Espionage of the Heart

We’re all spies. Or at minimum, skilled secret-keepers.

When it comes to our pain, we conduct an elegant espionage of the heart.

In our culture, pain is a fiercely private matter. We cry in the shower and behind locked doors, but rarely where anyone can see us. We archive our agony, stowing it away in the deepest, darkest caverns of our consciousness, in hopes it might simply dissolve and passively fade away.

It won’t. I’ve tried.

Since publishing Even if you don’t this past Saturday, I’ve received excellent feedback from hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Their kind words of encouragement and affirmation have blessed me immensely. And I pray that millions of hurting hearts all over the world will have an equally high opinion of the book.

But out of those thousands of comments, many of which came from different states, countries, and from an enormously diverse set of life circumstances, I’ve derived a single commonality: “We didn’t realize how bad it was.”

The majority of my first-day readers had a connection to my and Kailen’s war with cancer. They either read Kailen’s blog (Team KCT Blog), followed our battle on social media, or had a tangential connection to us through friends and family.

Many of them followed our story daily. They had consistent, and relatively intimate, access to what we were enduring.

And yet, upon reading the book, were left stunned by my unfiltered accounting of our experience.

Interestingly, this emotion was most pronounced in those who knew us best.

Close friends and dear family members began feverishly apologizing, desperately wishing they had been around more, or done more to help.

But they needn’t apologize. They’ve done nothing wrong!

In fact, the We Didn’t Realize Phenomenon, as I’ve come to call it, has illuminated a crucial truth, a concept with the power to completely transform the way we help people cope with pain, grieve a loss, or process any number of difficult emotions:

We must understand that we do not understand.

No matter how close we are to a person, we are NOT that person, and as such, can never fully understand the depths of their personal agony.

Though that seems negative, I can assure you it isn’t. Our lack of understanding is an unstoppable natural phenomenon, like tornadoes or beach erosion. It’s unfortunate and can bring about some deleterious effects, but it’s reality.

The cure, as stated above, is understanding our lack of understanding.

Please know this applies just as much to me as it does anyone else.

Though I loved Kailen with every beat of my heart, I wasn’t Kailen. It wasn’t my colon that was plastered with diffuse, purulent ulcers; it wasn’t my breast they cut off; it wasn’t my ovaries they dissolved in a tube; it wasn’t my bones that were charred by an unrelenting, cancerous fire; and most of all, it wasn’t my life that was lost (at least not the life of my physical body).

No one knew Kailen better than I did, and yet, I still didn’t know.

There’s vast power in that realization.

It shouldn’t inflict guilt. It should induce inspiration.

While people didn’t understand what Kailen and I were going through, we didn’t understand what others were going through either. The lack of understanding isn’t born out of dysfunction, and no one is at fault.

But if we can humbly accept our inadequacy, and even state it plainly, our capacity to love one another in the midst of pain will grow. Our empathy will deepen; our ballast will strengthen; our hope will sprout roots.

And therein lies the power – if we can reconcile our impotence, realize that not realizing is an ineradicable reality, and ultimately, if we can surrender our espionage of the heart, we can start loving one another better.

So let us start loving that which we don’t understand.

Let us abandon our secret-keeping.

All pain is different. But all pain is the same.

So let us fight it together, hand-in-hand with the mystery of it all.

I’m humbled to report the book is off to a spectacular start. Within 8 hours of launching, it reached #1 in Love & Loss and Death & Grief categories, and even broke the top 12 in ALL of Amazon’s New Release Bestsellers. Please join me in praying that as it reaches hands, it will reach hearts.

Get your copy here: Read EVEN IF YOU DON’T.