dean kesler

Shortly after our divorce announcement went out, M & I got a unique and encouraging response from a mutual friend of ours, Pat:

What an exciting time for both of you! Change can replenish the soul in so many wonderful ways. You will always be apart of each other on so many levels that your union will always exist within each of you. While your paths are taking separate roads now, you both will still be traveling and sharing your stories with old and new friends. Our society, even ourselves, may discourage this uncoupling for the betterment of each, but personally, I’m all for it. Be true to yourselves and others and the rest will work itself out. I do not consider your separation has a weakening, rather two good people having a chance to reach out into our community in two new directions. I feel for the pain that you went through and the pain that is yet to come during this division, but I also am joyous in your new awakenings. Let the little things fall to the side, see the good, forgive the bad in the other and yourself, open the heart, shake the wings, and soar to new adventures.

While I liked the message from an intellectual standpoint, I wasn’t exactly in a receptive place for it emotionally. I followed up the next day:

Thanks. I appreciate your fresh perspective of hopefulness and exuberance. It almost makes me want to take the gun out of my mouth.

Just kidding about the gun. You’re right in many respects and I do sincerely appreciate the positive perspective. I hope our paths cross again. You are truly one of a kind.

I knew I wasn’t ready to process all that in the manner it deserved. Part of me secretly hoped that would be the end of the exchange. It was not. He shared with me a story of his friend Steve whom I’ve never met. I include the story not because the details parallel my situation, but because it illustrates a person making a conscious choice about how do deal with a life-changing event. Pat responds:

Your comment about the gun out of your mouth reminds me of my friend and his divorce from his wife. The gist is that his wife started sleeping with the other youth group leader, the church supported this “new couple” because his parents were huge contributors to the church.  My friend was basically excommunicated from the church though he was the one that had been wronged.
He did get in his car and planned on driving until he couldn’t any longer, get a hotel and end his life.  He made a call to the suicide support line and that call save his life.  He went to get counseling and was tasked by counselor to go to Second City and start in one of their groups.  No, he didn’t become one of America’s greatest stand up comedians.  But he took his pain and created something beautiful from it.  His comedy revealed his pain to the world and made us care for him and ourselves.  After his trials and tribulations and his healing, I became friends with him.  He is one of my favorite people on the planet.  He healed.  His scar still shows.  His past pain can still be detected.  But not because he is still in pain, but because he is so quick to see pain in others and he helps them to heal.  I know he would not have chosen the path he has taken in his life, but when he hit the bumps, he did not fall, he got air.
I do not envy you because you will have an easy time of this.  I envy those who will meet you in your future.  In your time to heal. When the pain comes in waves, get out the longboard…

I must have read that email thirty times over the next few days. So incredibly profound and so inconceivably unattainable that it made me angry. Angry! I wanted to believe that he made it up, merely fodder more for some bullshit Hollywood movie than for a real person to have experienced. But that’s not Pat’s way; that much I could believe. So of course I saved it, thinking I’d come back to it at some point in the distant future when I could more objectively reflect and better process its message. I didn’t talk to anyone about his email and was surprised to be reminded of it so soon, barely 3 weeks later.

More recently, after spending some quality time with a close friend Kathleen, I recieved a most validating email:

Your vulnerability with me, and with others, is a gift to us. Incredibly liberating, for me anyway, to have someone model grief, and acceptance of that emotion, and the effect that such candor has on stepping-down the intensity of the emotion.

Its like the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. Three people, one of which I’ve never even met, all of which I am grateful for, have somehow converged for me during a time of immense need and uncertainty to usher me into a profound positive transformation. Wow.

It is a great paradox for me: creating exponentially more integral connections by learning to let go and feeling less vulnerable by opening yourself up. Somehow things are starting to make a little more sense. I’m trying to work with the things that hurt and scare me instead of against them. It’s hard work either way, but in working with the scary stuff, I feel better about the effort. And the results.

The blind don’t fear the dark, they embrace it.