We are each in a lifetime conversation with suffering and care that, in time, will open us to our strengths and gifts. We are meant, it seems, to come apart and come together, so we can discover who we are at the core. We are meant, it seems, to be rearranged by what we go through and held up to that process by those who care. We are meant to accept suffering and care as our teachers, our mentors, as the tools used by time to shape us into what matters.

And while we each want a map for how to live our lives, your map won’t help me and my map won’t guide you. Only inhabiting our personhood can reveal our map to us. All we can do is encourage each other to enliven our personal authenticity, which will lead us to discover and decipher our own way. So sharing the raw truth of my journey is only meant as an encouragement, not as a guide. Ultimately, we each are meant to gather meaning through relationship: with ourselves, each other, and with suffering and care.

Through the years, we are ever changed and changing. Even as I write this, the teachers of suffering and care are shaping me further. During the last year, I lost my father at ninety-three, a man I loved who I was estranged from along the way and close to at the end. And after thirteen years, my wife Susan and I lost our beloved dog-child Mira, a yellow lab whose immediate and unfaltering love taught us much. These deep losses have thrown me into my latest conversation with suffering and care, through which I continue to grow more salient and tender. So, even though I thought this book was done, I felt compelled to include lessons from these losses. If any of these stories touch your story, it’s because the particular sufferings and care we each encounter place us in the story of all suffering and care. And in that sea lives our resilience.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

This book itself is a journey, not offered in a straight line but quite circuitous—because that is how life is. Though events happen sequentially through the years, their impact gathers and merges inwardly. This is the inner rhythm of healing that leads to wholeness. My healing journey keeps reverberating forward, backward, sideways, and back to the beginning, always different but at heart the same. The journey of this book tries to introduce you to this mysterious process.