I just spent two exhausting days getting a friend, a dear soul, admitted to the hospital as a psychiatric inpatient. She had not left her room in three days to eat, drink, or use the bathroom.
It was strange to be back in the same hospital advocating for the care of someone else. Half a year ago, I was in her shoes. I was far more coherent than she. Far more together. But my suffering was similarly intense.
Marching through the emergency room, hunting down doctors and insisting that they take care of her, I felt such deep compassion and at the same time, such rage. The doctors repeatedly attempted to discharge her despite her suicide attempt, despite her severe delusions. I let them have it! I brought social workers and psychiatrists back into the room and spoke to them firmly until they fully understood the situation. With my finger shaking in their face and my voice taking on the tone of a mother reprimanding her child, they listened and quickly reversed their decisions.
Tibetan Buddhists describe what is known as compassionate wrath, anger expressed for the purposes of relieving suffering. I was never good at conjuring anger, but my wrath in the emergency department was spectacular, and it ensured that my friend was cared for. Finally I think I get it.
When we found our friend, she was lying on her bedroom floor deliriously awaiting death and speaking to the air. We called an ambulance and accompanied her to the emergency room. I did not sleep on Wednesday night. I tossed and turned with vivid, nauseating flashbacks of the scene. I could even remember the smell. I let the flashbacks come, receiving them with love.
Months ago, I brought a similar pain to others. Now I understood how much love and tenderness oozes out of those waves of primal anxiety, burning empathy, and grief. From a place of wholeness, a place from which my friend was far removed, I can experience faith in her eventual healing, faith that she cannot access. I was so grateful for the moment, for the opportunity to respond, to be challenged, my compassion muscles made stronger. I was grateful to her for this.
I never appreciated this from the other side. I was not able to see through my own pain and understand that even those who are burdened are opened by the experience.
Suddenly, I was able to forgive myself and open my heart in a deeper way to those I burdened. Enough time had passed, I thought, to extend a more formal apology to one individual in particular. I owed her a book. Yesterday, as unintrusively as possible, I left a book for her on Dzogchen. The evening passed peacefully, but I awoke abruptly after 11 pm with a queasy, burning, crawling horrible feeling, and just knew I had only caused further pain.
I was the personification of her worst fears. What we cannot face within, we cannot face in someone else. Someday, she will face it, and everything she saw in me will feel different, more peaceful, safe. Only because I faced the suffering in myself could I sit beside my tormented friend undisturbed and have faith on her behalf. I remember the pain of being a source of pain. The added suffering of suffering is the burden it imposes on others, the fear it evokes, and sometimes that burden leaves an imprint that lasts a lifetime.
Sometimes not. I witnessed members of a Buddhist charity group come to her side and inquire incessantly about her well being. I watched my Buddhist love, someone who stood by me through a dark night despite my screaming and punching, come to the side of our suffering friend, listen to her delusions, hold her hand, even carry out the bag she’d used as her bathroom. I will never forget that scene. Without complaint, without a hint of disgust, he grabbed the bag at her request and removed it from the room. In a metaphorical way, he had done the same for me.
Even in the most humiliating pain, we are surrounded by more love than we know.
