What Matters Most Is How You Walk Through the Fire

Last year our beloved cat Skye enjoyed a spoonful of cream, sauntered into my son’s room, and dropped dead.

He was only a year old Maine Coon, but apparently, the breed is prone to underlying heart conditions. My wife and I scooped up his limp body and sped to the veterinarian’s office, but there was nothing they could do.

We tearfully held his paws on the exam table, said our goodbyes, and drove home in stunned silence.

The next morning I accompanied my wife to a doctor’s appointment to get the results of some tests. Her doctor sat down in front of us and said, “You have breast cancer.”

Those four words launched my wife and me into the fire. The fire of fear, uncertainty, tests, surgeries, and stress.

On the day of my wife’s double mastectomy, I took a cell phone picture of her just before surgery. We wanted to share a photo with family.

My wife held up her right hand and gave a thumbs up.

My wife before surgery.

She was moments away from the fire. The fire of surgery, uncertainty, pain, and fear. Yet she gave a thumbs up for the photo, to tell her family that it will all be okay.

That’s how you walk through the fire.

With dignity and grace.

Things get bad for all of us

The late author and poet Charles Bukowski lived a difficult life.

In the 2003 film Bukowski: Born Into This, Bukowski says that his father beat him with a razor strop three times a week from age six to eleven years old. He claimed that the beatings informed his writing, helping him understand undeserved pain.

Bukowski suffered from terrible acne as a youth, thus isolating him from others his age. The suffering in the Depression deepened his rage, all of which fueled his writing and worldview.

Bukowski’s writing can be blunt and depressing, often transcending our preciousness and treacly optimism. Yet it also finds beauty lurking behind the ugliness of life.

JohnPWeiss.com

Charles Bukowski may have been a hedonistic alcoholic, but he discovered and wrote about the hard truths of life as he experienced them growing up, on the streets, and in the bars.

Consider the following quote from Bukowski’s book What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire:

Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.

This wisdom echoes the views of the late psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, whose famous memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, reminds us that we cannot control what happens to us, but we do control how we will respond.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. — Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Stress, tragedy, and hardship are inescapable realities in life. Shakespeare called them “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” They can destroy good people.

They should have destroyed the late singer Roy Orbison.

Only the lonely know the way I feel tonight

Roy Orbison was famous for his signature dark glasses, jet black hair, and operatic vocal ability.

Less known are the multiple tragedies that happened to Orbison in his life.

In the 1960s Orbison and his young wife were riding motorcycles when she crashed into an open truck door. She died in Orbison’s arms.

Two years later, while Orbison was on tour in England, his house burned down, killing two of his three young sons. Then, in 1973, Orbison’s brother Grady died in a car accident while en route to visit Orbison.

Only the lonely know the way I feel tonight. — Roy Orbison

How does one navigate the tragic loss of a spouse, children, and brother? How does one walk through those fires?

With hope in your heart.

Just months after his young sons perished in the house fire, Orbison recorded an album about the tragedy. It was thought to have been lost forever until his other sons discovered it.

One of the songs on the album is titled “You’ll never walk alone,” which is a cover of the original by Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Richard Rodgers for their musical Carousel.

Here are the lyrics:

When you walk through a storm hold your head up high

And don’t be afraid of the dark

At the end of a storm is a golden sky

And the sweet silver song of a lark

Walk on through the wind

Walk on through the rain

Though your dreams be tossed and blown

Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart

And you’ll never walk alone

You’ll never, ever walk alone

Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart

And you’ll never walk alone

You’ll never, ever walk alone

Despite the tragedy of losing two children in a house fire, Orbison found a song of encouragement and hope.

The lyrics “When you walk through a storm hold your head up high” reflect Orbison’s answer to how we should walk through the fire.

The lyrics echo Bukowski and Frankl. We may not be able to control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond.

One of Orbison’s sons said that his father always kept a positive attitude. Orbison was a sensitive man who remained cheerful despite the losses in his life.

If Roy Orbison can do it, how about the rest of us?

You can beat death in life

Those who have read the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire are likely familiar with his most famous work Candide.

Candide touches on several subjects, but it mostly wrestles with reality versus blind optimism. It holds the view that we are already living in the best of all possible worlds (of course, people of faith would differ on this view).

The late Professor Peter Gay, in his introduction to a bilingual edition of Voltaire’s Candide, wrote:

If this life is a desert, it is our duty to make an oasis in it;if this life is a shipwreck, we must rescue as many as we can, and not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

The world and all its tragedies may be all we get, but that doesn’t mean we can’t “sing in the lifeboats.” We get to decide how we want to respond to life’s catastrophes.

Charles Bukowski’s poem “The Laughing Heart,” tells us we can beat death in life. We can choose to turn darkness into light, as the following lines suggest:

you can’t beat death but

you can beat death in life, sometimes.

and the more often you learn to do it,

the more light there will be.

your life is your life.

know it while you have it.

you are marvelous

the gods wait to delight

in you.

When the fires came for my wife, she bravely gave a thumbs up and held her head high.

When tragedy took Roy Orbison’s little boys, he found a way to beat death in life. By inspiring others with his songs of hope.

Sooner or later you’ll have to walk through the fire.

Hold your head high.Do it with grace and dignity.Show the world that you’re greater than what it can throw at you.Replace the darkness with your light.

This is how we walk through the fire.

Before you go

I’m John P. Weiss, an artist, writer, and photographer. Every weekend I publish The Saturday Newsletter, containing my latest writing, artwork, photography, book reviews, and more. Check it out here.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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Photo credit: John P. Weiss