a sisterhood, and together, through education and other kinds of support, they’ve contributed to lowering the stillbirth rate in their state so significantly that doctors are scratching their heads in disbelief and gratitude. Instead of withdrawing or disconnecting from their suffering, they ran straight toward it. Their shared pain became their bond and their fuel. Now, together, they are saving others from the very heartbreak that brought them together.
Heartbreak delivers your purpose. If you are brave enough to accept that delivery and seek out the people doing that particular world-changing work, you find your people. There is no bond like the bond that is forged among people who are united in the same world-healing work.
Despair says, “The heartbreak is too overwhelming. I am too sad and too small, and the world is too big. I cannot do it all, so I will do nothing.”
Courage says, “I will not let the fact that I cannot do everything keep me from doing what I can.”
We all want purpose and connection.
Tell me what breaks your heart, and I’ll point you toward both.
grief
Fourteen years ago, I was sitting in my sister’s bedroom in the home she shared with her then husband. Tish, just a few months old, lay in her car seat on the hardwood floor, sucking on her fingers and gurgling. Sister and I were quiet. She and her husband were struggling in their marriage, and it was all quite confusing and difficult.
While we sat there, her phone pinged and she looked down at it. Then she dropped the phone and slid from her chair to the floor. I grabbed the phone from the floor and saw that her husband had just emailed that their marriage was over. I looked away from the phone and down at my sister, who appeared lifeless, like whatever had been keeping her alive and afloat had gone, like the leftovers of a deflated balloon. Then she began to wail. I have known my sister since moments after she took her first breath, and I had never heard her make a noise like this. Her wail was animalistic, and it made me feel afraid. I touched her, but there was no response. The three of us were in that room together, but we were not together anymore. The pain had taken my sister to a place all her own. Tish was completely still, her eyes wide and watery, stunned by the volume and intensity of the wailing. I remember wondering how a baby exposed to this much raw pain, this early, would be formed by it.
In the coming year, while the rest of the world carried on, my sister, Tish, and I became a small army trying to push together through the muck of grief. Sometimes I think that first year shaped Tish’s depth and tenderness. She still becomes still, wide-eyed, and watery in the presence of another person’s pain.
My sister moved out of the home she had painstakingly created for her future family and into a small guest room in my basement. I wanted to decorate it, to make it nice for her, but she resisted. She did not want to make a home inside my basement, inside her grief. She wanted to make it clear that she was just visiting this place. The only thing she hung on the wall was a small blue cross I gave her with the inscription “For I know the plans I have for you. Plans to give you hope and a future.”
Every evening she’d come home from work, eat dinner with us, and do her best to smile and play with the kids. Then she’d walk downstairs to her room for the night. One evening, I followed her downstairs and stood outside her door. As I prepared to knock, I heard her crying softly. That is when I realized that where she was, I could not go. Grief is a lonely basement guest room. No one, not even your sister, can join you there.
So I sat down on the floor with my back against her bedroom door. I used all I had, my body and my presence, to hold vigil, to guard her process, to place myself between her and anything else that might disturb or hurt her. I stayed there for hours. I came back to her door for that nightly vigil for a very long time.
A year later, my sister left that room and walked up the stairs and out the front door of our