Orphaned

Some people go for the gusto. Some people follow the rumblings in their gut. Others believe in love, not so much in the romantic variety, but in the charitable kind, the kind you show when you are caring for people who are dying. It’s a calling like any other.

A woman who has recently cared for her dying mother, who believes that that shows her ability to love deeply and unselfishly, asks our friend Polly what she can do to sustain her passion.

Orphan is 35, lives in New York, has a stable job with benefits, and is looking for more.

First, a few excerpts from Orphan’s letter:

I brought my mother to live with me in NYC to take care of her while she was dying, and it was the most meaningful time in my life. All the hard shit was so fucking hard I can’t even describe it … physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But none of it seemed hard because I loved her so much. It shocked me … the depth of my love….

I know the animal contact of bathing my mother, of holding her on a portable potty when she can’t make it to the bathroom, of touching and caring for her once round and white soft magnolia of a body and witnessing it turn into bone and hanging skin. I died inside as she pleaded with God to take her to be with her husband. If you don’t believe in true love, you watch someone plead to see their love’s face and beg to die so they can just be with them again. 

Her love is special because her parents adopted her at a young age when her birth parents abandoned her. Thus, the love that she feels must have something to do with her horror at the fact that parents can abandon a child. She seems to be playing out the drama of an abandoned child who is saved… like Moses:

The deeper part of it is they adopted me at a young age since my birth parents abandoned me and so much of my identity is wrapped up in them. They were literally the most loving, saintly, wholesome salt-of-the-earth people I have ever come in contact with.

Yet, now that her mother has died—presumably she has no siblings—she feels like she has nothing left in her life. Not to be too unpleasant here, but did her loving parents allow her to step out in the world, to have her own friends, to get her hands dirty in relationships, friendships and even everyday silliness? Were they so dependent that she has no one else in her life, even when she left home. Orphan is simply too intense and too isolated for her own good.

She writes:

When my parents died, it’s like all the love and meaning drained out of my life. I think I’m one of those people who finds deep joy in loving and taking care of others. I know you can say, Oh, you have to start loving yourself …taking care of yourself. I have done a great job of that (I think) my whole life. I have fun, I meditate, I do yoga, I cook, I read books, I see movies, I travel the world. I like myself very much. I’m not perfect, but I do try to be a good person. I do all these things and they used to make me feel something but they don’t anymore. Not really.

What should she do? Polly hones in on some possible solutions.

It sounds to me like you should try to fall in love, have a baby, and start an orphanage. I’m not kidding. Because it sounds to me like you believe in love and connection more than anything else in life. And you love caring for others. 

And yet, Polly adds the salient point, the shocking point in Orphan’s letter: namely that Orphan seems to have no other people in her life. The sense of her own isolation is oppressive. Perhaps she does not want to have a child because her own parents were themselves so needy and dependent.

Polly says:

You described to me so clearly what matters the most in life to you. Do you talk to other people this way regularly? Do you wear your heart on your sleeve? Do you open up? Or did your parents hold this precious place in your life and no one else gets to see that side of you? Because I do think you’re grieving and depressed and that’s why you can’t feel anything. But I also think you’re trying to come out of the closet as an intense person with extremely strong opinions about what is important in life and what isn’t.

True enough. Orphan is too intense. She does not seem to talk to other people at all. But, more importantly, she does not seem to know how to get along with other people. If she talks to other people the way she writes to Polly her intensity will be off-putting. Does she know how to make small talk? Does she know how to talk about the weather or fashion? We do not know what she does for a living, but hopefully it allows her to interact with other people.

While I agree with Polly that Orphan wants to bring her intense emotions into her everyday life, she ought not to do so. Her emotions seem more fitting to the grand drama she was playing out with her adoptive parents. Most people, certainly most people you are just getting to know, do not want to hear about it and do not care. Unfortunately, Orphan is so into herself that she will surely have difficulty opening herself to other people.

Polly thinks that Orphan’s solipsistic world of intense love is real. Surely, Orphan thinks so. But, Orphan is wrong. It is not real. It is emotion. It has very little do with reality. Polly does understand that Orphan cannot express what she has put in her letter without overwhelming other people:

Just saying what you believe, out loud, to someone who’s listening and understands can give you chills. Suddenly, the world is burning with bright colors, the flowers have faces, strangers are singing and handing you lollipops. It’s almost too much. For most people, it is too much.

Polly wants her to open up to the world:

Because when I read your letter, I feel like I’m witnessing someone who knows what she cares about but can’t say it out loud to anyone but a stranger. You have to start telling people — old friends, new friends, strangers — what you care about. Make other people uncomfortable, if that’s what it takes. And rest assured that, the older you get, the more you’ll feel at home letting other people know just how heavy and dark you feel a lot of the time, and the more you’ll move among people who understand the divinity of connecting, of telling the truth, of showing up for each other, no matter what.

About this, Polly is right and wrong. While I agree that Orphan might very well want to open an orphanage in Chile, and while I accept that Orphan ought to share her experience with other people, I do not agree that she ought to do it to their faces. I think she should write it. 

She can write down her intense passions, in a book or an article. Since her parents are no longer around and since she seems to have no other family, she will not have to worry about exposing family secrets.

Why else did she write it down in a letter to Polly? This will allow her to express them in the proper medium and to avoid burdening other people with something that they do not want to hear. Writing it down matters because they she will learn that the world she is living in is a fiction. It is not reality.

And of course, we all agree that Orphan should have a child of her own, even to get married. Polly suggests that Orphan have a child out of wedlock, perhaps because we see no sign of there being any other people in Orphan’s world. I accept Polly's advice, because the distance between Orphan's self-involvement and a romance is very large indeed.

As it happens, we might all become confused here because we believe that love is love and that all loves are the same thing. Such is not the case. The love you feel for a dying parent is not the same as romantic love. Engaging in a romantic love affair requires a far different set of social skills, one that, I suspect, Orphan does not have. And these two kinds of love are not the same as the love and affection you feel for a friend, not for a friend with whom you can describe a dying body, but a friend with whom you can share a good time, enjoy a dinner or watch a movie.

Orphan has missed out on all of the banalities that make life meaningful and worthwhile. She should confine her intense love for her parents to a notebook and move on with her life. I suspect that once she starts writing it all down she will discover that her idyllic childhood, created and sustained by selfless love, had more than a few flaws. As the old saying goes, love is blind. The more intense the passion, even the passion for charity, the more blind it is.