deja vu all over again. Same questions, same requests for my story. Afterward, she retreated into her locked fortress of unyielding unhappiness, using structural excuses like finances to claim she “couldn’t afford” any path to healing I’d mention (many of which didn’t cost a dime).

The physical cost of these encounters was devastating; returning home, emotionally spent, I had to lie down, and I’m not a napper. This was followed by a couple of days of depression. My productivity plummeted, and I felt ill. What was happening?

My strength was being sucked. Jane was not looking for a way out of the labyrinth of her grief; she was using her twenty-year-old trauma as a syringe to extract my energy and attention, completely rejecting the hard work transformation requires.

To survive relationships like the ones with Jane and even Marj, without sacrificing our peace, we might consider adopting Ram Dass's philosophy, which teaches that we can view people like these two women with the same allowance we give to twisted trees in a forest. “Ah, so. And this too,” he would say. We can shift from being an active “fixer” to the quiet “witness.” Listen, being a “fixer” is an ego gig too. We can get trapped in the identity of the Helper without helping anyone, including ourselves.

Compassionate detachment means holding space for someone’s pain without absorbing it. That requires setting an airtight boundary, as I did with Marj, and applying it to the Janes in my life. A bulletproof boundary acknowledges their struggle without feeding the cycle of advice-giving-and-rejecting. When Jane asks for the same advice she has asked for numerous times, I can say, “Jane, I don’t have any new guidance that I think would be helpful to you. I can only share what helped me, but I know our paths are different.” I could also say, “I love you, but I can’t play this game anymore.” The “Yes, but...” game collapses when there is nothing to reject.

Why do we have to do something like this that may seem, on the face of it, as unfeeling or cold? Well, first of all, we tried, and it didn’t seem to help. How many times do we have to keep trying? We have to protect our energy, especially those of us who have faced severe traumatic loss. Yes, we especially so.

Second, we can’t force another human being to wake up or choose happiness before they are ready. Much of our suffering in relationships with people we find difficult comes from our clinging to how we think they should be, so it is up to us to unattach from that. If we don’t, then it really is our problem.

True compassion lies not in drowning alongside the sufferer, but in standing firmly on the shore, offering a steady presence without plunging into the currents of their self-inflicted chaos. Ram Dass calls it being there when the person is ready to come up for air. By cleansing our energy through physical resets, somatic release, and unshakable verbal boundaries, we protect our inner light. In doing so, we honor both our own peace and the complex, painful journey of those still learning to let go of their thorns.

What if they never let go? This is the most painful, haunting question when practicing compassionate detachment. It forces us to confront our deepest rescue fantasies, as well as our grief and compassion for people we love. When someone chooses, consciously or unconsciously, to carry their thorns to the grave, we have to face two uncomfortable spiritual truths: their soul’s timeline is not our responsibility, and a life spent in suffering is still a complete human journey.

Ram Dass taught that each person incarnates with a specific set of lessons to learn, or what he called the soul’s curriculum. Jane’s curriculum in this lifetime might actually be to fully experience the heavy, devastating weight of unyielding grief, manifested through a label she carries proudly: her anhedonia. Only she knows this. I don’t. It’s a harsh curriculum, but it belongs entirely to her soul. Ram Dass said we have no moral right to take away another person’s suffering. Let that sink in. Suffering is often the very grace that shows someone where their mind is clinging and what they need to release. When we step in with our frantic helper egos trying to fix things or steal that pain away, we are overstepping a cosmic boundary.

Zen masters teach that a person’s mental knots (or samyojana) can only be untied by their own awareness. We can’t do it for them. If Jane leaves this lifetime with her knots still tightly bound, that is the reality of her path.

Compassion doesn’t mean demanding that the world be free of pain. True compassion means looking suffering in the eye while keeping your heart open. “Bearing the unbearable is the deepest root of compassion in the world,” Ram Dass said. “When you bear what you think you cannot bear, who you think you are dies. You become compassion.” That is certainly what happens when a child dies - all of us still standing have borne the unbearable, and it often does result in an expanded compassion and awakening. There is power in that, but we can’t allow it to be abused.

I have to look at Jane’s suffering in its eye, see her choice to remain stuck, and allow her the dignity of her own destination. Her life is not “broken” because it is unhappy; it is simply the life she chose to live. As is Marj’s and as is mine.

I survived the loss of my child by doing the agonizing work to choose loving awareness. I know exactly what the road to healing costs spiritually, psychologically, physically, and yes, even financially. I’ve paid it willingly and with my eyes open. If Jane is unwilling to pay that price, I can’t pay it for her with my own life force.

Some people leave this world with their thorns fully intact. Our only job is to ensure we don’t bleed out trying to remove them.

Peace.

Before reading, leave a comment below on your first thought on seeing this photo.

A popular internet sentiment is that “hope is found in the comment section.” Maybe. What I find there most often is anxiety.

Every reel, every photograph, every harmless moment seems to attract at least one person whose primary contribution is an authoritatively worried warning. Or, a sentiment akin to “why aren’t you serving my specific needs in this video or considering my fears?” Otherwise known as “What about me?”

Watch a cooking video featuring the prep of raw chicken, and more than one person will remind the creator to wash their hands. It doesn’t seem to occur to some viewers that the video has been edited. The creator probably washed their hands three times between touching the chicken and picking up the frying pan. In fact, many creators now feel compelled to reassure viewers: “Don’t worry, I washed my hands.” “The dog wasn’t near the food.” “I sanitized the counter.” Tiresome (that’s the old Karen Kelly rearing her ugly head).

The other thing that happens in cooking reels made by amateur home cooks is the expectation that everything that a solopreneur does should include an alternative for every possible food phobia, aversion, or allergy. “Is there a gluten-free version?” “Can it be dairy-free?” “Can I replace the nuts with something else?” “Do you have suggestions for a vegan Beef Wellington?” I can almost feel the anxiety in the room of the person at home, scrolling, scrolling, becoming unnerved and upset that a cooking reel does not suit their specific personal preferences. I know because I’ve been there, having watched reels that unnerved me in some way, although not generally cooking videos.

In DIY videos, someone builds a bookshelf, refinishes a dresser, puts siding on the house, or installs a ceiling fan to inspire others to do the same. Immediately, the comments are filled with explanations of how it should have been done better, more safely, or more efficiently. The project itself becomes secondary. The comment section transforms into a tribunal of hypothetical disasters and arrogant cures.

A while back, I posted a photograph on Facebook of my husband and son walking through a field in upstate New York. A bittersweet memory. Bix might have been 4 or 5 when I took the photo, seen at the top of this post. It was one of those perfect moments. The grass was tall. The light was beautiful. The photograph captured something simple, fleeting, and true.

One comment simply read:

“TICKS!”

That was it.

Not “Beautiful photo.” “What a wonderful day that must have been.” Or “Lovely.”

Just “TICKS!”

The moment had been transformed from an expression of love into an overwrought public service announcement. The commenter could only see one thing: danger.

Ticks exist. Lyme disease exists. Food poisoning exists. Ladder accidents exist. Power tools can be dangerous. I’m not suggesting otherwise.

The question isn’t whether danger exists. It does. The question is why so many people feel compelled to announce their personal fears, needs, anxieties, and food preferences and limitations if something they see doesn’t meet their expectations. Why does impulse control go out the window on the internet (and often, in life)? Why are we so afraid? I’ll answer that question shortly.

But first: Why does a photograph of a father and son walking through a field immediately summon a warning label? Why does every moment of beauty, spontaneity, creativity, or joy require a volunteer safety officer or a common scold? Even if you have gotten Lyme disease, and the photo brings back your trauma, why must it be broadcast? Why? The photograph (or reel) is of a moment in time that has passed. It’s too late now, anyway.

Social media comment sections have become the internet’s largest projection screen for collective anxiety. People aren’t simply responding to content. They’re revealing themselves through it.

One person sees a father and son walking through a field. Another sees Lyme disease. Another person sees someone preparing dinner. Another sees salmonella. Jane sees a home improvement project. Joe sees either a superior building method or a trip to the emergency room.

Content becomes a Rorschach test. People tell us who they are by what they fear.

Fear, of course, is deeply human. From an evolutionary perspective, fear keeps us alive. People who worried about threats were more likely to survive than those who didn’t. I get it. I lived in New York City for more than 30 years, and I learned how to walk down the street. Despite my savvy or street smarts, I was sexually assaulted twice, mugged on a subway train, groped, my apartment was robbed, my fire escape in Little Italy was used by drug dealers who would wave hello to me on their way to the roof, and a man was shot dead in front of our Brooklyn brownstone one hot summer night. There’s more, but I’ll save it for another day. I also had the time of my life living in NYC.

Our brains are wired to prioritize survival over happiness. Our hearts want more.

Unfortunately, modern life has figured out how to exploit that wiring. News organizations, politicians, corporations, influencers, and algorithms all know that fear captures attention. Fear keeps us engaged, scrolling, and clicking.

Eventually, we begin scanning every situation for what might go wrong. Eventually, we stop seeing the grassy field or its wildflowers.

What interests me most is that the TICKS! comment isn’t really about the tick, just like most comments on food and DIY reels aren’t about recipes or construction. They are responses to a future scenario the ego has created.

The mind can take us out of the unfolding life and deposit us into a hypothetical version of reality where something has surely gone wrong.

Here is the answer to why we’re so scared sitting at home scrolling: Ram Dass taught that when we cling to exact models of how the universe “should” be, we resist reality. Instead, he would invite the person to quietly observe their attachments without judgment because holding life or others to rigid demands causes our own suffering.

Expecting every reel, post, or essay to conform to a personal preference is a profound misunderstanding of how the universe operates. Demanding that strangers fulfill our personal needs is an attempt to use the world as a mirror for our own ego. True peace comes from changing our own hearts, not from setting unrealistic expectations of others, especially strangers on the internet.

Here's a chocolate cake I made for my family and friends that contains allergens, including eggs, milk, sesame seed paste (tahini), and wheat flour. I have no alternative recipe. 

When I see comments voicing expectations and fears, I feel both sadness and love. Losing Bix changed my relationship with fear in ways I never expected. For some people, losing a child understandably causes fear to expand. Every danger becomes more vivid. Every risk becomes magnified.

Something different happened to me. Not immediately and not perfectly. But over time, particularly through my spiritual journey, fear began losing its authority. No, I have not become a careless risk taker. I simply understand that when the ego views itself as an isolated entity cut off from the rest of the world, it perceives anything it cannot predict or manipulate as an existential threat. When you understand how the ego uses fear, you can stop letting it run your life

I can also guarantee everyone reading this that something bad will happen. I don’t know what, when, or how, or to what degree of badness. My bad thing was extra bad. Yours might be medium bad or not-that-bad bad. I just know bad things can and will happen to everyone, rich and poor, you and me, they and them.

You might get sick from bad chicken or sushi. You might hammer your nail instead of the nail in the floorboard. You might lose your job, your health, your heart, or someone you love. Your child might not die. They might. It’s possible.

That isn’t pessimism. It’s reality. Knowing that firsthand, because my worst fear came true, means I am freer than I was.

I’m not suggesting that we throw caution to the wind. We all take risks every day because we correctly assess them as low risk. We drive cars, cross streets, eat in restaurants, board airplanes, trust people, and fall in love. The issue isn’t prudence. It’s believing that enough vigilance can save us from uncertainty or disaster. It can’t.

Even when things are chaotic and messy, everything is still working for our good. This realization was a bitter pill for me to swallow, but I also know it is a profound truth from a higher spiritual perspective: “Everything is perfect,” including every crisis and inconvenience. Ram Dass viewed difficult events, broken plans, and personal struggles not as mistakes, but as “grist for the mill” of our spiritual awakening.

One of the most profound teachings I received after Bix died is that most fear is an attempt to negotiate with reality. If I worry enough, maybe it won’t happen. If I prepare enough, maybe I can prevent it. If I comment on enough videos, perhaps I can save strangers (and myself) from every possible danger.

Uncertainty is built into the structure of existence. Ram Dass frequently talked about fear as a manifestation of separateness. When we see ourselves as tiny, fragile, isolated beings struggling to survive in a dangerous universe, fear becomes almost inevitable. Every recipe is a threat to our relationship with food. Each DIYer challenges our belief that our way is the right way. Every grassy field contains the possibility of illness.

Do you know how many times I’ve asked myself “what if” about my son? Countless times. Too many to count. Infinity times. It’s not worth a shit.

The ego’s job is to protect itself, and it takes that job seriously. What if X goes wrong? What if Y gets hurt? What if something bad happens? What if? What if? What if? The comment section gives that voice a microphone.

Ram Dass offered a different approach. Instead of identifying with fear, he suggested observing it. Notice when fear is telling a story. Ask yourself whether the danger is here now or whether your mind has traveled into an imagined future. Become the witness. Fear is here. That’s very different from saying, “I am afraid.”

Come back to the present moment. Feel your feet on the floor. Notice your breath. Look around the room. The present moment is often far less frightening than the future we are imagining.

When I look at that photograph of my son and husband, I don’t see ticks. More importantly, I don’t spend time imagining ticks. I see a father and son who loved each other walking through a field on a beautiful day. I see sunlight and grass and a moment that happened, but that can and will never happen again. But it happened once, and that is enough. I enjoy the photo in this moment.

Will we spend our lives worrying about what might happen next or paying attention to what is happening now? While we are busy imagining the tick, the grassy field awaits. And so do the people we love.

What to do With all That Anxiety

• Witness the fear: When you notice yourself getting anxious, angry, or sucked into the internet’s panic, pause. Say to yourself, “Ah, there is anxiety arising,” or “Look at how the ego wants to fight right now.” By naming the emotion, you detach from it. You are no longer in fear; you are watching the fear.

• Drop the judgment: The Witness does not judge the fearful commenters, nor does it judge you for getting triggered. It treats everything with neutral curiosity. You view the collective panic exactly like a thunderstorm—it is just something that is happening, not something you need to fix or absorb.

• Root yourself in the body: To step out of the mind’s looping thoughts, bring your awareness to your physical senses. Feel your feet on the floor. Notice the weight of your phone in your hand. Take one deep, conscious breath. This immediately yanks you out of the imagined future and grounds you in the “Here and Now.”

• Shift from mind to heart: Once you observe the world from this quiet space, Ram Dass would tell you to look at humanity with compassion. Those angry, anxious commenters are just souls trapped in a heavy illusion, terrified of suffering. Instead of feeling disgusted or annoyed by them, feel the gentle warmth for how hard it is to be human. Because it is.

• Stop scrolling. It could be a good idea to stop looking at things that stoke your fears around whatever it is you’re anxious about, whether it be food, fashion, bug bites, germs, furniture refinishing, and so on.

• Thank the bad. The universe is unfolding perfectly according to law.

Some cherries on my counter. And yes, I washed them.

The other day, I was standing in the produce section of Publix contemplating cherries.

I had gathered a few things and was on my way to hunt down some chicken. My cart wasn’t full, but it contained the sort of items that make you feel as though civilization has accomplished something worthwhile: a bag of salted cashews; a loaf of crusty bread; a crisp, dry bottle of California white; a three-for-12-dollar bunch of Alstroemeria, and a few plums.

The cherries looked particularly good.

There are two schools of thought on sampling produce before buying it. The first holds that trying a cherry or a strawberry is a perfectly reasonable way to determine whether they’re worth purchasing. The second holds that doing so will result in immediate illness because “you have no idea where it’s been.”

I popped a cherry into my mouth.

It was perfect. Crisp, juicy, sweet, and tart all at once. I selected a bag, nestling the cherries between the flowers and the plums. As I surveyed my cart, something unexpected happened. I was overcome by a feeling that’s hard, even for me, to put into words. Gratitude is the closest word I can find, but even that doesn’t quite capture it. This wasn’t the kind of gratitude that comes from reminding yourself to count your blessings, as in an HR-mandated personal-growth assignment when they are about to tell you you’re not getting a raise this year.

The sensation arrived all by itself.

For a few moments, standing under the fluorescent lights of a Venice, Florida, Publix, I could hardly believe my good fortune. I thought of all the people who had cooperated to create this store and its offerings.

I was healthy enough to be shopping. I had enough money to buy good food. I lived in a safe place. I had choices. I could stand there and debate (with myself) the nutritional merits of cherries over plums, which is not the sort of dilemma that keeps most people awake at night. The colors seemed brighter than usual. The abundance felt almost ridiculous. Ripples and waves of electric-like pleasure and happiness pulsed through me.

If only Publix were actually like this…

I suddenly saw my life differently. Nothing had changed, yet everything had. The groceries in my cart were the same as they had been thirty seconds earlier. The world was the same world (which isn’t flat, BTW, but it’s also true that governments, universities, media organizations, and scientists routinely lie).

For one moment, I saw the gift hidden in an ordinary day. It was physically palpable; the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

This is what is called a transcendental experience or transcendental wholeness, when you suddenly perceive that the people, the produce, and the space of the store are all part of one continuous fabric. Everything feels inextricably linked, and the simple act of obtaining food takes on a feeling of immense abundance, gratitude, and care.

I am aware that while I was standing in Publix contemplating cherries, other people were contemplating survival. There is a genocide going on that many pretend not to see (and many are seeing for the first time). Children are going to bed hungry or are being hurt. There are families who are fleeing war. People living through bombings, displacement, and terror. I wasn’t. I was standing in an air-conditioned grocery store selecting produce, thinking about what cheese would go with the bread, and planning dinner in my head.

That realization did not make me feel guilty. It made me feel grateful.

Sometimes gratitude gets confused with denial. As if acknowledging what is beautiful requires us to ignore what is terrible. I don’t believe that. The world contains both. The cherries and the suffering. The abundance and the loss. The funeral and the feast.

Ram Dass smiling, photographer and year unknown.

It reminds me of a story Ram Dass tells, and it’s an incredible teaching, one you can re-learn in the grocery store.

“If somebody asks me, ‘Ram Dass, are you happy?’ I stop and look inside. ‘Yes, I’m happy.’

‘Ram Dass, are you sad?’

‘Yes, I’m sad.’

Answering those questions, I realize that all of those feelings are present. Imagine the richness of a moment in which everything is present: the pain of a broken heart, the joy of a new mother holding her baby, the exquisiteness of a rose in bloom, the grief of losing a loved one. This moment has all of that. It is just living truth.”

Gratitude, he continued, opens the heart and allows God to slip in. Just as suffering cracks the heart open and allows for awakening. Standing there with my bag of cherries, I understood exactly what he meant. Not because life was perfect. Not because grief had disappeared. But because, for one shining moment, I could see beyond the constant human habit of focusing on what is missing. Like Bix.

The universe also has my son.

I miss him every day. There are mornings when grief arrives before my feet hit the floor. There are birthdays, anniversaries, and random Tuesday afternoons when I would give almost anything to hear his voice again. None of that disappeared in the produce aisle. My loss was still there. My grief was still there. And yet my gratitude was real. Imagine the richness of a moment in which everything is present. I didn’t have to; I lived it right there in Publix.

This is something that parents who’ve lost children worry about, often out loud in grief groups and gatherings. “I found myself laughing the other day,” said one, “but I caught myself. Is it wrong to have fun since my daughter died?” Ram Dass’ story is instructive for this woman and all of us who have faced such tremendous loss.

At one time, I thought gratitude and suffering occupied opposite ends of a spectrum. If one increased, the other had to decrease. “You should be grateful,” was understood (by me) as a threat or a warning rather than a spiritual principle. What I have learned is that gratitude and suffering coexist. Some of the most grateful people I’ve met have suffered deeply; they’re grateful because hardship showed them how precious life is.

The universe that has my son is the same universe that handed me a perfect cherry on an ordinary afternoon. I don’t fully understand how both can be true at once, but I’ve stopped believing that understanding is a prerequisite for gratitude, joy, and happiness, because they coexist with suffering. You can miss your sweet child and still find transcendent joy in the moment. The moment is all we’ve got.

I should mention that I don’t keep a gratitude journal and have no plans to start one. I have nothing against them. If they help people notice what is good in their lives, that’s wonderful. But gratitude has never come to me as a worksheet or a daily assignment. It arrives as an internal heart practice, a state of being, a state of seeing.

What happened at Publix convinced me that gratitude is not something we manufacture. It’s something we uncover through experience. It comes from Source straight into the heart, not from the ego into our heads. It is always there beneath the noise, the worry, the comparison, and the endless search for what comes next. If we pay attention, we catch a glimpse of it. We suddenly see our lives not through the lens of lack but through one of abundance. It’s all unfolding perfectly according to law. It’s beautiful, and it sucks. Not one or the other, but both.

Life really is a bowl of cherries. Not because everything was perfect or because suffering had disappeared from the world. Life is a bowl of cherries because we can see, feel, and experience the extraordinary gift hidden in an ordinary day.

Peace.

* For the history buffs out there: The saying Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries comes from a popular song written in 1931, during the Great Depression, with music by Ray Henderson and lyrics by Lew Brown. It was written for the Broadway revue George White’s Scandals and was introduced by the legendary Ethel Merman. The song’s message is essentially: life is uncertain, difficult, and temporary, so enjoy it while you can. You can that by being in the present moment:

Life is just a bowl of cherries.
Don’t take it serious; life’s so mysterious.
You work, you save, you worry so,
But you can’t take your dough when you go, go, go.
So keep repeating it’s the berries,
For the strongest oak must fall,
The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned
So how can you lose what you’ve never owned?
Life is just a bowl of cherries,
So live and laugh at it all.
This song was originally posted on protestsonglyrics.net
People are queer, they’re always crowing,
scrambling and rushing about;
Why don’t they stop someday,
Address themselves this way?
Why are we here? Where are we going?
It’s time that we found out.
We’re not here to stay;
we’re on a short holiday.

Life is just a bowl of cherries.
Don’t take it serious; it’s too mysterious.
At eight each morning I have got a date,
To take my plunge ‘round the Empire State.
You’ll admit it’s not the berries,
In a building that’s so tall;
There’s a guy in the show, the girls love to kiss;
Get thousands a week just for crooning like this:
Life is just a bowl of...Aw, nuts!
So live and laugh at it all!

I received an email the other day with a disclaimer attached at the bottom.

“This e-mail and any attachments are legally privileged and confidential. If you are not an intended recipient, be notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this e-mail is strictly prohibited.”

I laughed. Not because the email contained state secrets. It didn’t. Nor because I received it in error. I was one of the intended recipients. I laughed because these disclaimers always strike me as a peculiar form of magical thinking. We write a paragraph at the bottom of an email and imagine we’ve gained a little control over an uncontrollable world. And doesn’t something like this immediately tempt you to forward the email to everyone you know? When I was a kid, mattresses and pillows still had a tag that read “Not to be removed under penalty of law.” When I was older, the manufacturers added: “except by the consumer.” Gosh, it was fun to rip off those labels.

I further “LOL’d” because of who sent it, and that is, someone whom I have struggled with for a few years. He presents himself in a way that pushes some of my many buttons. Condescending. Dismissive. The disclaimer felt less like a legal notice and more like a tiny monument of authority and importance.

At least that’s what I told myself. The problem is that I know his story. His son died years ago after a long battle with addiction. He once told me his son had little to do with him. His wife died a few years ago, and he misses her terribly. He is lonely, grieving, and carrying losses that would bring most people to their knees.

And yet. He still annoys me. There it is. Another normal human emotion telling me, “I’m here.”

Since Bix died, I have grown increasingly impatient with the little performances we all engage in to convince ourselves we’re important. But I also have to give it grace, we’re all making the journey home at our own pace (and that has nothing to do with aging). Part of my reaction likely stems from my own history. I don’t like being condescended to or dismissed. I bristle when opinions are presented as if they were immutable facts. It’s something I see in my colleague, and it bugs me.

Why should this bother me so much? My teacher Ram Dass said that when someone else’s actions bother us, it’s a mirror reflecting our own unresolved attachments or ego. Instead of trying to change others, he emphasized that our only job is to cultivate inner awareness and work on our own reactions. I had to ask myself why a harmless disclaimer sent me down a rabbit hole. Why does this personality type get under my skin when others don’t?

I want to be compassionate, the person who understands another human being’s suffering so completely that all judgment dissolves. I discovered that understanding someone and enjoying them are not the same thing. Compassion does not automatically erase irritation. Sometimes they sit side by side, sharing the same uncomfortable space.

The longer I thought about him, the more I found myself reflecting on the story he carries. He once told me his son wanted little to do with him, even now, in death. My beliefs lead me to see death differently. I believe relationships continue and consciousness survives. I believe understanding deepens after someone leaves the body. Both of our sons know more now than we do, and both love us.

But what if you don’t believe that?

What if you believe the last chapter of a difficult relationship is the final one? No later conversation. No reconciliation. No second chance. I don’t know exactly what he believes, only that he believes in humanism and describes himself as an atheist. I can go on about scientism, another flawed human interpretation of the world, but I don’t want to leave anyone feeling intellectually adrift in a chaotic, unpredictable universe with no solid ground beneath them. Moving on. What I do know is that guilt can become an identity. Regret can become an identity. Grief can become an identity. A title. A position. A credential. A disclaimer at the bottom of an email. We’re all going to die. Why are we wasting time on the labels we want to attach to ourselves?

We all cling to different things. Expertise. Accomplishments. Being right. Being wounded. Being spiritual. Being scientific. Being a grieving parent. I have done a little of each. Underneath those identities, however, often lies the same longing.

Just because cats…and because Levi is extremely evolved.

What I saw in the email disclaimer was a man trying to hold on to his sense of significance by clinging to material things. Another human being trying to reassure himself that he matters. Once I shook off my initial annoyance, I saw suffering and sadness, and yes, grace.

We all want to matter. We want our lives to count for something and to believe that our existence made a difference. We want the people we love to know they were loved. We want our work to have meaning. We want someone to remember us after we’re gone.

Mattering and importance can get muddled by the ego.

Importance is comparative. It depends on status, recognition, authority, credentials, and applause. It depends on disclaimers and warnings. It requires an audience. It is ego-driven, and the ego wants to be somebody.

Mattering is different. Of course, we all matter. The question is why we sometimes think we need to be important in order to matter. And why do we sometimes have to impose that idea of “importance” on other people?

Mattering happens as part of our relationship with the world. It happens when we show up for another person. It happens when we help, teach, comfort, encourage, or love someone. Mattering rarely makes headlines. It’s often invisible except to the people whose lives we touch.

Bix mattered, but he had no importance by American cultural standards. He had no accumulated titles or credentials. He was only 15 when he died. He didn’t even get to graduate from high school. He mattered because he changed people. Four years after his death, people still tell me stories about him. They remember his kindness, his humor, his loyalty, and the way he stood up for people who needed someone in their corner.

Perhaps my reaction lingered because I recognized something of myself. I don’t particularly want to be important. I don’t need a title—heck, I’ve written more than 50 books over the past 27+ years, and my name is only on a few of them. I don’t need people to agree with me. But I do want my life to mean something, too. I want my work to help the people who need it and find it. I want people to know that I love them. I want to leave this place a little better than I found it.

The ego says: “I need to be important.”

The heart says: “I want my life to matter.”

The soul says: “Your life already matters. Now go love somebody.”

I still find the disclaimer funny and the sender annoying. But these days, when I think of him, it’s less about his frustrating behaviors and more about the burden he carries. I can’t save anyone from their own pace of growth and awareness; I can only work on that in myself. I try to separate the person from the soul and see everyone, including my colleagues, as a being struggling right along with me…and everyone else.

I think about a father who lost a son and a husband who lost a wife. I think about another human being trying to make sense of the same mystery I’m trying to make sense of. It doesn’t matter whether we do it differently, more slowly, or more quickly. A spiritual path isn’t about becoming nobody in a nihilistic sense. It is becoming less attached to the idea of being somebody.

Maybe that’s enough for now. I simply want to be able to see another person clearly, acknowledge my own reactions honestly, and quietly wish them well. Doing so decreases both of our sufferings.

As I prepare to attend a meeting with this man, I will remember this mantra: May you be free from suffering. Even if you still drive me a little crazy…but that’s my problem. Because I am a spiritual being having a human experience, I will have human experiences.

It’s a good practice for those who annoy you in life. If no one ever annoys you, let me know. I want to meet you.

Peace.

***

Some things that help me when I am being human, which is 24/7.

How about you?

The three foundational teachings of Ram Dass and his guru, by way of his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, also affectionately known as Maharajji:

• Love Everyone: Viewing all beings through the plane of the soul rather than the ego. It is about recognizing the fundamental unity of all things and shifting from a mindset of giving/taking love to being love.

• Serve Everyone: Alleviating human suffering by showing up authentically and offering help without attachment or ego, realizing that helping another is ultimately tending to oneself.

• Remember God: Staying grounded in the present moment and connected to your spiritual center, regardless of external circumstances.