Suffering is part of the human experience. Every religious and spiritual tradition that I know of not only acknowledges that but in one way or another engages that reality. With some distance between us and that suffering, we almost always begin to handle the story of that suffering in a way that helps us understand, learn and grow from the suffering. Even saying this, though, makes me rush to acknowledge: not everyone always enjoys that kind of space in their human suffering, and that is a story all of its own.
As a child, there were two stories that I heard often enough to leave their imprint on me. They were never told to me by the people that they were about–always by someone else. My grandmother told us about how her husband, my grandfather, had been called into his father’s deathbed when he was a young teenager (13 or 14). His father told him he was now the “man of the house” and that it was his responsibility to take care of his mother and two older sisters. From that day on, he quit school and took full responsibility for the strawberry farm that his family had. Without saying it, my grandmother wanted us to know that despite having to quit school in the wake of his father’s death, how smart and capable my grandfather was, and how he did, indeed, even though he was the baby of the family, take care of his mother and sisters. We should know how much he, this silent hero, loved us, his family.
The other story was about my mother’s mother. She was the ninth of ten children born in her family. Her mother died giving birth to the last child, and her father was already devastated by alcoholism. Her older siblings had moved on in life including her oldest brother who had moved from Pennsylvania to Birmingham in Alabama. He learned from an older sister still in Pennsylvania that their father had sold their little sister (my grandmother) as a housegirl to another family. As the story goes, in the dark of night, her eldest brother drove to Pennsylvania and essentially kidnapped his sister back to his home in Alabama. The story ostensibly was to tell us how we came to live in Alabama, but it told me so much more about the suffering and hardship that my grandmother had endured as a child. It helped me understand her feelings about family, about alcohol abuse and how very much she never said out loud.
Our stories are ever unfolding, and they often take a lifetime or even more than a lifetime to become what they need to be: understanding, practical wisdom and meaning for those who receive them. Our stories help create an ever evolving wisdom.
~Bob Patrick
