181. Darling, I Am Here For You – Elizabeth Lesser
Thich Nhat Hahn at Plum Village
“The most precious gift you can give to the one you love is your true presence. So my mantra is very simple: ‘Darling, I am here for you.’”
People need people. That’s one thing I have learned during the pandemic. But people also drive each other crazy (another thing I’ve learned.) We need each other, but so often we don’t know the basics of just being with each other. That’s never more obvious than when someone we love is suffering—whether they have a serious illness, or a headache, or a heartache. When I was my sister Maggie’s bone marrow donor, the easy part was having my stem cells harvested (a lovely word they use to describe a not-so-lovely procedure.) The harder part was knowing how to help Maggie during some of the most extreme suffering I’d ever witnessed. We’ve all been there—trying to support the ones we love when they are hurting. And we have all been the ones hurting. And still we flounder in our helping.
I had a front row seat in the theater of how-not-to-help when I was Maggie’s caretaker after the transplant. When well-meaning friends expounded on the healing power of juice fasts, or the amazing clinic in Germany where so and so’s cousin was cured, or how negative thinking might have caused the cancer, I’d watch Maggie’s face twist into a look of weary—and sometimes wrathful—disbelief. Some people were over-helpers, filling the awkward spaces with too much advice, too much talking. I’ve done that; maybe you have too. And some friends, in their confusion or fear, didn’t help enough. I’ve done that too—not making contact because I didn’t want to say the wrong thing or intrude on someone’s privacy. But avoiding the one who is hurting also goes into the how-not-to-help category.
So how to help our beloveds in their illnesses, their struggles—or merely in these troubled times? My favorite advice comes from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen monk, poet, and peace activist who died in January. All over the world, thousands of people would gather to listen to Thich Nhat Hanh, perhaps expecting complicated theories that would unlock the secrets of life. But it was his very being that was the teaching. He was the most peaceful person I have ever been around. In an interview Oprah asked him the best way to help another person. In his lilting accent he said, “The most precious gift you can give to the one you love is your true presence. So my mantra is very simple: ‘Darling, I am here for you.’”
It turns out that while health articles, a meal chain, and even your bone marrow will go a long way in helping, it is the marrow of our very selves—our unadorned presence—that we crave from each other. When I think back to those dark winter days after Maggie came home from the hospital, what I know she appreciated the most were the hours we spent stretched out on the long window seat in her kitchen—she on one side, me on the other, our feet touching, and the silence, the deep healing silence. And me repeating just under my breath, Darling, I am here for you.
– Elizabeth Lesser
