How I Got My Name

In a recent class, we talked about using seeds from real life to create fictional stories. At first, I asked everyone to tell a true story with one lie in it. Then I had them write a story about their mother or father; the piece was to be based on truth, but be at least ¼ fiction. In the final prompt, I asked the class to create a story about one of their grandparents, based on a kernel of fact, with the resulting story mostly imagined.

This is the piece I wrote about my grandfather. All I knew for sure were the bare bones of the story. I made up the rest. It was a very satisfying exercise.

I got my last name because my grandfather, Joe Budjakovski, was a young Jewish boy living in the Pale, the area that spread between Russia and Poland at a time when there were still pogroms, where soldiers still thundered in on their horses and killed for the pure pleasure of it, a time when soldiers burned the meager fields of the farmers and took the prettiest girls and raped them in the fields, leaving them disgraced, disfigured, or dead.

Joe’s grandfather was a learned man, a rabbi. His rules were strict and unyielding. All 613 commandments of the Talmud were followed. There was no room for deviation. No room to dream. And Jewish young men in that harsh land were destined for conscription in the Russian army which meant being worked to death, a sentence of hard labor on the frozen steppes with inadequate food, shoes, clothing, shelter. It was a death sentence. If the enemy soldiers didn’t kill you and hunger didn’t take you, and you didn’t freeze to death on sentry duty, then one of your fellow soldiers, who didn’t like Jews or wanted a little sport might slit your throat in the quiet of the night.

Joe Budjakovski wanted more than the life that was before him, so at age 12, in the dead of night, he stole away from his village, the only village and the only people he had every known. He carried nothing more than a small bundle of bread and some turnips and a warm cloak his mother slipped him at the last minute while secretly urging him away and making the sign of blessing over his head. Joe walked across those vast steppes, he walked through his shoes, the only pair he had, he walked until his feet bled and then he finally made his way to England, where like other boys who only dreamed of getting away, he ended up begging on the streets, his dream of coming to America slipping away as his stomach tightened and his mind turned feral, hell bent on survival.

One day, when he was begging on the street, a tall thin man with a neatly trimmed beard and kind eyes looked down at the boy shivering below him. “Where are you from?” he asked.

10 Things I Know the Truth About: How to Surrender to Serious Illness

This is part of an ongoing series I started publishing in the newsletter a few months ago: ten things I know the real truth about. This month’s topic: I know how to surrender to serious illness.

P.S. I want to make it clear everyone walks through the valley of illness differently. This is a list of what worked for ME...it won't necessarily be what works for you or your loved one.

1. As soon as you get your diagnosis, educate yourself and reach out for support. There are lots of people who know all about what you have—and they will be happy to help you learn what you need to know. They have walked where you have walked before and they will be happy to extend a hand.
2. Do not keep your illness a secret. Do not waste energy trying to pretend to yourself—or to anyone else that you are not sick.
3. Don’t let anyone else tell you what you should or shouldn’t do to respond to what is happening in your body. Do your own research and make your own decisions.  Be willing to change course as often as you need to.
4. Don’t try to keep everything normal. It is not normal. Accept that you are on a new path and that illness has much to teach you. Be open to your life and your body cracking open into something new.
5. Allow yourself to feel—whether you feel outraged, accepting, sorry for yourself, grief-stricken, enlightened or depressed. Let the feelings move through you.
6. Join a support group. Talk to other people who are living in the underground of illness. Let your hair down with them—often.
7. Set boundaries. Not all the help that comes your way will feel helpful. Say no to people who drain you, even if they have the best of intentions. Say yes to people who come out of the blue to be your best supporters. Say yes to building a community of support. Let people in. Let them help you.
8. Decide on a daily basis what is and isn’t important. Stop doing anything and everything that is not important.
9. Experience the freedom of no longer having people expect you to do what you used to do. Take advantage of this opportunity. If you survive your very serious illness, you will once again have the world—and the expectations of others on your shoulders.
10. Learn the skill of breathing through everything—every needle stick, every test, every test result, nausea, pain and physical discomfort. Breathe and let go. Breathe and let go. Breathe and let go.
11. Give yourself permission to watch as much mindless TV and smoke as much pot as you need to—or whatever it is that brings you a moment’s relief.

The Choice

There was once a hundred year old man. Everyone who met him marveled at his vitality and the vibrancy of his mind. He radiated joy and people wanted to be near him. When asked the secret of his long and happy life, he replied, “When I turned fifty, I was determined to find a way to stay youthful and young at heart, so I decided that every five years, I would study something new.” And so every five years, this man embraced a new activity and poured his energy into it, letting the joy of learning lead him in a new, surprising direction.

I don’t know what he chose to study, but let’s imagine what his trajectory might have been: fencing at 55, sailing at 60, Indonesian at 65. At 70, gourmet cooking. At 75, Shakespeare. At 80, a pair of knitting needles. It doesn’t really matter what he studied; what matters is that he started over again and again, and he never stopped learning.

I was intrigued by this man’s story; inspired that someone had embodied lifelong learning so completely. What an amazing man, I thought. What an amazing life he must have had! But then the wave of momentum that is my life crashed upon me, and I promptly forgot all about him.

Only I didn’t really forget him. Not completely. Because when I turned 55 last July, a confluence of circumstances led me to see two distinct paths stretched out before me. And to avoid the one I didn’t want to take, I decided to adopt this man’s strategy as a compass for my life.

Until I made that decision, my choice as an adult had been to do more of what I was already good at. I was a good writer, so I continued to write. I was a good communicator, so I kept communicating. I’d always been a transmitter of change and transformation, so I kept expanding my role as a teacher. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things. They’re wonderful, generative, creative things, and there are great rewards in going deeper and deeper into something you love.

But that wasn’t working for me anymore. I never created the time or space in my life to try anything new; I limited myself to well-worn paths worn into familiar grooves long ago. I didn’t have hobbies. I had drive. I had ambition. I had accomplishments. I had busy down pat. I had my share of successes—and some spectacular failures as well. And it’s not that I was risk aversive. But the risks I took were calculated. They were all in the same bailiwick. And because of that, my world was getting smaller.

Fear was starting to narrow the margins of my life. Repeatedly, I heard myself say things like, “I can’t do that.” “My brain doesn’t work like that anymore.” “I can’t remember anything.” “I’m not good at that. I’ve never been good at that.” Or, “That’s just not me.”

I had started to sound old.

10 Things I Know the Truth About: Part 2

A couple of months back, I gave my students assignment, "Write about 10 things you know the real truth about." Once we honed our list of subjects, we wrote wrote a piece that succinctly summarized what we knew about each of the ten topics--what we knew deeply about them.

Last month, I shared a couple of the subjects I'd put on my own list. Here's another: how to make peace with a mother you're estranged from.

This is a subject I know a lot about, mainly because I've successfully reconciled with (and have an excellent relationship with) my own mother, from whom I was estranged for seven years.

I got so interested in the topic of estranged relationships and how to mend them, that I wrote a whole book about it, I Thought We'd Never Speak Again: The Road from Estrangement to Reconciliation. Of the seven books I've written, it's my personal favorite, though it wasn't the most commercially successful.

If you have someone you're estranged from in your life, I suggest you check it out. It will help you find your own answers--without telling you what you should do or how you should do it.

I know how to make peace with a mother you are estranged from:

1. You have to become comfortable with the elephant in the room.
2. You have to learn to let go of things you cannot change about your mother.
3. Stop being surprised every single time she acts like herself. Rather than being offended or hurt, cultivate a sense of humor instead.
4. Widen your focus away from the things that drive you crazy and the things you think you can't tolerate until you can see that there is a much bigger field that the two of you are standing in.
5. Remember, you're not the only one stretching here. Chances are your mother will be making the same adaptations in relation to you.
6. You have to see your mother as more than just your mother--with all her strengths, liabilities and failings. You have to see her as a human being shaped and formed by her environment, a mother who was also a daughter and a granddaughter and a sister and a worker and a teenager and a young woman and now a grandmother, someone coping with aging and loss and the vicissitudes of her life.
7. You have to make your viewpoint so large that you both become part of the human family, a family much more powerful and encompassing and spacious than the narrow human family you were born into.
8. You have to give up being right.You have to give up proving your point.
9. You have to focus on the positive things between you, even if they are tiny and seemingly insignificant. If you both like to bake ruggelach, focus on that. If you both like to read the Sunday New York Times, focus on that. Build a connection based on the small things you share or the tiny things you can agree upon. From that tiny foundation, a new relationship can grow.