Cult Icon

Desire teaches us, not just by gratification, but by constantly undercutting itself, by never being entirely satisfied. It rubs our faces in reality by always falling a bit short of its goal. This is desire’s secret agenda, to alert us to the gap between our expectations and the way things actually are. In so doing, it shows us that there is something more interesting than success or failure, more compelling than having complete control. "

 

"for something so apparently straightforward, desire is remarkably complicated. In its relentless pursuit of passion and pleasure, in its striving forever onward, desire keeps thrusting us into unknown territory, undercutting our needs for stability, security and certainty. At the same time, desire craves exactly those qualities of stability, security and certainty that it simultaneously undermines."

 

"“The Buddha taught that the cause of suffering is craving,” I told her, “not desire. There is a difference between them. Or you could say the cause is clinging,” "

 

"Trying to weed out discomfort from our experience of desire only makes it more overwhelming. But allowing oneself to fall into the space that desire cannot span makes the experience complete. The little bit of lack that remains, after even the most satisfying resolution of desire, is a window into something important, something true. While we are conditioned to recoil from this elusiveness, to see it as a deficiency that must be overcome, it is possible to relate to it in a completely different way. It can actually be enjoyed as an inextricable, and ineluctable, aspect of desire’s nature, and a window into the true nature of the self. "

Grasping onto the extrinsic appearance of things, we expect to be satisfied in a complete way. We look to union or merger, as I did with my wife, as the antidote to our suffering. But this kind of satisfaction is impossible because the qualities that we project onto the desired object—of permanence, stability or “thingness”—do not really exist. As a result, we are inevitably disappointed. The disparity between the way we perceive things and the way they actually are is at the root of our struggle with desire. Once we learn how to make that disparity part of our experience, however, desire can be a teacher rather than an affliction. We can open to it more when we stop fighting with the way it disappoints us"

 

“It is the difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor which will permit no halting at any position attained,”7 he concluded. We are driven forward, Freud felt, by a deceitful master, ever promising ultimate satisfaction and ever incapable of coming through. "

 

" Desire’s survival is dependent on
its frustration. Just when it appears to have reached its goal, it seeks out something else to covet. It never knows when to stop. And we are the vehicles of this endless drama. "

 

"This third character, the obstacle that comes between, is the critical factor in the path of desire. This is where one of the most helpful Buddhist teachings begins to make sense. The obstacle that comes between is always clinging. And clinging is driven by the hope that something or someone, somewhere, has some kind of ultimate reality."

 

"Desire must confront the gap that our clinging wishes to eradicate. How we handle this gap makes all the difference in our own unfolding lives. "

The reality, of course, is that the battle against death is doomed to ultimate failure. Sometimes doctors, patients and relatives enter into a joint deception to avoid discussing the likelihood of death. The doctors do not want to discuss the possibility of ‘failure’; the relatives do not want to destroy the patient’s hope; and the patient is clinging on to the possibility of a medical miracle. Instead of open and honest discussion about the likelihood that death is approaching, there is a strange and ultimately damaging game of pretence. Death has become defined by what doctors can and cannot do."

 

"The unique person, with all the wonder and mystery of life history, loved ones, joys and sorrows, has become invisible. "

 

we are spiritual beings, death is a spiritual event.

Pride gets in the way of dying well. Pride tends to keep suffering and sickness and death at bay. Pride pretends to have no need of either the grace of God or the grace of another human being. It refuses to acknowledge neediness, and it is therefore no good at gratitude. Life frequently has a way of bringing down those who exalt themselves, but if life does not do it, dying will. . "

 

"

he last of the medieval temptations is that of avarice, or greed. In the illustrations, demons remind a dying man of his many possessions and ask him how he can let these go. They point to his friends and his family and remind him of the pleasures of his earthly life. How can he abandon all the good things of this life? Instead, he should cling on in desperation to the earthly possessions, experiences and relationships he has loved for so long.

This is a temptation for those Christian believers whose hearts are set too firmly in the here and now. Life is good. I do not feel ready to leave just now. There are so many more things I could do, more goods I could purchase, more pleasures to experience, more places to visit. There are many unfulfilled dreams on my ‘bucket list’. If this was a temptation in the medieval period, how much more is it a temptation for those of us who have experienced the benefits and pleasures of our materialistic and hedonistic culture!"

 

""We spend our lives creating our future, by creating habits, learning from experience, examining our weaknesses and strengths. Our lives as we live them day by day create the person we will be at the moment of death. You see this at the bedside of a dying person. You see it in the way a body rests or fights, in the lines of the face, in the faint shadow of a smile or a scowl, worry or peace. With every passing day, we create the kind of death we will have.""

 

"The specter of death reveals our relationships to be our most precious possessions. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve met people in my office, an emergency room, hospital, or a hospice program who have expressed deep regret over things they wish they had said before a grandparent, parent, sibling, or friend died. They can’t change what was, but without fail their regrets have fueled a healthy resolve to say what needs to be said before it’s too late—to clear away hurt feelings, to connect in profound ways with the people who mean the most to them."

 

"

Everyone knows that all relationships, even the most loving, have occasional rough spots. We assume that the people we love know that we love them, even if we’ve had our disagreements and tense moments. Yet when someone we love dies suddenly, we often have gnawing doubts.

We are all sons or daughters, whether we are six years of age or ninety-six. Even the most loving parent-child relationship can feel forever incomplete if your mother or father dies without having explicitly expressed affection for you or without having acknowledged past tensions. I’ve learned from my patients and their families about the painful regret that comes from not speaking these most basic feelings. Again and again, I’ve witnessed the value of stating the obvious. When you love someone, it is never too soon to say, “I love you,” or premature to say, “Thank you,” “I forgive you,” or “Will you please forgive me?”

When there is nothing of profound importance left unsaid, relationships tend to take on an aspect of celebration, as they should."

 

"

“It wasn’t just with me. He started going around to all of us in the family, almost everyone he knew, in fact, asking forgiveness for things he’d done or, in my case, not done.

“He told people how much they meant to him. He was very deliberate about it. He was very specific with everyone. He paid off debts—even those that had long ago been forgiven, or forgotten. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve run into who have told me about these visits with my dad.”

 

“We were baffled, to say the least. Looking back, my mom and I have pieced together that he’d lost an old Navy friend about three months before he started making amends. Then his barber keeled over at work.”

 

 

“Did people give your father the forgiveness he sought? Did you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Diane. “He was so sincere. It may sound funny, but I was actually happy for him. He was softer, more genuine. We had such a wonderful time those few months. We had a real father-daughter relationship for the first time. It was a shock to lose him so soon after he had reached out to us. The whole family was devastated. But, without a doubt, it was easier because of what we had all shared in those precedingmonths. My mother feels the same way. When she talks about him, she’s sad, but she’s told me that she also feels proud of him—as if in some way he made it! We all got the feeling that he was content with himself before he died, probably for the first time in his life.”

 

“I never realized just how much was missing in my life until my father reached out to me. It was as if something that was broken inside me suddenly felt whole. I know he felt the same way. There was a deep sense of peace and warmth. I guess the lesson for me is that it’s never too late to say what needs to be said,” she said. “But it is also never too early. Because you just never know.”

"People who acknowledge that their lives may soon be over tend to have little patience with pretense, including their own."

 

"

Most people who are dying still have the capacity to change in ways that are important to them. Their transformation can also make an enormous, and lasting, difference to the people around them. Even the least introspective person may begin to look inward. Serious illness can allow people to experience the immediacy of life. Hard, angry, suspicious people (who, it seemed, would stay that way to the bitter end) often soften, becoming vulnerable and even trusting. I look at these changes not as deathbed conversions, but as quantum leaps in personal development—opportunities to achieve a state of mind and an intimacy with others that might not otherwise come to pass.

We know that our family and friends are the most important parts in life, but we tend to get distracted, enmeshed as we often are in the work and family responsibilities that fill our daily lives"

 

"As we learned more of Steve’s personal history, however, we realized that his anxiety stemmed in part from the fractured nature of several key relationships and the complex, conflicted nature of his family’s life."

 

"Although Steve’s anxiety did not disappear, its grip weakened on him in the wake of his remarks. When he asked forgiveness from the people he cared most about, he said that he had suddenly felt transformed. He was able to tell them how much they meant to him and how much he loved them. Steve’s life didn’t become easy, but it did become less anguished. After that day, everyone reported that there was now a tenderness and a cohesiveness among them that no one could remember having felt before."

 

As he faced his life’s end, Steve was transformed and so was everyone around him. He was happier with himself than he could ever remember being, he said. Paradoxically, in the process of dying, he was healing and becoming well within himself."

 

"

Measuring Your Time by Its Depth, Not Its Length

Antoine’s life had been transformed in his last hours—he died knowing that he had a daughter, a daughter who loved him. Chantelle’s life was also changed forever. She now knows she had a father who loved her, who saw her as she was. He apologized, asked for her forgiveness, and she willingly gave it. She misses all that could have been, but feels fullness in her heart where there had previously been emptiness and pain."

Many people come to the end of their life with fractured relationships. But as the stories of Herb, Steve, and Chantelle show, the healing of a broken relationship in the last hours, or even minutes before death, can reframe the history of the relationship and the biographies of everyone involved."

Of course, not all relationships are fractured. Sometimes, our only regret is death’s relentless approach or another parting of ways."

“I love you.” The people trapped on the upper floors of the World Trade Center and in the highjacked planes on September 11, 2001, called their loved ones to say it one last time. It was the most important call they ever made. Saying “I love you” and expressing the spirit of the Four Things is a priceless gift for those who live on. The knowledge of being loved, even when you are separated from each other, sustains you and provides you with inner strength and comfort."

 

Desire animates the world. It is present in the baby crying for milk, the girl struggling to solve a math problem, the woman running to meet her lover and later deciding to have children, and the old woman, hunched over her walker, moving down the hall of the nursing home at a glacial pace to pick up her mail. Banish desire from the world, and you get a world of frozen beings who have no reason to live and no reason to die. Some people have far fewer desires than the rest of us. Some of them lack desire because they are depressed; others lack it because they have achieved enlightenment."

 

"This enlightenment, by the way, is typically the end result of years of conscious effort, brought on by an intense desire to free themselves, to the extent possible, from the grip of desire. Because we continually experience desire, we are oblivious to its presence in us. It is like the noise made by the fan of a computer. The noise is always there, a low whisper, and because it is always there, we stop noticing it. Similarly, we are usually oblivious to our desires—to their ebb and flow within us, to the role they play in our lives. It is only when our desires are intense (like when we fall in love) or when they come into conflict (like when we want a bowl of ice cream but, because we are on a diet, simultaneously want not to want it) that we pay attention to our desires, with a mixture of puzzlement and vexation. And because we are oblivious to the workings of desire within us, we are full of misconceptions about it. "

 

" Indeed, in many cases, you don’t so much choose your desires as discover them within you. You will also come to appreciate the extent to which these unbidden desires determine how you spend your days and, in the long run, how you spend your life. Another thing: once you gain an understanding of how desire works, the desires you form are likely to change. "

 

" Once I came to understand the extent to which desires arise within me spontaneously and not as the result of rational thought processes, I grew suspicious of my desires. “Where did this desire come from?” I would ask. “Why do I want this thing  that I want?” And having asked, I would in many cases end up discarding the suspect desire."

 mastering desire will be less difficult than we might imagine. For one thing, once we come to understand our desires, many of them will simply vanish; they will fall away, as Bhikkhu Bodhi puts it,“like the leaves of a tree, naturally and spontaneously.” Furthermore, the effort required to master desire is probably less, all things considered, than the effort we will expend trying to fulfill whatever desires pop into our head. It is true that a person attempting to master desire will have to spend time reflecting on his desires and how best to overcome them and might have to spend some of his free time reading philosophers or meditating. But the alternative approach, working to satisfy a neverending stream of desires, will be far more arduous. The person taking this last approach might be forced to spend his adult life doing a job he hates so that he can afford the objects of his desires. His days might be frenetic, while the person who works instead to master his desires will enjoy relative tranquility."

 

"In forming a life plan, we are, in effect, misusing our ability to choose: we are using it not to accomplish
the goals our evolutionary master has set for us but to accomplish other goals we have set for ourselves, goals that are incompatible with his. It may be wrong to cheat our friends and neighbors or even our workplace boss, but cheating our evolutionary master raises, I think, no similar moral issues."

 

"
 Buddha, Merton, Thoreau, and Amish farmers, to name a few. All of these individuals clearly had meaningful lives. Their life plans may not have allowed them to gain worldly success, but they achieved something of even greater value—satisfaction. They did not spend their days wishing they could be someone else, or be themselves living a life other than the one they were living. To the contrary, they embraced their lives and destinies. I also think a life plan can confer meaning without being as exotic as the plans of Buddha, Merton, and the others. "

 

"

"Cases in which people, such as the woman described above, form life plans whose goals are impossible to attain are tragic. Almost regardless of her circumstances, the woman had it in her power to live a life filled with contentment and tranquility. She could have taken delight in the most ordinary of events; she could even have experienced joy. She needed only to choose the right life plan. Instead, her life was likely filled with anxiety, envy, bitterness, and discontent (when, for example, she was snubbed when trying to climb into a new social circle or could not afford to buy what she found herself wanting), broken only occasionally by moments of delight (subsequent, perhaps, to a social triumph or to making a significant purchase). Whether your life is a living heaven or a living hell depends, to a considerable extent, not on your circumstances but on yourself and the degree to which you have mastered your desires. If we take a person whose desires are out of control and give him everything he wants—a big mansion, a private jet, adulatory articles about him in magazines, and a billion dollars in the bank—he will soon be as dissatisfied as he was before we made his dreams come true. If, however, we take a person who is master of his desires and banish him to a desolate island—the way Seneca was banished to a “barren and thorny rock” by Emperor Claudius1—he will, despite the privations, probably find more contentment there than the newly minted billionaire will in his luxurious mansion."

 

"According to the people examined in this book, our goal should not be the attainment of worldly success—the attainment of fame and fortune. It should instead be the attainment of satisfaction. What matters is not a person’s absolute level of fame and fortune but whether his level of fame and fortune are sufficient for him—whether he feels satisfied with it. The lower his expectations are with respect to fame and fortune, the easier it will be for him to gain satisfaction. "

 

"t when we look at people who have gained worldly success, we find that their success did not extinguish the feelings of dissatisfaction that drove them to pursue it. In the words of Epicurus, “Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.”

 

"Suppose, for the sake of argument, Epicurus is wrong. Suppose we come across a person who, as the result of decades of effort involving unpleasant toil and considerable anxiety, gains worldly success, and suppose that on gaining it he gains lasting satisfaction. This person, despite having gained satisfaction, deserves our pity, for either he could have gained satisfaction with much less effort, or he could not. In the former case, we should pity him for wasting his effort—for working so hard to get something that could easily have been obtained, if only he had mastered his desires. He is like someone who traveled all the way to Tibet to get a certain kind of tea, even though it was readily available at his corner market. And if, turning to the second case, it was impossible for this person to gain satisfaction without first gaining worldly success, we should pity him for being so hard to satisfy."

I think it is possible for a person to gain both satisfaction and worldly success, but usually when this happens, it isn’t because his success brought him satisfaction. Instead it might be that the thing that brought him satisfaction also brought him success. This is what happened to Diogenes: his indifference to success, besides enabling him to feel satisfied with his life, made him famous."

 

"For most of us, though, the choice between worldly success and satisfaction is mutually exclusive. Generally, to gain fame or fortune a person must be driven by ambition, and a driven person is unlikely to feel satisfied with his circumstances."

 

"At this point, someone might comment that if everyone took to heart the advice to stop seeking worldly success and instead seek satisfaction, the world as we know it would grind to a halt. Instead of a world filled with ambitious people, we would have a world full of Thoreaus, Mertons, and Epicuruses. These complacent individuals would be unwilling to put in long hours at jobs they hate. As a result, there would be little progress. There would be no SUVs, no shopping malls, and no mansions. In response to this criticism, I have two replies. The first is that it is quite unlikely that everyone will take the above advice to heart: across the millennia and across cultures, only a handful of individuals are sufficiently enlightened to recognize that there can and should be more to life than laboring daily in the service of one’s BIS. There is little reason to think that this will change in the future. Indeed, in recent decades people have shown, if anything, an increased willingness to comply with the demands of their BIS. "

 

"It is worth noting, by the way, that although Thoreau, Merton, and Epicurus, were not conventionally ambitious— they did not spend their days working to gain fame and fortune— it hardly follows that they were lazy. To the contrary, their days were full of activity they found to be satisfying, even though the activity in question was unlikely to gain them worldly success. "

 

"

Do you sincerely think that a billionaire or a famous actress is happier than you are, or that having the billionaire’s money or actress’s fame would make you happier than you currently are? It is true that the billionaire and the actress look happy: magazines have such glowing things to say about their luxurious lifestyles. It is also true that the billionaire and actress should in theory be happy: they have what most people want. But that is not the question. Rather, the question is, are they in fact happier than you? It all depends, I would like to suggest, on how satisfied you, the billionaire, and the actress are with what you’ve got. If you are more satisfied than they are, then it is entirely possible that they are less happy than you, despite their fame and fortune. And since it is unlikely that the billionaire and the actress would have achieved the success they did if they were easily satisfied, it is likely that you are more satisfied than they are and therefore are happier as well. It is true that by pursuing material wealth and social status we can earn the rewards offered by our BIS, but it is unlikely that these rewards will fully compensate us for the trouble involved in pursuing them—particularly when we recall how fleeting the rewards are likely to be. Is our goal in life to be rich? Then we would do well to take to heart the Taoist proverb, repeated in many cultures, that “he who knows contentment is rich.”4 Lao Tzu was right, I think, when he claimed that “there is no disaster greater than not being content.”5

 

"Some desires are formed as the result of rational thought processes. "

 

"It would be a mistake, though, to suppose that all our desires are formed in this manner. To the contrary, many of our most profound, life-affecting desires are not rational, in the sense that we don’t use rational thought processes to form them. Indeed, we don’t form them; they form themselves within us. They simply pop into our heads, uninvited and unannounced. While they reside there, they take control of our lives. A single rogue desire can trample the plans we had for our lives and thereby alter our destinies. "

 

"If we are to understand desire—indeed, if we are to understand the human condition—we need to acknowledge the
possibility of spontaneous desire. "

"

tragedies depict characters making mistakes, rather than inherent flaws in character. I know that I miss the mark hundreds of times each day. I often have to lose my way in order to find the right path forward. Making mistakes, even habitually and unknowingly, is central to what it means to be human. Characters in Greek tragedies stray, err, and get lost. They are no more flawed than the rest of humanity; the difference lies in the scale of their mistakes, which inevitably cost lives and ruin generations.

At the same time, being human and making mistakes—even in ignorance—does not absolve these tragic characters of responsibility for their actions. Had they fully understood what they were doing, they most certainly wouldn’t have done it. But they did it all the same. It is in this gray zone—at the thin border between ignorance and responsibility—that ancient Greek tragedies play out. This is one of the many reasons that tragedies still speak to us with undiminished force today. We all live in that gray zone, in which we are neither condemned by nor absolved of our mistakes.

What is so utterly flawed about the idea of the “tragic flaw” is that it encourages us to judge rather than to empathize with characters like Oedipus. Tragedies are designed not to teach us morals but rather to validate our moral distress at living in a universe in which many of our actions and choices are influenced by external powers far beyond our comprehension—such as luck, fate, chance, governments, fami

lies, politics, and genetics. In this universe, we are dimly aware, at best, of the sum total of our habits and mistakes, until we have unwittingly destroyed those we love or brought about our own destruction.

It is not our job to judge the characters in Greek tragedies—to focus on their “flaws.” Tragedy challenges us to see ourselves in the way its characters stray from the path, and to open our eyes to the bad habits we may have formed or to the mistakes we have yet to make. Contrary to what you may have learned in school, tragedies are not designed to fill us with pessimism and dread about the futility of human existence or our relative powerlessness in a world beyond our grasp. They are designed to help us see the impending disaster on the horizon, so that we may correct course and narrowly avoid it. Above all, the flaw in our thinking about tragedy is that we look for meaning where there is none to be found. Tragedies don’t mean anything. They do something."

 

Merton was not surprised by these sudden onsets of desire and by his inability to explain them. To the contrary, he unhesitatingly rejected the claim that our desires—and in particular, our most important, life-affecting desires—are formed as the result of rational thought. The intellect, he tells us, “is constantly being blinded and perverted by the ends and aims of passion, and the evidence it presents to us with such a show of impartiality and objectivity is fraught with interest and propaganda.” We are, he says, masters of self-delusion. Our desires “are fruitful sources of every kind of error and misjudgement, and because we have these yearnings in us, our intellects . . . present to us everything distorted and accommodated to the norms of our desire.”

 

"Usually in life, our desires change with the passage of time, as one desire displaces another. Compare your fondest desires when you were ten years old with your fondest desires today. There should be a difference. What has happened is that slowly,
with the passage of time, some of your earlier desires were fulfilled and you went on to form new desires, while other desires seemed impossible to fulfill and you abandoned them in favor of new desires. This is the natural state of man: a head full of desires, but with the desires in question changing from year to year and even from minute to minute, like the water in a river. Sometimes the flow of desires ceases, and a person experiences what I call a crisis of desire. Before I go any further in my examination of such crises, let me explain the difference between a crisis of desire and a mere conflict of desire. "

 

 

 

 

Type 2 diabetes is a fitting metaphor for the human condition as portrayed in ancient Greek tragedy, and for the interdependence of human action and fate. Those who are diagnosed with the disease often possess a genetic predisposition to develop it. It is written into their DNA, like an ancient intergenerational curse. ""

 

""

Things are as they are, unrelenting and absurd. We are punished far in excess of our guilt.

It is a terrible, stark insight into human life. Yet in the very excess of his suffering lies man’s claim to dignity. Powerless and broken, a blind beggar hounded out of the city, he assumes a new grandeur. Man is ennobled by the vengeful spite or injustice of the gods. It does not make him innocent, but it hallows him as if he had passed through flame. Hence there is in the final moments of great tragedy, whether Greek or Shakespearean or neoclassic, a fusion of grief and joy, of lament over the fall of man and of rejoicing in the resurrection of his spirit. No other poetic form achieves this mysterious effect"

 

"The motion of tragedy is a constant descent from prosperity to suffering and chaos: exitu est foetida et horribilis. "

 

"

 

"

"Myth was, and still is, a vehicle for bringing our lives into contact with something deep within us and larger than ourselves."

 

"While much of the secular, industrialized world has lost touch with the power of rituals and myth, humans today are no less receptive to them than were our ancient forebears. We still ache for contact with the transcendent and the divine. We yearn to know that we are part of something bigger. And we are relieved to discover that we are not alone, especially across time."

 

"Aristotle also argues that one of the most important elements of Greek tragedy is “suffering.” By portraying physical pain and emotional anguish, tragedies were designed to elicit powerful emotions. But how, and to what end? Tragedies, by portraying well-intentioned people passing rapidly from prosperity to affliction, evoke “pity and fear.” Pity, because we all make mistakes. Fear, because the suffering portrayed in ancient Greek tragedy is horrifying and extreme."

 

"The goal of eliciting these emotions, Aristotle argues, is to bring about catharsis. Thousands upon thousands of pages have been written about what he intended by this one word, which in ancient Greek means “to cleanse, purify, refine,” but none of these words in English fully conveys the spirit of what Aristotle may have intended, or for that matter the experience of ancient audiences. All well-balanced people feel healthy amounts of pity and fear, when appropriate. So I take Aristotle’s catharsis to mean “the purification of potentially dangerous emotions, such as pity and fear, of their toxicity,” rather than “the complete eradication of these emotions.”

Plato on the dangers of consuming entertainment:

 

"In Plato’s assessment, imitation, or mimesis, is dangerously removed from the truth of reality. And tragedy, the most developed and persuasive form of mimesis, arouses aberrant emotions that cloud our ability to reason and hasten the disintegration of a just society. Tragedy aimed to sweep audiences away—emotionally and physically—with powerful performances, encouraging spectators to indulge in the perilous activity of setting aside reason and being overwhelmed with emotions. This is what made tragedy, in Plato’s view, so corrosively and insidiously dangerous for the state. It was inherently manipulative, as well as an enemy to reason and skepticism."

 

"

Aristotle contends in The Poetics that the purpose of tragedy is to arouse pity and fear not for the sake of simply arousing them, or in service of mere entertainment, but in order to purify or refine them of their toxic qualities.

I would add that perhaps tragedy aimed to arouse powerful responses, including pity and fear, in order to facilitate a healthy and balanced response to personal suffering and the suffering of others. T"

Instead, they were giving voice to timeless human experiences—of suffering and grief—that, when viewed by a large audience that had shared those experiences, fostered compassion, understanding, and a deeply felt interconnection. Through tragedy, the Greeks faced the darkness of human existence as a community."

 

"In the months and years that followed, I saw these ancient stories—filled with conflict, ambivalence, and loss—no longer as subjects of academic study but as lived experience. The extreme emotions that they portrayed now seemed like a natural extension of my own. If ancient Greek tragedies could speak directly to me, or could capture the essence of something private and seemingly unknowable, such as the death of someone I loved, then they could also speak to anyone who had lived—in some direct way—the human experiences they describe."

 

A similar process occurs with emotional wounds. Healing is effected when the toxic material in the rift between two people has been cleansed and they are able to reestablish a sense of closeness. Forgiving is an act of cleansing that enables the wisdom within us to reach out and reconnect with people we once loved."

 

"“People live on within us” is not just a pleasant nostrum from a Hallmark card or a metaphysical assertion. In tangible ways, our relationships with the people we have lost through death continue. It’s natural for the most important people in our lives—our parents, brothers and sisters, spouses, children, and our closest friends—to become part of who we are. Death can’t change that; even death is not that strong. In many ways, both conscious and unconscious, people continue to influence our everyday perceptions of the world and our sense of ourselves. And they continue to populate our dreams at night. They are an entirely normal, important part of our psyche and as such, they do live on within us."

"

From a psychological perspective, it is possible to complete relationships with people who have died. Most often, however, it’s a lot easier to do so when they are alive.

Carla and her father brought their relationship to completion. She still draws comfort from the sense of resolution she and her father achieved. In contrast, Paul’s experience is marked by a sense of things unresolved. He didn’t have the chance to talk with his dad the way that Carla had. And their father never had the opportunity—or didn’t take the opportunity—of saying to Paul some of the things, including “I’m sorry,”"

 

More than likely, in order for Paul to feel whole in his relationship with his father, he will also need to forgive himself. Like the rest of us, he will need to accept himself as he is—mistakes, regrets, and all—and go forward with compassion and love for himself and others. Truly forgiving yourself is not easy in a culture that strives for perfection, but it is something all of us should practice."