Grief can be profoundly disorienting and traumatic. Yet it can also open our hearts, strengthening our empathy and affection for other people—and our compassion. It may even open us to new forms of joy.
In The Gift of a Broken Heart, Bryan Welch movingly recounts his own journey through deep grief at the loss of his 25-year-old son to addiction. The book describes, in searing detail, the pain of parents grappling with an adult child’s mental illness and, finally, his death in the throes of the disease.
As Bryan begins to recover from devastating parental grief, he becomes aware that his new vulnerability gives him unexpected feelings of warmth, kinship and compassion toward his fellow human beings. This, as much as debilitating grief, is part of his son’s legacy, and he begins exploring practical, psychological and spiritual ways of honoring that legacy and sustaining a more compassionate, less egotistical view of his world.
Grief is a part of every human life. We desperately try to avoid it. But it can provide profound instruction about how we can experience life, and love, more deeply.
The Gift of a Broken Heart explores how the simple acknowledgement of our shared vulnerability can help heal the traumas that separate us from one another, and might lead us toward a more loving, less divisive human world.
Read an excerpt from the book
Living With a Broken Heart
This is not a book about healing. It is, in part, a book about recovery—in the same sense that people describe being “in recovery” from addiction. They acknowledge that they will always be addicts, and they will always be in recovery.
I will always live in a state of grief. My heart will stay broken. And I think, in many ways, that my life has been improved by that.
I think I have been improved by that.
Grief is with us. The deaths of our loved ones, our own disease and death, the end of a treasured relationship or some sad disappointment in the state of our world—grief has many points of origin, but it is here. And as long as we live, it will be.
It will, at times, frighten and disorient us. We may lose our sense of joy. We may lose our sense of identity and self-worth. Worse, it may dampen our will to live.
We may not treasure life or self anymore, for a time. In that dark place we may feel we have no reason to feel affection for ourselves. Joy may feel like self-indulgence. Happiness can seem like a distant memory.
That was, for a time, my experience after a terrible thing happened in my life.
My son, Noah, died of drug addiction when he was 25 years old.
That event tore down the scaffolding on which I had built my self-esteem, my happiness and my self-definition of my “meaningful” life. I had nurtured some carefully crafted narratives to support my sense of self-worth. Those were gone. The basic conditions I had prescribed for my satisfaction in life were no longer present.
I’ve had a rewarding career in business, which afforded my wife and I the opportunity of living on a pleasant farm in the American Midwest, surrounded by our sheep, cattle and pets. We’ve traveled widely and made interesting friends. Most importantly, we raised loving and successful children. Successful, that is, up to the point where our youngest child became addicted to drugs and descended into a hellish realm of pain and delusion from which he never really emerged before he died.
As a parent who lost his child to mental illness, I can never be completely certain that I was not responsible for that illness. Objectively, I had failed as his parent. Being a good parent was the most important responsibility I ever held. Having failed my child, I found it very difficult to feel any sense of self-regard, or affection for myself.
In that terrible circumstance, an opportunity arose. Because I seemed to have no reason to care for myself, I felt I had to consider whether I could care for myself without a reason or condition, whether I could accept myself and my life unconditionally. In that desperate state I found that, sporadically, I could.
After a time, I realized, with some gratitude, that I was also feeling affection for other people that was less conditional than before. I felt a new openness and a new warmth.
I realized I had, until then, approached my human relationships in a transactional way, basing my affection on the pleasure I derived from my relationships. I chose my friends and companions based on whether they made me feel good. But in my deepest grief, I wasn’t deriving much pleasure from anything, or anyone. In a way, that put everything—and everyone, including myself—on a more level playing field.
In those moments when I could accept and care for myself unconditionally, the only way I was capable of doing so, I could also accept and care for others without so much regard for their “special” qualities or their benefit to me.
That was a strange, but welcome feeling. It was a gift: a gift I could not have accepted or even conceptualized until my heart was broken.
I can’t maintain that feeling of unconditionality all the time. I probably don’t really nail it most of the time. But I try to welcome it, and encourage it as best I can, because I have found that I want to experience my life and my relationships more in that way.
Loving oneself unconditionally is a tricky business. When we feel unconditional love, the specific qualities of the love object are less relevant. In other words, if I care for myself unconditionally, then my specialness decreases in value. My ego has a problem with this, and tries to assert that I am lovable for this quality or that quality. But if those qualities are not prerequisites, then they’re a lot less valuable and less special. This makes me and my ego uncomfortable. I try to get past that, but the issue never completely goes away.
That issue is also an impediment to feeling unconditional love for others. When my sense of affection for myself is contingent on some quality or another, I find it’s virtually impossible to feel deep affection for others that is not conditioned in a similar way. Generally, it makes me gravitate toward people who help me feel special.
The underlying, inherent quality of unconditional love—a love that is not transactional, that seeks no specific outcome—opened up the potential for me to feel a more profound kind of compassion, a compassion I want to explore more and more. And I don’t only feel open toward other people. I feel more open to experience, to all the vagaries of life, and to joy.
In those moments of unconditional openness, I feel its potential. Not only in my heart. I feel it in the air. It’s all around.
When I give up always trying to get something in return, to keep something as a trophy for being good and loving, I see the world differently and new fields of possibility emerge.
I would rather, if I can, care for myself and others, experience my life and my work, unconditionally. I would rather encounter each person and event fresh, with an open mind and an open heart. I don’t want to rebuild the self-regarding narratives that once pretended to protect me from heartbreak.
I would rather not live my life in fear of grief—the grief that once destroyed my conditional self-esteem, my conditional loves and my very conditional peace of mind.
So, I try to practice unconditional love and maintain an unconditional peace of mind.
Because I know grief is coming for me again.
And, my friends, it’s coming for you as well.
So I offer this thin book, a memoir of my grief and the paths where it led, for what it’s worth, to anyone who is grieving or will grieve one day soon, which is to say, almost everyone.
May it be helpful to someone.
May it be helpful, perhaps, to you.