Negative Space

On those days when I feel lost and adrift in negative space, I remind myself that there is still much to do. If you look around, you can always find someone with worse troubles than your own and often doing a better job of coping.

Sitting in an aftercare session one evening several years ago, contemplating divorce and worse, I listened to a woman tell of her daughter, her only child, living in an abandoned car in the dead of a a New England winter. From her kitchen window, she said, she could see the car, on the edge of her property, rusty, wrecked and half buried in snow drifts. Its passenger trudged through the snow each morning and night, a walking bundle of dirty rags, barely upright enough to go in search of her next fix but still refusing any offer of help. She's my child, the woman wept, how can I do this to her? One of the group suggested taking her food, another suggested blankets and warm clothes - But I'm killing her! the woman wailed helplessly. No! the counselor said in a sharp tone he rarely used, The cocaine is killing her!

These were not easy hours. We were all lost and adrift in negative space, searching for answers and forgiveness and understanding, trying to cope with incomprehensible guilt, pain and uncertainty. Most nights it seemed as if all we had to offer one another was bad coffee, bitter experience and kleenex - hope was in short supply and it was easy to lose sight of the fact that we were there to help and heal ourselves, not the suffering of the ones we were trying to love. There's a purpose to negative space, I've learned, to give your eyes a rest and help you focus on what's important, but then it was just blackness and emptiness, a cruel absence of light.

Members of our group came and went, some helped, some not. Some of the ones we loved found their way back, most did not. The girl who had lived in the abandoned car froze to death in a January blizzard and her mother, thin, pale and finally out of tears, sat silently with her loss and grief, unable to speak of it for months. There was nothing we could do except encourage her to keep coming and forgive herself - she did the first for an entire year and then began missing sessions and finally stopped coming altogether. Whether she found forgiveness or just gave up, we were never to know but we kept her in our thoughts.

In some situations, an absence of light can be a kindness and negative space a force for good. The trick is figuring out which is which.