There are years that ask questions and years that answer. Zora Neale Hurston

Her email arrived on February 11th, five days before the anniversary of Jimmy’s death. I was seven years into my own loss, feeling as though I needed to have answers for others. Wisdom to offer, guidance on where to go and how to get there. Still in fixer mode, make-it-better mode and focused too much on sharing what I had learned from my own losses.

Ericka’s son Elijah had been murdered. Gunned down at the age of 22 by two teenagers who tried to carjack him. He was the love of her life, she said, and his death had broken her.

I offered resources, an introduction to other parents who had lost young adult children, a conversation over Zoom. She asked how soon we could connect. We agreed to meet the next day.

What I remember most about our time together is how little I said. Not because I was smart enough to stay quiet, but because I couldn’t find the words to comfort Ericka. To make anything better, to soothe her pain. It was the moment when I first understood on a visceral level that I’d been striving for the wrong thing.

I thought the goal was to solve people’s problems. To figure out what they should do and share it. What I learned from my brave new friend that day was that none of what had happened to Ericka was about me. My only job was to show up and bear witness. To ask about her son as he lived, not how he died. To hold her pain as best I could and listen without judgement to whatever she felt comfortable telling me.

This insight came in a flash. Putting it into practice has taken a long time. We humans are hardwired to fix things. Tell another person you have a problem, and chances are high they’ll lean in and say, “How can I help?” The unspoken part of that question is “solve it” as in “How can I help you solve your problem?” The assumption being that no matter what someone is dealing with, we have the answer for them.

More than forty years ago, my mother wrote down Rilke’s often shared quote about focusing on the questions, not the answers and gave it to me:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

I didn’t get it back then. Rilke’s wisdom wasn’t what I was looking for when I was younger. Certainty held far more appeal than what I viewed as ignorance. The whole point was to know, to become the expert.

Jimmy’s brain cancer diagnosis was the first turning point. The moment when I realized how much I didn’t know. That close to 20% of children and adolescents are diagnosed with chronic or life-threatening illnesses every year in this country. Then later, after his cancer spread like wildfire, that far too many of them will die of those diseases, just as Jimmy did.

The decade following Jimmy’s death has been one long continuing education class in learning to live the questions. Finding ways to embrace uncertainty and get comfortable with my own ignorance. Accepting ambiguity and waiting patiently for the way to be shown.

But the real gift of these days has been discovering that the wisdom we need is already within us. Erika didn’t expect me to have all the answers or even one of them. She didn’t need advice as much as she needed a benign witness. Someone to hold space and wait patiently while she tapped into her own inner knowing about what was best for her that moment, what she needed to go on for another day without her son.