By Ann Bacon

​Music has always been my way to work through emotions. Childhood was “Dancing on the Ceiling” and “Hip to be Square.” High school was a rotation of R.E.M., Tori Amos, and Alanis Morisette. When I left for college, my brother insisted that we listen to happy music on the car ride, because I was finally getting out of our small town. But when I learned that same brother was dying of cancer, there was no off-the-shelf love song to help process the emotions.

C was diagnosed with rectal cancer twice, first when he was twenty-eight, and a few years later when it reoccurred. In between, my mom made it through breast cancer, I met my husband, and C was my right-hand man preparing for my wedding.

Nine months after the wedding, there was a shadow on his scans, and a call that the cancer was back. We thought it was easily treatable like the first time, and C wanted to use a local, South Dakota surgeon. The local surgeon chose a surgical procedure that misted virulent cancer cells all over C’s liver and lungs. A month after this mistake, C was evaluated at the Mayo clinic and we learned that his liver and lungs, which were clear before the surgery, were now pocked with cancer cells. The doctors wouldn't tell us how many months he had left, but the internet gave us an answer—a bell curve with only 5% of patients living at the five-year mark.

Without long-term hope, my grieving process began before his death. I sat on the bus on the way to work every morning and on the airplane during frequent work trips, wearing big sunglasses to hide tears as I alternated between mentally writing the eulogy I knew I’d have to give and listening to music, trying to find the lyrics that would help me express my feelings. I thought that if I found just the right song, I could play it for others and explain why I was so sad, why my relationship with my brother was so important, why I wasn’t okay, and wasn’t going to be okay. 

But there’s no love song for a dying brother.

Yes, C was the one thing I'd rather die than lose, especially in the moments when his death seemed so close, but the romantic parts of “Mine Would Be You” didn't work, and it didn't seem fair to my new husband. (Top 40 hits seem incapable of acknowledging that at times, someone other than your romantic partner or child is most important to you). I wanted to sing to C that “I could offer him a warm embrace,” “I'd go hungry I'd go black and blue,” “I'd go to the ends of earth” for him, all to make him feel my love and demonstrate how much I wished it was me with cancer; but the truth was that there was no body part I could donate to him that would cure him. There was no equivalent of “F* You” for the doctors who told me how lucky I was that they were able to find and remove my precancerous lesions before they turned to cancer, because C got cancer first. Modern worship songs, with their teenage-esque obsession with trust in Jesus and the prosperity doctrine, were the opposite of a respite. If Jesus had the wheel, he had steered the car into the lone tree in the middle of the Dakota prairie.

When I explained C's medical situation to others, I mastered the stoic approach: “I will hold my head up high. You will never see me cry. I'll smile and say I'm good. But I would fall apart if I could.” At home, by myself, and behind my sunglasses on the bus, I allowed myself to fall apart. “I drink up all my money, dazed and kind of lonely, you're gone and I gotta stay high all the time to keep you off my mind.” Except instead of Tove Lo’s drugs and clubs, it was red wine, and for a time Guitar Hero. I calculated how long I could descend into the abyss after his death without doing real damage to my friendships and career. I decided the magic number was thirty days and after that I would have to hold that head back up high again.

There were also moments reminiscent of a sweet country song in the months following the cancer reoccurrence. I decided that my vacation time would be spent in South Dakota. Instead of going “2.7 second on a bull named Fu Manchu,” C and I picked wild raspberries with my nephews in the Black Hills on a dry August afternoon. We took my nephew to his first rock concert on my brother’s thirty-fourth birthday—an acoustic Jack White show that only played in five rural cities. I imagined C and I as the two little kids walking to school together in "We're Going to be Friends" as my nephew burrowed into C, tapping out the beat on his arm. We dipped our feet into the Mississippi at a rest stop on a first-time trip to Wisconsin during a diversion on a visit to the Mayo clinic. I asked him to help me put up shelves in my condo so that when he’s gone, I have something physical to remember him. 

Three years have now passed. He's beating the bell curve, and hopefully he'll ride out a long tail. But he'll never be cured, and that bell with a long tail is merely hope in graphical form. So on my best days, I try to imagine him as the main character in "When I Get Where I'm Going," riding a drop of rain, speaking with his namesake, and shedding his struggles. And on the worst, I remember that “I'm Alive,” and try to convince myself that today that's going to have to be good enough for me.

There will be times in your life when you feel like an outsider. When it looks like everyone around you, the people you admire and the ones you dislike, belong somewhere. They have this life thing all figured out. They are needed, respected. They matter. Their opinions and insights matter. And they have their ranking systems, their awards programs, their contests and grants and fellowships. They all seem to know how to work that system and be recognized—whether it’s for years of toil on some obscure invention or a brilliant essay dashed off after a flash of insight.

Don’t fall for it. It’s a trick of the light, a smoke-and-mirrors deception. All of us are outsiders and wanderers. The only real lasting sense of belonging has come from cultivating a strong relationship with my inner world. The degree to which you feel exiled, out of place, shunned, is the degree to which you are estranged from your own core of being, your own heart.

Paradoxically, our belonging is not contingent on acceptance into human communities—schools, neighborhoods, workplaces. Our belonging is a given, from the moment of our birth. More accurately, from conception, and, the mystics tell us, even before that moment. 

David Wagoner has a marvelous take on this in his poem, “Lost.” If you’ve ever gone into a forest and felt acutely the outsider, this poem is for you. It forever changed how I see myself, both in forests and in the world of buildings and streets and cities. 

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

It’s a mystery to me why I need this reminder again and again. Maybe that feeling of being an outsider has become an ingrained habit. As alienating and lonely as it feels, there’s also a kind of safety to standing on the sidelines and watching. 

Still, during those periods when I wade into the arena, when I show up and submit work or give talks or run retreats, there is no guarantee that anyone will respond. I used to worry feverishly about whether anyone was “out there,” reading my stuff or feeling the least bit affected by whatever I was offering. That sort of anxiety can be paralyzing, but maybe there’s a healthy reason for it. I do not always feel up to sharing my more precious insights. I might tell myself it’s because the work isn’t “good enough” yet, that it needs more polishing. That I need to hone my craft. These may all have truth to them. But the real reason is that I am comfortable in my distance. My alienation suits me even as it traps me in isolation and separateness.

This world can be accommodating and welcoming. It can also be indifferent and cruel. That’s the challenge. Wade in or sit this one out? The only litmus I’ve come across thus far is a series of questions that go something like this: Am I in love with this work? Do I feel compelled to do it, even if I don’t understand why? Am I willing to stick with it though no outside recognition or encouragement has been forthcoming? And, will I keep working without any certainty of its outcome?

To answer “yes” to any or all of these questions is to commit to a path into the unknown. I do not answer lightly, though I also do not understand all the implications of such a commitment. In some sense, we are all rootless wanderers at the mercy of our inner promptings. The least we can do is be true to what’s in our hearts.

 

​Our culture is on a threshold between stories. The old stories—of law and order, of command and control, of rich versus poor, of white versus black—are being exposed as unfair and inadequate, manipulative and destructive. 

Everyone has the power to conjure the stories that we so desperately need now, particularly when it comes to the gulf between people of means and those in poverty, white privilege and the oppression of people of color. Alternative stories are recognizable for their humanity, their appeal to empathy, connection, and belonging. 

Declaring war on the old, false, damaging stories, sweeping them away by force—no matter how tempting—will only keep us stuck in the same alienation and conflict mindset of the old story. Instead of declaring war on racism, or war on white supremacy, or war on the war on drugs, we can take a wider view.

One of the most hopeful moments in Baltimore’s uprising last April was the wall of people—pastors and mothers, fathers and brothers—who placed themselves between the riot-gear-clad police and the angry, ominous knots of friends and strangers. This is the power of love to alchemize both fear and anger. It was an act of great courage and compassion—for both the fearful police and the angry protestors.

New stories emerge from a methodical interrogation of old stories. We discover that hierarchies are fiction, invented for people in power to control those they have labeled as inferior. We find the war mentality unleashed on all manner of problems, including health. We “fight” cancer, for example, with surgery, chemo and radiation, which are sometimes effective. But sometimes the patient suffers and dies horribly from the treatment itself. 

Starting instead with the premise that the body has great capacity to heal itself yields a different course of treatment that supports the healthy parts of the whole rather than waging war on the ailing parts. 

The wider we draw the circle around an illness or problem, the better chance we have at restoring health and balance. Focusing only on someone’s liver to cure a cancer may have limited results. Taking a wider view to the healthy resources of their entire body or their environment—the water they drink, the air they breathe, the food they eat, the chemical plant where they work—yields further information and resources that could help to restore balance and health.

Similarly, racism and the devastation of the war on drugs in communities of color are not problems only of those communities, nor can they be solved by a narrow focus on the people and places directly affected. The illness is systemic. It has infected our laws, our policing, our justice system, and our choices at all levels. It’s why we treat drug use as a criminal problem instead of a public health issue. And why we build prisons instead of housing.

Rage and fear are both natural responses to oppression. Beneath them is a more tender emotion: grief. Grief for the broken promises of a self-deceived national identity. For deliberate policies and accidental ignorance. For the assumptions and accusations that keep us apart. For the lives, young and old, taken too soon. For the children traumatized by violence, and for their parents, who live in constant fear of further loss.

Looking still deeper, beneath grief, we find love. We are biologically programmed for all emotions. Love and grief unite; fear and anger divide. 

Both anger and fear have a similar effect on our brain chemistry. Hormones flood the most evolved part of our brain, shutting down our ability to reason and feel compassion, or to broaden our field of vision and think creatively. When at the mercy of the primitive brain, whose sole job is personal survival, we do not sense our connection to other people. We see only separation and isolation. We feel alone and vulnerable. This is a hallmark of old stories.

Fear and anger are potent forces. Sociopaths and politicians have made use of this in insidiously creative ways over the years. Fear and anger can both be harnessed to turn masses of people against one another and increase the power of leaders and the privileged. If fear engenders flight, anger and rage typically compel us to fight, to lash out in violence. As long as people are afraid and violent towards one another, they are unable to see or address the bigger picture. A sick status quo is maintained.

We are likely to be on this threshold between old and new stories for a while, experiencing the confusion of swinging between mindsets that divide and those that unite. The wider our view, the more resources we can tap. The healthy parts of the system—people, jobs, creativity, compassion, education, ideas, optimism and more—can help to heal and restore balance to the ailing, damaged, under-siege parts. The narrowing, simplifying effects of fear and anger can be alchemized by the tender universal experience of grief and the connecting power of love.