My friend Kristi spoke these words – the privilege of pain – when we met in December and she ministered to me by bringing a big salad full of all the things I love and having a picnic at my kitchen table, all things, even napkins, provided by her. She also picked up my daddy, who doesn’t drive a lot these days, so he could be at the bungalow with us. He promised he would just read and mill around and be a gentle presence in the background of our reunion. Kristi brought cosy pajamas for both me and Charlotte and a fluffy blanket for Don that we all continue to shroud ourselves in when we watch TV on the sofa together. And, most importantly, she brought along the easy conversation that comes through life-long friendship. How natural it was to laugh and cry together. During this visit in the early days after Emily’s death, she spoke this profound phrase: the privilege of pain. The recognition of this truth was present for me immediately; I even asked her to repeat what she meant by this phrase, yet my brain and heart were not yet ready to process what this meant on a heart level.

And then I woke in the early hours before dawn today, swathed in the soft blankets of my sister’s basement bedroom in Seattle with my sweetheart snoring softly beside me, some two months later, knowing explicitly what this phrase meant to me. What it has become to me.

The privilege of pain is to see you, all of you, to really see you, even if you don’t speak. It is to silently or verbally acknowledge that you too have suffered. How? I won’t always know. But to really know at a soul level that you have felt and experienced acuity, intensity: unfathomable things, and that grief resides within you for a multitude of reasons, many of which you may not even remember or have pushed away.

The privilege of pain is to receive each of you who has shared with me – about your own children, your spouses, your lost loved ones or ones you are in the midst of losing, your own depths of depression, sorrow, anxiety – with grace and with knowing. I hold each of those confessions like a warm egg, a baby chick emerging. The crack is already starting, my hands ready to receive the fluffy warmth. Each story you have shared with me, through our visits, through the many, many notes, through voice messages and texts, they are gifts. They truly are.

That you have been able to share something profound with me because my grief and vulnerability and openness have somehow given your that forum, this has been an honour. It is my privilege to receive your pain because somehow, unfathomably, it does not make mine deeper, but rather transforms it and eases it. To know that we are in this earth school together, putting our boots on the ground and doing what we have to do to carry on because we have made this choice, sometimes just minute by minute or day by day: this is a pact that we now have together that binds us. To help you just a little bit by allowing you to share the grief of your lost babies; your years of crushing anxiety; your unimaginable losses or hurtful gains; your rapes; your near-suicides; the vigilance with which so many of you must live day after day, for fear a loved one of yours will end their lives; for the breaths you take hoping this day will not be your last because you may finally receive some respite; for the sorrow of children not born; of people lost in the futility of war and hate surrounding us; the shocking sadness of a true love being taken without warning and the wrenching sorrow of the long goodbyes; the chronic and persistent pain in your own bodies and minds; the parents who have faded away with dementia yet whose bodies continue to function; the memories of happier times or the memories we cannot let go of, even though the experience is long gone and the trauma remains. Oh, my. Each time I receive these emotions through your words, my own heart softens. Instinctively, when I read your notes or hear your words, my hands go to my heart. 

Thank you for sharing, for allowing me into your worlds, rich with florid, robust emotions. Some of your soul sears are as ancient as the old growth forests, many intergenerational and inherited and brought forth from and with others. Your depths are so cavernously rooted and sometimes as dank and dark as the innermost labyrinth of trees that have somehow managed and strained to flourish, their trunks accruing years of wisdom and strength and solidity. Know that there is beauty in your forests – so much – and it comes from the pain. There is no rainforest without rain. None of us is exempt.

Thank you for giving me a glimpse of your forests; thank you for letting me into the depths of your souls. I take none of it lightly, and I receive it with such gratitude. Your pain eases mine. How can it be? It’s the transmogrification of something sacred; there is a communion that unites us. It is compassion. It is grace. 

May your hearts be eased. I wish for all of you peace and continued growth through all seasons. I wish you much, so much, warming sun, but also the rain that helps you to grow. May we all become vessels of compassion. May we all make space for one another. May we look up and see the sad eyes, the frazzled parents, the unkempt child, the downcast heads, the tent cities of people living with inexplicable loss, literal and figurative, and see these people, hear their words, know their pain, so that selfishly, ours may be eased and there can be a fusion of our forests. This is the privilege of pain.