Your Loving Presence Is Enough: Helping Someone Who’s Hurting

“Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.” ~Robert Gary Lee

As the only child of a single parent, my family of two was small and our relationship could be intense.

My southern belle mom, with her stories and easy laugh, her quick wit, and her love of all things literary was the mom who all my high school friends adored and loved—the one who my teenage friends could talk to when they were too angry or irritated with their own mother.

I loved her too, but I also worried about her. A lot. Because I knew a secret about her that no one else did: she was an alcoholic. Not a big, scary, yelling, hitting alcoholic, but a quiet, light dimming, slow fade alcoholic. 

My mom loved me, she provided for me, but her own grief and story about her past could take over her brain and take her far away, down into her beer bottle, along with her ever present cigarettes.

When she told me during my senior year of college that she was entering outpatient chemical dependency treatment, that heavy weight of worry felt lifted from my shoulders. I hoped that this would give her a chance at a happier life.

As my mom healed, I did too, and got more of my own life in action. I went to graduate school and moved across the country and back. I started a relationship with the man who would become my husband. I got my first real professional job.

So when the pain in her leg was diagnosed as cancer—terminal stage 4 Lung Cancer, spread to her bone, with a prognosis of six months to live—it was a huge blow.

Through six months of treatments that left her tired and nauseated, she persevered. But then another blow, though not the one I anticipated: leaving a doctor’s appointment, she had a stroke and fell down unconscious in the parking lot.

The drive from my house to the hospital where she was taken was one of the longest four hours of my life, not knowing what awaited me at the end.

After three hard weeks of physical therapy, my mom returned home. But she wasn’t the same. The parts of my mom that I and others most valued and relied upon—her humor, empathy, and listening ear—were gone, stripped away by the stroke like a cheap veneer, never to return. 

And while she wasn’t drinking or smoking any more, my worry returned, not knowing when the proverbial other shoe would drop. Was she really able to live alone in a two-story house? Was I being a bad daughter by not moving back to my hometown to care for her?

On top of the worry, the impact of the stroke was a bitter pill to swallow. While others marveled at her longevity with such an advanced cancer diagnosis, I felt guilty and angry: the whole situation felt like a rip-off. My mom was still alive, but it was hardly much of a life, in my opinion.

I wondered why she was still alive, when she was barely able to enjoy the life she was leading. 

Before her stroke, I’d clung to some romantic notion that her illness might give her opportunity to finally make sense of the hardships she’d endured through much of her life.

I cared for her the best I could from afar, knowing that it was less than ideal, and I continued to craft my own independent life, as well. Over the next eight years, I married my boyfriend, got promoted at work, and got pregnant with my first child.

Throughout my pregnancy, my mom had more troubles—a heart attack and increased breathing problems. The day we brought our newborn son home from the hospital, my mom called saying she was in the hospital with shortness of breath.

Instead of relishing the first sweet days of my son’s life, my first days of parenthood were flooded with the same familiar worry, guilt, and anxiety.

My mom spent the next three weeks bouncing between home, hospital, and residential hospice.

She clearly was in denial about what was happening to her: as the survivor she was, she saw it as just another difficulty to overcome, anticipating another victory in her long triumph over cancer. She struggled and resisted what was happening to her.

This time, she couldn’t outrun it: I held and stroked her sweet hand as she took her last breaths, and nursed my baby five minutes later.

In the ten years since my mom’s death, I’ve realized the person who needed to learn and transform from her illness and death wasn’t her: it was me.

My worry, judgment, guilt, fear, and anxiety couldn’t fix the past, cure her cancer, or protect us from the future. Those emotional states and feelings only could inflict more pain, distance, and suffering.

Throughout my mom’s life, including illness and death, all I could do was be with her and love her, as best I could, from moment to moment. Our loving presence with each other was often the most useful medicine for either of us during the hardest times.

Because no matter how much we might wish otherwise, there will always be some difficult times in life. It’s pretty much a guaranteed part of the deal with being a human.

So when you or someone you love is hurting or suffering, rather than trying to outrun any difficult feelings, such guilt, worry, judgment, fear, or anxiety, see if you can stop and find a grounding place within yourself, such as the regular rhythm of your breath.

See if you can even briefly be present to the hurt or suffering, as unpleasant as it may be, without needing to change it.

In first witnessing and just simply being present to our own or others’ difficulties, rather than automatically trying to change or fix the situation, we are of great service and can create deep healing in ourselves and others.

Through being with the situation, as it is, we can also better discern what our next best actions should be.

Instead of getting caught up and carried away by intense emotions, disappointments, grief, anxiety, or any other difficulty, being with the experience as it is and doing as best we can in that moment is often the quickest and least painful way through challenging times.

Regardless of what difficulty your loved ones face, trust that your loving presence is all that is required. And know it is completely enough.

Photo by David Goehring

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