The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (37 page)

Marion made the decision to embrace death early on in her dance with cancer. She wrote in her journal on January 12, 1994—just months before she came to Kripalu—“
I decided if I was going to die, it was all right. Just have to adjust the focus. I realized that Ross and I are living with Death as a daily ally. Death is right here.”

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Marion—along with Jung, along with Krishna—chose a remarkable view of difficulties: Difficulties—even death—are not an enemy from the beyond. They are not an alien force. They are part of the Self. Therefore, what appear to be difficulties are really invitations. They are doorways into a deeper union with split-off parts of the Self. They are opportunities. But in order to make full use of these opportunities, one must be willing to undergo what Marion calls “the initiation.”

Marion’s awareness that cancer is an
initiation
—not an alien intruder—was a turning point in her journey. In her journal, she pondered the fact that many of the initiations in her life had come precisely through the body. “
My body has always been the instrument through which I have been forced to come to consciousness—heatstroke, eating addiction, car accident, kidneys, knees, cancer … Its agony forced me onto a new path, where I did not want to go … Always through illness God picked me up, dropped me on the new road, and said, ‘Walk!’ ”

Marion saw in her struggle with cancer all the stages of initiation that she had taught for so many years. She describes these stages in
Bone
. Together they make up a stunning reframe of difficulty itself—making it into a path we can fruitfully tread. They include (and here I paraphrase Marion):

I had heard Marion teach about all of this before, but none of it had come into such focus for me as it did now, reading
Bone
. Initiations are opportunities for us to grow larger. They are death channels. And they are birth channels. They allow us the opportunity to integrate more of our self—more possibility, more reality, more sensation, more feeling. They require everything we’ve got. They destroy us to re-create us.

These initiations can be terrifying, disorganizing. Writes Marion: “
We usually need to leave the old without any promise of the new, need to spend time as forest dwellers, just surviving. Our journey to our old,
new home is cyclical, [we must see] that we shall never move in once and for all.”

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Marion teaches that we cannot undergo initiation until
we learn to live in paradox. She writes: “We learn to live in paradox, in a world where two apparently exclusive views are held at the same time. In this world, rhythms of paradox are circuitous, slow, born of feeling rising from the thinking heart. Many sense such a place exists. Few talk or walk from it.”

Carl Jung created a brilliant developmental strategy for standing in paradox: One must hold both sides of a paradox at the same time, he teaches, without choosing one or the other. Exiling neither. Privileging neither. In this way, we can gradually learn to tolerate living
in the tension of opposites
. Marion states the technique with stunning clarity:

“
Holding an inner or outer conflict quietly instead of attempting to resolve it quickly is a difficult idea to entertain. It is even more challenging to experience. However, as Carl Jung believed, if we held the tension between the two opposing forces, there would emerge a third way, which would unite and transcend the two. Indeed, he believed that this transcendent force was crucial to individuation. Whatever the third way is, it usually comes as a surprise, because it has not penetrated our defenses until now. A hasty move to resolve tension can abort growth of the new. If we can hold conflict in psychic utero long enough we can give birth to something new in ourselves.”

Hold conflict in psychic utero
. This is a skill that can be learned. But it requires a host of collateral skills that most of us in the West have not nurtured: the capacity to stand in mystery; the capacity to tolerate the unknown; the courage to live in the wilderness for a while; the love of the dark and the night and the moon; the wisdom of the circle, not the line. (How can we not hear echoes here of John Keats’s Negative Capability?)

Marion teaches that part of our problem is that we try to speed things up—to foreclose them too early; to make them linear; to choose one side over the other. As a result, we do not get the initiation. Not having learned to hold the tension in “psychic utero,” we are destined to split
the world: Experience becomes either acceptable or unacceptable, good or bad, Life or Death. The initiation fails.

Marion’s view allowed her experience with cancer to be full of meaning, to be replete with possibility, and it enabled Death to bring her more deeply into Life. She
got
the initiation.

14

As I think back, I realize that unlike Mom, Dad actually did not go to war with his experience of Alzheimer’s. He surrendered gracefully to it. It occurs to me now that somewhere along the way he had learned Marion’s lesson.
Stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart
. Wherever did he learn it? Where had he been initiated into this mystery? Was it fighting on the beaches of Italy during the Second World War? As a kid growing up threadbare in an Ohio River mill town? I remember one night when he cried about his affliction—early on, before the disease was even officially diagnosed. I don’t think I had ever seen him cry. His heart was still open. He was able to walk straight ahead, even into Alzheimer’s.

Dad surrendered. He opened the door and walked through it. After it was clear that he could no longer live at home, we took him to a very fancy Alzheimer’s unit—and then later to a more modest facility nearer to Mom’s home. Dad never went to war with this illness. There was some very large capacity in him to face reality.

And I wondered, after his death, if Dad had maybe even thought about the possibility of Alzheimer’s—or prepared himself somehow for it. After all, Dad’s contracting Alzheimer’s should not have been a complete surprise. His mother, my grandmother Cope, had developed the disease, too, in her early sixties—before we even had the name Alzheimer’s. I remember my grandmother’s suffering all too well. Already deep into the ravages of this disease for which we had no name, she came to live with us for a short while in our little house in Ohio. They are weeks I will never forget. She—my beautiful, sweet grandmother who sang “I’ll be Workin’ on the Railroad” with us five kids tucked into her big walnut bed in the morning—had become paranoid, confused, disoriented. My family watched, terrified and helpless. One day she chased
my mother around the house with a knife—in a fit of paranoid delusion. That very day, she was carted off to Apple Creek State Hospital, where she died—mercifully—just months later, of what the doctors then called “hardening of the arteries.”

I remember my father on the afternoon she died—sitting, stunned, at the little telephone stand in the dining room, staring at the blank wall. What had happened to his beautiful, feisty, Scottish mother? She had died in a lunatic asylum. That is what happened, I guess, to Alzheimer’s patients before we had the name. On some level, Dad never got over it.

What must it have been like for Dad, then, when he began to experience the same symptoms? What must it have been like for him when he began to forget things? When he could no longer remember how to get from his home to his office? What must it have been like for him, for Dad, who was famous—like his mother—for being always beautifully groomed and turned out? What must it have been like for him when he could no longer figure out how to wear his elegant wardrobe—his Italian shoes, and his English custom suits? When he began to confabulate in order to cover up the fact that he—the historian—no longer knew who was president of the United States?