Gift : 12 Lessons to Save Your Life

by Edith Eger

  I told her to get rid of the “shoulds.” To make her language kinder. “Tune in to the way you speak to yourself,” I said. “Acknowledge you were wounded. And then choose what you let go and what you replenish. You got in the habit of minimizing your pain, and wanting to make yourself smaller. Now build a new habit. Release shame by replacing it with kindness, by making sure your dialogue is full of ‘yes I am, yes I can, yes I will!’ ”

  While visiting the Midwest once on a speaking tour, I was invited to eat dinner with a lovely family. The food was earthy and delicious, the conversation pleasant, but when I complimented the daughter, the mother kicked me under the table. Later, over coffee and dessert, she whispered, “Please don’t lavish praise on her. I don’t want her to grow up conceited.” In trying to keep our children or ourselves modest, we risk making ourselves less than we really are—less than whole. It’s time to give yourself a kiss on the hand and say, “Attaboy! Attagirl!”

  Loving yourself is the only foundation for wholeness, health, and joy. So fall in love with yourself! It’s not narcissistic. Once you begin to heal, what you discover will not be the new you, but the real you. The you that was there all along, beautiful, born with love and joy.

  KEYS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM GUILT AND SHAME

  You made it. If there’s some part of yourself you routinely resent or criticize, imagine yourself being very little, so tiny you can crawl inside your body and say hello to each of your organs, to each part of yourself. If you believe that everything is your fault, then gently hold your heart, hug that wounded part of you, and exchange it for a loving self. Tell yourself, “Yes, I made a mistake. It doesn’t make me a bad person. My doing is not the entirety of my being. I am good.” If your trauma is still living in your body, embrace it, because you survived it. You’re still here. You made it. My breathing has been very limited since my back broke during the war, so I like to go inside myself and say hello to my breathing, to my lungs. Find your vulnerable part and love it all over.

  What you pay attention to grows stronger. Spend a day listening to your self-talk. Is it full of “I should,” “I shouldn’t,” and “yes, but”? Do you tell yourself, “It’s my fault,” or “I don’t deserve it,” or “It could have been worse”? Replace these messages of guilt or shame with a daily practice of kind and loving self-talk. As soon as you wake up in the morning, go to the mirror and look at yourself with loving eyes. Say, “I’m powerful. I’m kind. I’m a person of strength.” Then kiss yourself on the back of each hand. Smile at yourself in the mirror. Say, “I love you.”

  Chapter 6 WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN

  The Prison of Unresolved Grief

  One day two women came to see me back-to-back. The first had a daughter who was a hemophiliac. She’d just come from the hospital, and she wept the whole hour, feeling the intense pain of watching her child suffer. My next patient had come from the country club. She also spent the hour weeping. She was upset because her new Cadillac had been delivered, and it had come in the wrong shade of yellow.

  On the surface, her reaction seemed out of proportion, her tears unearned. But often a minor disappointment represents a larger grief. Her sense of loss wasn’t about the Cadillac—it was about her relationships with her husband and son, the sorrow and resentment she felt that her desires for her family went unmet.

  These two beautiful women reminded me of one of the most fundamental principles of my work: how it is a universal experience for life not to turn out as we want or expect. Most of us suffer because we have something we don’t want, or we want something we don’t have.

  All therapy is grief work. A process of confronting a life where you expect one thing and get another, a life that brings you the unexpected and unanticipated.

  This is the epitome of what most soldiers face in combat. I’ve worked with many combat veterans throughout my career, and they often tell me the same thing: that they were sent to a place they were unprepared for, and that they were told one thing and found another.

  Grief is often not about what happened. It’s about what didn’t happen. When Marianne went to her first high school prom in a gorgeous orange silk dress, Béla told her, “Have fun, honey. When your mother was your age she was in Auschwitz and her parents were dead.” I was speechless with fury. My children knew by then that I was a survivor, but how dare he burden our precious daughter with my past? How dare he ruin her night with something that had nothing to do with her? It was completely unfair. Totally inappropriate.

  But I was also so upset because he was right. I never got to put on an orange silk dress and go to a dance. Hitler interrupted my life, and the lives of millions of others.

  I’m a prisoner and a victim when I minimize or deny my pain—and I’m a prisoner and a victim when I hold on to regret. Regret is the wish to change the past. It’s what we experience when we can’t acknowledge that we’re powerless, that something already happened, that we can’t change a single thing.

  I wish my mother had had a better guide through a sudden loss when she was nine. She woke up to find that her mother, who slept beside her, had stopped breathing, her body gone cold in the night. They buried her that day. There was no time to mourn, and all the years I knew her, my mother struggled with unresolved grief. She immediately took on the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings and cooking for the family, watching her father turn to alcohol to dull his pain and loneliness. By the time she married and became a mother herself, her grief had calcified, the shock and sorrow of her early loss tight around her like a cage. She hung a portrait of her mother on the wall above the piano and talked to it as she went about her chores. In the soundtrack of my childhood, my sister Klara practices violin, and my mother begs her dead mother for help and strength. Her grief seemed like a fourth child, in need of constant tending. It’s good to feel all the aspects of grief—sadness, anger, powerlessness. But my mother got stuck there.

  When we have unresolved grief, we often live with overwhelming rage.

  Lorna had a brother who drank a lot. One night he went for a walk and was hit by a car and died. A year later, she is struggling to accept that he’s gone. “I told him and told him not to drink!” she says. “Why didn’t he listen? He was supposed to help me take care of our mother. How could he be so selfish?” She can’t change that he was addicted to alcohol, that he kept right on drinking despite his family’s best efforts to intervene, that he was inebriated when he died. She can’t change a thing—and it’s hard to accept our powerlessness.

  When my grandchildren were young, a schoolmate was riding his bike one afternoon when he cut in front of traffic and died. Marianne was asked to talk to his classmates, to help them process all the complex feelings that come with loss—the way it forces us into a reckoning with our own mortality, with the fragility of life. She came prepared to address their sadness and fear. But the students’ overwhelming response to the tragedy wasn’t sorrow. It was guilt. “I could have been nicer to him,” they said. “He could have been at my house instead of riding his bike alone, but I never wanted to invite him over.” The students enumerated all the ways they might have prevented the boy’s death. By holding themselves responsible, they were seeking control. But as long as they continued to blame themselves, they’d be avoiding their grief.

  We don’t have control, but we wish we did.

  Resolving grief means both to release ourselves from responsibility for all the things that weren’t up to us, and to come to terms with the choices we’ve made that can’t be undone.

  Marianne helped the children name all the decisions that weren’t in their control: the boy’s choice to ride his bike that day, the route he took, what he was or wasn’t paying attention to when he rode off the curb into the street, what the driver of the car was or wasn’t paying attention to as she moved into the intersection. And she helped them face their remorse for choices they had made: the sleepovers and birthday parties they hadn’t invited the boy, the teasing remarks, the times they�
��d laughed or stayed silent when he was the butt of a prank. This is the work we get to do in the present: to grieve what happened or didn’t happen, to own up to what we did or didn’t do, and to choose our response now. Being more attuned to how their behavior might hurt or marginalize others wasn’t going to bring their classmate back. But they could embrace the opportunity to become more aware—to act with greater kindness and compassion.

  It’s so hard to be where we are, in the present. To accept what was and is, and move on. For twenty years, my patient Sue has come to see me every year around the anniversary of her son’s death. When he was twenty-five, he shot himself with the gun she kept in her bedside table. He’s been dead now almost as long as he was alive, and she’s still healing, still trapped sometimes in the unrelenting eddy of guilt. Why did I own a gun? Why didn’t I secure it properly? Why did I allow him to find it? Why was I so unaware of his depression and troubles? She can’t seem to forgive herself.

  Of course, she wishes he hadn’t died. She longs to erase all the factors, large and small, that may have contributed to his death. But her son didn’t end his life because she owned a gun. He didn’t kill himself because of anything she did or didn’t do.

  But as long as she stays in guilt, she doesn’t have to acknowledge that he died. As long as she can blame herself, she doesn’t have to accept what he chose to do. If he could see her suffering now, he would probably say, “Mom, I was going to kill myself anyway. I didn’t want you to die with me.”

  It’s good to keep crying for those we’ve lost, to keep feeling the ache, to let ourselves be in the sorrow and accept that it’s not ever going to go away. I was invited to speak at a support group for grieving parents where they shared memories and pictures, cried together, showed up for each other. It was beautiful to witness this connected and supportive way of living grief.

  I also noticed some ways I could guide them toward greater freedom within their grief. For example, they began the meeting by going around in a circle and introducing themselves and the child who had died. “I lost my daughter to suicide,” one said; another, “I lost my son when he was two.” Each person used the verb “lost” in describing his or her grief.

  “But life is not about lost and found,” I told them.

  It’s about celebrating that the spirits of our loved ones came to us—sometimes for a few short days, sometimes for many decades—and it’s about letting go. About acknowledging the sorrow and joy that coexist in this moment, and embracing all of it.

  Parents often say, “I’d die for my child.” I heard a few of the parents in the grief group express the wish to trade places with their deceased children—to die so their children could live. After the war, I felt the same way. I would have gladly died to bring my parents and grandparents back.

  But now I know that instead of dying for my dead, I can live for them.

  And live for my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren—for all my loved ones who are still here.

  If we can’t move on from our guilt and make peace with our grief, it’s damaging to our loved ones, and not a compliment to those who’ve died. We have to let the dead be dead, to stop yanking them up again and again, to let them go and to live our own best lives so they can rest in peace.

  Sofia is at a critical place in her grief.

  Her mother was a dynamic teacher and celebrated psychologist who finished her master’s degree at age fifty (like me!) and became certified in Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy (like me!)—a theory and method of guiding patients to discover meaning in their lives and experience. She was still working at age seventy, and had just published her first book, when she started having back pain. She was an exceptionally healthy woman—Sofia can’t remember her ever having so much as a cold—but suddenly she was refusing food, avoiding family events and social functions because her back hurt so intensely. She saw a specialist who found nothing wrong. She went from specialist to specialist, trying to discover the root of the pain, and finally a gastroenterologist performed the tests that revealed her diagnosis: stage-four pancreatic cancer. She died a month later.

  For a year, Sofia was in constant mourning, crying all the time. The passage of time has dulled her intense shock and sadness, and the pain is less raw and consuming—but she’s in a precarious place, a crossroads where she can choose to heal or stay stuck. To heal doesn’t mean to get over it, but it does mean that we are able to be wounded and whole, to find happiness and fulfillment in our lives despite our loss.

  “She died so suddenly,” Sofia told me. “There was no time to prepare, and I have so many regrets.”

  “Do you have guilt? Do you think there’s something you could have done that you didn’t do?”

  “Yes,” she said. “My mom was so strong, I never thought she was dying. I scolded her for not eating. I was trying to help her, but if I’d known they were her last days, I would have reacted differently.”

  She was imprisoned by two words: what if. What if I’d known she was dying? What if I’d known I was about to lose her? But what-ifs don’t empower us. They deplete us.

  I told Sofia, “Today you can say, ‘If I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently.’ And that’s the end of the guilt. Because you owe it to your mom to turn that guilt around. Just say, ‘That used to be me. Now I will begin to cherish the memories that no one can take away.’ You had her for thirty-four wonderful years. There will never be another mom like that. There will never be another therapist like that. So cherish the person she was and the time you had, and don’t waste another moment on guilt, because guilt does not produce love. Ever.”

  Guilt stops us from enjoying our memories. And it prevents us from living fully now.

  “When you’re guilty, you’re not available to be playful, to have intimacy,” I told Sofia. “And you’re tarnishing the beautiful things. The memory of blow-drying your mom’s hair in the hospital, helping her feel elegant and pretty as she wished to be in her final days. The gift that she went quickly, without suffering for years and years, unable to control her faculties.”

  Sometimes we may feel that we’re cheating on the dead if we laugh too much, that we’re abandoning them if we have too much fun, forgetting them if we’re happy.

  “But you belong dancing with your husband,” I said, “not sitting at home crying for your mom. So get rid of that punitive parent voice in you—the should’ve, could’ve, why didn’t I. You’re not free when you’re guilty. If your mom were sitting with you now, what would she tell you she wishes for you?”

  “For my sisters and me to be happy. For us to live a full life.”

  “And you can give her that gift. Have a full life. Celebrate. Your whole life is ahead of you now. I see her winking at you, encouraging you. So show up for your sisters and your husband. Love each other. And when you’re ninety-two you can think of me, and how your life began when your precious mother died and you made the decision to have a full life, and not be a victim of any circumstance. It’s your job now to give her a gift: let go. Let go.”

  Grief has so many layers and flavors: sorrow, fear, relief, survivor’s guilt, existential questioning, diminished safety, fragility. Our whole sense of the world is interrupted and rearranged. The adage says, “Time heals all wounds.” But I disagree. Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time.

  Sometimes people compensate for the upheaval of grief by trying to keep everything the same—jobs, routines, and relationships remain static. But when you’ve had a big loss, nothing is the same anymore. Grief can be an invitation to revisit our priorities and decide again—to reconnect to our joy and purpose, recommit to being the best we can be right now, to embrace that life is pointing us in a new direction.

  When grief came knocking—which it does, to you, to me, to everyone—Daniel wasn’t content to live automatically, doing the same thing over and over. He was ready to switch gears and take back his power.

  As he put it, “Something so hard or tr
agic can happen that a person has to make a choice to continue being the same way, or make a change for the better.”

  His story of loss began as a love story. He met Tracy when he was eighteen years old. Both indigenous Canadians, they were studying the same subjects—environmental science and indigenous studies—at university. Right away they became good conversationalists and good friends, talking for hours at a stretch, relaxed and happy in each other’s company.

  But now Daniel reflects, “There was a lot we didn’t talk about that we probably should have.”

  Daniel was twenty-five when they married, thirty when their son, Joseph, was born. They moved across the country to Tracy’s home province. That’s when things began to sour. She was thriving academically and professionally—she finished her master’s degree and started working on her doctorate, and was a respected environmental expert and sought-after consultant. But being back at home underscored all the reasons she’d left in the first place: rampant alcoholism and drug addiction in the community, as well as violence and deaths. And, though Daniel didn’t know it yet, she was again in proximity to tragic abuse that had occurred within her own family. She fell into a tailspin, often drinking and raging, and she and Daniel separated. Joseph was just two.

  They did their best to coparent in a respectful way, sharing custody fifty-fifty, managing not to fight around their son. But Tracy’s life was growing more tumultuous. Her driver’s license was suspended, he presumes for drunk driving, and on several occasions when Daniel dropped Joseph off, he felt uneasy, a fleeting sense that she might be high. He confronted her about his concerns, and she said she was dealing with difficult personal issues, but had it under control.

  Once, concerned for her welfare, Daniel left Joseph at home with a babysitter and went looking for her. He found her at a relative’s house, sleeping off a hangover. When she woke up, she seemed distraught. He sat on the bed with her. Sobbing, she revealed that when she was twelve she’d been sexually abused by members of her own family. At age eighteen, she’d confronted her parents, and her mother sat tightlipped and rigidly silent while her father threw it back in her face, blaming her for what had happened. Daniel was shocked. He knew she’d had it rough as a kid, that she and her siblings had been beaten. But he’d had no idea about the sexual abuse. It helped him understand how much she was hurting—and it ignited a new set of concerns. He told her, “From now on I can’t have Joseph around anyone who does that to a child. So that’s the new rule. No contact with your parents until this is brought out and talked about.” She agreed. But a month later she filed for divorce. And a year later she gave their son to her father to watch. When Daniel found out, he took her to court and earned full custody.