Read an Excerpt

1
 
A Personal Challenge
 
In the middle of a nationwide promotional tour for one of my books in the fall of 1978, I received a long-distance call from my mother. She was crying as she said, “You’ve got to come home. Your father’s in the hospital. He’s having emergency surgery for cancer.”
 
I caught the next plane to New York. The thought that my father might die terrified me not only because of how much I loved him but because he and I had so much unfinished business to take care of. He had always been my father, but I felt that I barely knew him as a person. I was filled with guilt that on some level it was my fault he had developed cancer; that if I had not stayed away from my parents so much, maybe I could have done more for him.
 
Up until that phone call, I had thought that I had my relationship with my parents “handled.” Living more than three thousand miles away from them, I would join my mother and father for an occasional lunch or dinner when a lecture, book tour or business matter brought me back to New York. I would make sure to limit the reunions to an hour or two. By holding a tight lid on my conflicting feelings for my parents, I had always managed to avoid a direct confrontation during our strained conversations. While hardly enjoying the visits or our routine once-a-week phone calls, all of us nevertheless kept up the appearance of a caring family.
 
For most of my life, I had thought of my father as a victim and had felt sorry for the many frustrations he suffered. He often complained that his work didn’t satisfy or adequately reward him. At home, most of the time my parents either argued or kept a hostile silence; the tension was such that I remember thinking as a child, “God, just let me survive now and I’ll heal later.” While I loved my father, I also resented him for never breaking out of his rut. After struggling for his entire life, he had reached the age of sixty-five to face a hopeless decision—work until he dropped dead or retire to spend twenty-four hours a day with my mother.
 
On the plane during the flight to New York to my father’s hospital bed, I sensed that you don’t get to heaven alone—you take your family with you. I realized that I had the opportunity to make this visit different from all the others. Even though I knew I could try to fake my way through it by bringing my father flowers while still holding all my feelings inside, I made up my mind that I was going to reestablish closeness with each of my parents. Keeping them at arm’s length was no longer what I wanted. After years of resenting my obligatory reunions with my parents and blaming them for how unenjoyable it all was, this time I would make myself responsible for what I got out of the visit. I had never before viewed my training in medical school, psychiatry and human-potential seminars as a vehicle for relating to my own parents, yet it was clear that God or nature was saying, “O.K., Bloomfield, let’s see how much you’ve really learned.”
 
The Two-hundredth Hug
 
 
My father’s skin was jaundiced as he lay hooked up to monitors and intravenous tubes in the intensive care unit of the hospital. Normally a well-built man, he had lost more than thirty pounds.
 
My father’s illness had been diagnosed as cancer of the pancreas, one of the most malignant forms of the disease. The doctors were doing what they could but told us that he had only three to six months to live. Cancer of the pancreas does not lend itself to radiation therapy or chemotherapy, so they could offer little hope.
 
A few days later, when my father was sitting up in bed, I approached him and said, “Dad, I really feel for what’s happened to you. It’s helped me to look at the ways I’ve kept my distance and to feel how much I really love you.” I leaned over and started to give him a hug, but his shoulders and arms tensed up.
 
“C’mon, Dad, I really want to give you a hug.”
 
For a moment he looked shocked. Showing affection was not our usual way of relating. I asked him to sit up some more so I could get my arms around him. Then I tried again. This time, however, he was even more tense. I could feel the resentment starting to build inside me, and I was almost ready to say something like “I don’t need this. If you want to leave me with the same coldness as always, go right ahead.”
 
For years I had used every instance of my father’s resistance and rigidness to blame him, to resent him and to say to myself, “See, he doesn’t care.” This time, however, I thought again and realized the hug was for my benefit as well as my father’s. I wanted to express how much I cared for him no matter how hard it was for him to let me in. My father had always been very Germanic and duty-oriented; in his childhood his parents must have taught him how to shut off his feelings in order to be a man.
 
Letting go of my long-held desire to blame him for our distance, I was actually looking forward to the challenge of giving him more love. I said, “C’mon, Dad, put your arms around me.”
 
I leaned up close to him at the edge of the bed with his arms around me. “Now squeeze. That’s it. Now again, squeeze. Very good!”
 
In a sense I was showing my father how to hug, and as he squeezed, something happened. For an instant, a feeling of “I love you” sneaked through. Where for years our greeting had been a cold and formal handshake that said “Hi, how are you?” now both he and I waited for that momentary closeness to happen again. Yet just at the moment when he would begin to enjoy the feelings of love, something would tighten in his upper torso and our hug would become awkward and strange. It took months before his rigidness gave way and he was able to let the emotions inside him pass through his arms to encircle me.
 
It was up to me to be the source of many, many hugs before my father initiated a hug on his own. I was not blaming him; after all, he was changing the habits of an entire lifetime—and that takes time. I knew we were succeeding because more and more we were relating out of care and affection. Around the two-hundredth hug, he spontaneously said out loud, for the first time I could ever recall, “I love you.”
 
A Time for Healing
 
My father’s cancer became an opportunity for growth and change within my family. I found myself practicing the compassion and understanding I had been teaching my patients. With my assistance, my mother and father began to work out some of the buried resentments and emotional distance that had long accumulated between them. My older sister and I joined them in family meetings during which we were able to share our feelings more honestly and lovingly than ever before.
 
Ever since I had studied to become a teacher of Transcendental Meditation (TM), my father had dismissed my strong interest in meditation as “weird” and “impractical.” Now, as though he had suddenly heard my point of view for the first time, he enrolled in the basic TM course and was soon meditating twice a day. I also taught him the visualization technique prescribed by Dr. Simonton,* during which my father would picture his white cells going to and gobbling up the cancer cells, apparently mobilizing his body’s defenses against the disease. In addition to the stress reduction and visualization techniques, my father began to improve his condition through diet, physical exercise and planning trips with my mother.
 
The healing and growth in my family meant that each of us released a whole backlog of resentments, suppressed anger and love. As a result, my father no longer remained stuck in the role of victim or martyr. Instead of blaming his cancer on my mother by saying, as had been his custom, “You did it to me … it’s your fault,” he powerfully regained his will to live. He and my mother began to enjoy life more than they had in years.
 
When my parents came to my home near San Diego for three incredible weeks with my wife-to-be, Sirah, and me, I felt that my father was my oldest and dearest friend. Sirah and I were giving him lots of love and he was responding with lots of love for her and me. The tension was gone; our time together was very loving and close. We each knew it would be his last time at my home, yet we felt a sense of tremendous gratitude. The doctors had predicted three to six months; my father had survived the cancer for over four high-quality years.
 
One night after we took my parents out for dinner, my father sat in my hot tub as I massaged his neck and shoulders. With the attention I gave his muscles, he was absolutely melting. We no longer had our defenses up toward each other and for a time we both had the sense that we were one.
 
My parents, Sirah and I had finally become the close-knit family we had always pretended to be. After we celebrated a very special Father’s Day, my parents went back to New York, where my father died a few weeks later. His life complete, his relationships with his wife and children having come full circle, he died in a state of grace.
 
Those four years of peace with my parents made a tremendous difference in my life. Seeing the two of them having a good relationship freed me to stop perceiving marriage as a prison. With a new and exciting model of love and commitment in my mind, I was able to break through my fears of and resistance to marriage. From healing my resentments and sharing more love with my parents, I also gained inner peace.