My mom committed suicide the day before my wedding when we were in the middle of the biggest fight of our lives. She had lost both her parents, one right after the other. Prior to her losing them, she had already purchased tickets to come visit us in France for Christmas. She debated coming, but finally decided to come hoping it might help her feel better.

But on Christmas Eve, she became upset about not sight-seeing enough, which of course wasn’t the real issue, and then she drank a whole bottle of wine and insisted on leaving. We said no, she said yes, we said no, she said yes; finally, we said “fine.” We took her to the airport and the security guard said, “go home people, don’t do this,” but my mom insisted. By the time she sobered up, she was on a plane and convinced herself that we kicked her out on Christmas Eve. Interestingly, I discovered Venerable Geshe-la a few days later when I ran into Meaningful to Behold in the bookstore. This is my origin story for finding the Dharma.

I spent the next three, four years trying to contact her and re-establish relations with her, but was met with total silence. I’m not even sure if she ever opened my letters (this was pre-internet). I then got engaged and my mother found out through the grapevine. About a month before our wedding, she contacted me wanting to come. My parents absolutely hated each other and my mother ruined my brother’s wedding because she couldn’t hold it together with my father there. I didn’t think it was a good idea for the first time I see my mother to be at my wedding when my father was going to be there, so I said no she couldn’t come. I said I would come after the honeymoon and we would work everything out. She then killed herself the day before my wedding, which was also the anniversary of her own parents’ marriage.

If I look within my mind, I don’t really have much guilt about her having committed suicide. That is not on me. But what I didn’t see until now (thanks to a dear Sangha friend helping me see it) was how this created in me an absolute hyper-aversion to my relations being bad with anybody, especially prior to any extended separations, such as when my kids head off for college or I get posted to an assignment for my work where the family can’t join me.

In practice, this takes three forms. First, when for whatever reason relations are bad with those I love, I can’t handle it. Everything must be OK and resolved now, now, now, or certainly before any big separation. So I push them to resolve their issues immediately, which is of course ridiculous and unfair. Second, I chase after people’s forgiveness. When they are mad at me, it really messes with my mind, and so I go through all sorts of contortions trying to get things back to OK, but in effect it enables abuse and dysfunction when I probably should have walked away long ago or just been OK with them being mad at or disapproving of me. Third, at a more subtle level, it helps explain in part why I have projected expectations on my family that they always think and act in enlightened ways because I see any delusions within their mind as precursors of things potentially going badly.

All three of these forms are completely counter-productive, creating the very problem I am trying to avoid – namely having bad relations with those I love, having them be mad at me, or things ending badly before a big separation. Sadly, it is this aversion to any relations being bad that has in fact made virtually all of my relations bad. I think this is the hidden echo of the impact of my mom’s suicide on my mind that I have not seen until now.

The solution here is I need to create the space in my mind for this discomfort of not having things resolved with those I love. I need to create the space in my mind to give others the time they need to process things in their own way, even if that means they need to separate themselves from me or be very angry with me. It’s not fair for me to push everyone around me to resolve everything immediately just because I can’t handle it, but that is exactly what I have been doing. Creating the space for others to process their own things in their own way in their own time, therefore, is part of my practice of compassion for them. And part of my practice of protecting my own mind from this crippling, yet stealthy aversion.

Indeed, I see now how it was unfair of me to expect my mom to not act like she did when she came to France. She just lost both of her parents and that’s hard, she needed her own time to process. Likewise, a mother being told she can’t come to her son’s wedding must be completely devastating for her, and it is unrealistic of me to expect her to have processed it all on my timeframe. Creating the space for others to process their hurt in their own time and thier own way is part of our practice of compassion, and to expect them to do so in a manner that suits us is completely misplaced.

This will probably take a long time for me to become OK with, and I will likely continue to make many mistakes on this front. But I see it now. Hopefully I will become increasingly aware of how I do this and I will gradually stop. This, paradoxically, will actually help me heal over time a lot of the current bad relations I have with those I love.

Delusions are just awful! This aversion has been functioning in hiding within my mind, undermining everything important to me. I share all of this in the hopes that others don’t make the same mistakes I have.