This Is Heaven

How to love what's unbearable

[Trigger warning: Suicide, mental illness, loss. Take care of your heart, dear one.]

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Looking in his eyes was the hardest part.

Three months in a coma is a long time. Explanations can be invented, expanded upon, solidified, as if you think you know what happened.

We had no idea what had happened.

The call from my dad was a dream filtering through leagues of ocean water.

It’s Scott. He had a suicide attempt. Jumped off the roof of his fourteen-story apartment building. He’s alive.

When I first arrived at the hospital, leaving my seniors thesis class early to catch a flight, I didn’t know where to touch my brother. Cords snaked around his hands and wrists. His leg was hoisted in a pulley system, the metal rod shoved through his knee distancing femur bone from the broken mess of his pelvis.

His eyes were taped shut and covered in yellow goo. Like the doctors didn’t expect them to open soon.

The only place I found to touch him—between his shattered, purple eye sockets and chest pounding on a ventilator—was his eyebrows. Soft, circular motions. Like our mother did when we were children.

Months later, after scans and seizures and a never ending stream of doctors in the ICU, the tape was removed.

He woke up.

We had told ourselves many things in the meantime to ease our hearts. That it was an accident. That he’d been given a second chance and would use it to do good. That he would be grateful, even, to still be alive.

What we didn’t expect was this: he wasn’t him.

His eyes—his most expressive, enchanting feature—betrayed the arrival of someone else.

Someone distant. Cold. Halfway absent.

Later, the diagnosis would come. Schizophrenia, followed by hefty doses of antipsychotic medications, all in a desire to protect him. To keep the aliens at bay.

The ones who had told him to jump.

I was ashamed by how much I looked away. How I struggled to meet the person in the hospital bed, hand trembling wildly as he fought to bring a spork of mashed potatoes to his mouth. How I turned down the hall when the physical therapists arrived to help him sit on the edge of his bed, his body toppling back and forth until he laid back down, exhausted from the exercise.

How I looked past his cheek as he told me about the aliens, then he said between broken breaths: “You’d be crazy if you believed me.”

I didn’t know what to believe. Just as I didn’t know how to meet those eyes; the ones I desperately wanted to find reassurance in.

There was none.

Tragedy changes the fabric of your being. It abruptly expands your horizon past what was familiar into terrifying, untouched territories. It took a long time—and so much work—to forgive myself for the person I was at his bedside.

To forgive myself for all that I couldn’t say or do before he died, less than a year later, frozen at twenty-five.

It’s been fourteen years since then. My memories of my brother have found their proper proportions again—joyful years rising to the surface as the painful circumstances of his death deflated, becoming more manageable.

In an unexpected twist of events, I now sit on monthly calls with my Zen teacher and hear reports about how his husband is being lost before his very eyes.

To delusions. To disease. How his voice is changing texture, as my brother’s did.

It brings so much back, like I’m witnessing vestiges of my own story unfolding beside his. My teacher is older and more resourced than I was. He is meeting this tragedy with a larger container. And through that container—through him—I’m learning about myself, past and present.

I’m finding deeper wells of compassion for how hard tragedy is for anyone—a seventy-three-year-old and a twenty-one-year-old alike.

On our last call, he read a poem written during another sleepless night. A night where the remnants of a hard day lingered, needing an exit point through which to release.

He found that release in writing.

I wept as he read it to me—bowed over, face covered, when the last line landed, describing how the beauty and pain come together in this singular, swift life:

“Heaven,” he said, voice steady.

Heaven—the confusing days; the moments where it feels like you can’t handle it anymore, not another second.

Heaven—the ongoing loss of someone you love right before your very eyes.

Heaven—this life that is unfolding completely differently than expected, yet it cannot be fought or ignored. It can only be met.

And somehow, in fleeting glimpses, you feel grateful. Grateful to have people to love; people to lose.

This is heaven. This is heaven.

Not because it is pleasurable, but because it is everything.

Beauty and heartache and fear and surprise.

Hearts beating, skin touching, breath stirring, tension and release.

This is is heaven because this is life, unbridled.

And to find a way to cherish it still, even when the earth turns hard and the sun abandons the sky and there’s no clear way through…

That is the challenging, honest, brave work of what it means to choose your life.

Over and over again.

If I could reach back to that younger version of myself, drawing circles on her beloved brother’s clammy forehead, I would tell her:

It’s okay, Love. If you need to turn your eyes away, do so. But don’t turn your heart away, not from yourself. Because your heart is strong enough—wise enough—to hold even this life.

And then I would hold her and let my body speak in ways my words couldn’t. Reassuring her with touch and presence that she was loved loved loved—and while it wouldn’t take away her pain…

It would give her a way through.

A way through to heaven on earth.

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Here is my Zen teacher’s original poem, “Heaven.” His name is Flint Sparks. If you’re curious to know more about him and his teachings, here’s a recent talk he gave called “Heartbreak.” These talks are called inquiries, and you’ll notice there’s a format: meditating at the start, chanting to open the space, a dharma talk (wisdom talk), conversation with participants, and a chant to finish.

“Heaven”

Through it all, my body recognizes his,

And I know that his recognizes mine.

We know exactly who we are with.

It is this knowing that sustains us,

And warms us

Like a favorite blanket we cling to

That holds all the meaning,

Even as disease and disability threaten

To tear it away.

He reaches out with a gentle touch

Searching for my cheek,

To make sure I am still there.

I am unable to stop offering tender kisses

Across the creamy baldness of his scalp

As he nestles in closer.

We both feel the gentle breathing in the dark.

Heaven.