A haunting story in yesterday’s Modern Love column in the NYT.  Katherine Friedman recounts an airplane mishap – a scary plunge, the oxygen masks come down, a crash seems imminent – that suddenly reverses, leaving her and her new husband safe but shaken at a Cancun wedding:

At the beach, children shriek and tumble in the gentle surf, their
hair braided tightly into cornrows affixed with plastic beads. Everyone
rejoices in the delights of this paradise, but I feel as if I am
visiting purgatory.

There are meals to eat. Tours to take.
There is a wedding, beautiful in its simplicity. Vows are exchanged and
a marriage begins. There is dancing and music. We drink a little too
much. My husband has a cigarette for the first time in months.

That
night in bed I cling to him, much as I did on the plane, and he tells
me the same thing as when we were falling through the sky: “We’ll be
O.K.”

We try to talk about what happened on the plane, try to
reconstruct it, and then we stop. He wants to move past it, I can tell.
“We’re lucky,” he repeats.

I nod. But the truth is, I don’t
feel lucky. Or even alive. I feel indifferent. All I can do is watch
everyone around me experience what I should be feeling. No, it’s worse:
I watch them and condemn them for the utter uselessness of their joy.

      She describes her unease as letting go.  In a way – and this is my interpretation of her piece – she had to let go of the certainty that the next moment will be there, that her life as she knows it will continue.  The converse of this is an acceptance of uncertainty.  Maybe I will be hit by a bus tomorrow and others will find a way to carry on without me.  This kind of feeling for her is destabilizing:

And here I remain — among friends and loved ones, at the beginning
of my marriage and all the fierce entanglements of life. Yet in letting
go, it seems I created a break between my former and current selves
that isn’t so easily bridged.

At home, I go to the grocery store,
rub the dog’s belly, fold the laundry, return my mother’s calls — all
the routines and rituals that are supposed to give life structure and
meaning. But week after week I am still in that other place, a half
step removed, wondering when and how I am ever going to come back from
this.

 I have some sense of what she is talking about.  When Aidan was born, and his profound disabilities unfolded before us, I was dumbfounded.  All of my expectations were shattered, my visions of my family and myself scrambled.  As time went on, I learned to let go –  the Taoism helped – of what I thought life would be and found a way to marvel at life as it is.  Letting go for me was liberating.  It worked.  I was able to see Aidan in a new light – or, rather, he made me see myself from a new angle.  I found the good and tolerated the bad.

      The big difference between Friedman’s experience and mine is time.  Her shock came and went suddenly.  At one moment she thought herself near dead, and the next she was perfectly fine.  My life with Aidan came on more slowly – it took weeks and months to understand fully the extent of his disabilities – and defined my life forever.  I do not mean, in this comparison, to belittle the trauma Friedman suffered.  Rather, I am trying to understand why it is she would come to the opposite conclusion as me about "letting go."

     Perhaps the virtues of letting go, of accepting our lack of control over our lives, reveal themselves in the fullness of time.  It took a long time for me.  And, it seems, after some time, Friedman, too, regains her perspective; her father has a heart attack and this reorients her:

And it is not until I am beside him in the intensive care unit,
gripping his hand as he battles his weakened heart for each breath,
that I feel my own heart pounding again for the first time since that
day. It’s all so familiar: the panic, the terror, the threat of
imminent loss.

But this time I don’t let go. My father, laced with wires and unconscious, is pulling me back.

     But notice how she now resists "letting go."  Her impulse, ultimately, is opposite of mine.  That is not to say it is worse, just opposite.  For her, letting go is a descent into emptiness and disengagement.  For me, letting go is an acceptance of something fundamental about Way.  For her, it is constricting; for me, liberating.   I imagine, however, that, at some point, she will have to let go again.  And when that happens, I hope she will find some freedom and solace there, as Chuang Tzu suggests:

If you serve your own mind, joy and sorrow rarely appear.  If you know what’s beyond your control, if you know it follows its own inevitable nature and you live at peace – that is integrity perfected.  Children and ministers inevitably find that much is beyond them.  But if you forget about yourself and always do what circumstances require of you, there’s no time to cherish life or despise death.  Then you do what you can, and whatever happens is fine.