Perfect Broken Life

In 2012, I was hospitalized twice. Between those two admissions, I faced a vast expanse of uncertainty, including the distinct possibility of terminal illness. That period marked a permanent transition in my life. In a visceral way, I finally understood that time is short. I felt a sudden, fierce urge to love life more fully—not just the comfortable parts, but the entire spectrum of existence, from birth to death, and from joy to terror.

For much of my adult life, I had felt pushed toward suicide. This was not surprising. Aside from a harsh upbringing and an inherited vulnerability to depression, my earliest memories revolved around my mother’s battle with mental illness and her death by suicide when I was six. For decades, it felt entirely natural to imagine ending my own life.

But when I confronted what I feared was a terminal diagnosis, I learned something unexpected: even if you have spent a lifetime romanticizing death as a relief, when it actually comes into view, it is not so welcome.

This is not a unique realization. I felt a deep sense of connection recently while watching Come See Me in the Good Light, a beautiful documentary about the late poet Andrea Gibson. As a gender-nonconforming person with a long history of suicidal ideation, Gibson noted that the moment they were diagnosed with incurable ovarian cancer, those suicidal thoughts vanished.

Facing Mortality

My own saga began with severe abdominal pain. After twelve hours of escalating distress, my wife drove me to the emergency room. It hurt too much to sit up, so I lay across the back seat of our car, shivering in the cold and pain. After several hours of diagnostic workups, the doctors delivered the news: they had found a liter of fluid next to my pancreas. I had suffered a sudden internal hemorrhage, but they did not know its cause.

By the time I was discharged a few days later, the diagnosis remained stubbornly unclear. Pancreatitis and a perforated ulcer had been ruled out, leaving my wife and me with a short list of exotic, benign conditions—and the very real possibility of pancreatic cancer.

As a physician, I knew that such a malignancy is highly lethal. And we had watched a neighbor decline and die of it not long before. As I returned home to await further outpatient studies, mortality stared me down like never before.

You can contemplate suicide a thousand times and convince yourself that leaving this world would not trouble you. But let death come knocking at your door, and you suddenly realize your life is far more precious to you than you ever admitted.

The Sun

By the time this illness struck, I had already grown more welcoming of life’s uproar. I was increasingly able to find beauty in my hardest circumstances—my chronic pain, the loss of my medical career, my relative isolation, financial insecurity, and more. I  was learning to look beyond material concerns and do my best to love all beings, especially those closest to me: my wife and our dogs. Yet, as I waited at home for the test results, new tenderness and majesty vibrated in the depths of my tissues, in the heart of my soul.

Hanging on our fence outside was a ceramic sun made in Mexico—a cheap, cheerful item we had bought long ago. Seeing its brightly painted face one morning nearly brought me to tears. How many more chances would I have to gaze upon this innocent bauble? How many times had I walked past without noticing its charming, eternal message? I felt a sudden wave of gratitude for my wife’s sweetness in hanging an uplifting decoration where it could be seen every day, whether I chose to look or not.

That sun was just one example of how reality was waking me up. I felt a wrenching joy simply walking around our humble stucco house, or catching my wife’s worried smile as she watched me typing away at the computer—as I do too much and too often—flanked by her, the dogs, and the fireplace. These were heartrending gifts that I had rarely paused to truly feel. More than ever before, I saw the beauty that constantly surrounds us, and I admitted how much of it had passed me by while I obsessed over my mistakes, my problems, and my self-image.

The Ministry of the Broken

Ultimately, the crisis resolved. I turned out to have one of those rare benign problems, though by the time it resolved I'd suffered an intestinal obstruction and required major surgery, and I'd spent weeks in hospital. But eventually I returned to an ordinary life, free from the immediate fear of imminent death.

Yet I came away transformed. More than ever before, I understood the absolute futility of complaining about my situation. Life will end soon enough, whether I am ready or not. Until it does, my sole task is to embrace every terrible, amazing, agonizing, gorgeous, or simple and quiet moment of living. Most of all, I saw—and continue to see—the crucial importance of doing my best to love everybody and everything that shares our brief time on this planet.

It was a strange, harrowing, and beautiful interlude, filled with equal measures of fear and affection. During a Quaker meeting between hospitalizations, a phrase spontaneously popped into my mind. I rose to offer it to the room as verbal ministry:

“It’s all broken, and none of it needs to be fixed.”

I have kept those words close to my heart ever since. They may not resonate for everyone, but riding alongside the pain and the fear, they set me free.