On Being Someone's Son or Daughter

Kelly Corrigan takes what might have been a fairly standard story of survival, and reframed it, most charmingly, as a coming of age narrative. We see here a headstrong girl, under the most severe adversity, turn into a genuinely strong woman.

—Carolyn See, author of Making a Literary Life

Kelly Corrigan addresses a difficult subject in her memoir, The Middle Place . (Corrigan's blog link) The narrative begins with early childhood memories of a dynamic yet embracing father and continues on to weave in a story about cancer survival while she addresses her placement within the proud Irish-American family fabric. I agree with Carolyn See in the quote above- that the expected story would have been a survival story about one woman's experience with cancer. Yet, Kelly Corrigan, skillfully leads us into our own understanding of family relationships and their meaning within our lives.

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The documentary interview was finished. I was at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport preparing to return to Puerto Rico, steeped in my own memories of the past, when a series of mechanical irregularities (failed plane saftey test!) waylaid me to the Clarian hotel in the Metro area where I could thankfully give into Kelly Corrigan's reading experience. I was with her as she grew up on Wooded Lane in Philadelphia where she had the usual conflicts with her family, school and life in general. She was a young girl fighting for her place in the family and in the world.

Corrigan takes us to a memory land that we may never have actually lived but one that we all have lived enough. Let me explain. Our general life patterns overlap and we become adults. For most of us, we have a life defining shift that usually involves deep pain. It is that common human experience that provides a place to connect with the true story of a real person in a real life. Corrigan's honesty compels you to read on and wills you to understand how someone under great stress can find the will to continue activily participating in life while struggling to survive cancer. Corrigan is in the Middle Place-that place between childhood and full adulthood-a comforting place boxed in by childhood memory and young adult security. She writes that when she found out that she had cancer, she immediately need to call home-the location of her home still being where her mother and father live even though she is married and has two small children of her own. I was particularly perplexed about the location of this "Middle Place". After I read a bit more, I was grateful that she didn't have to confront it's passage too early in her life.

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What happens in your life when you are not someone's son or daughter? That's how my life is now with both parents gone. It's the natural course of events and most will arrive here at the uppermost generational tier. We hope it's not too soon. We hope were ready for the next phase. We hope we can breathe at this higher altitude. When our parents die, we feel like a child again. The feeling of our home, a feeling of situatedness evaporates with their death. Then the work of locating home inside, begins and we start learning how to parent ourselves.

In this uppermost space resides the location of possibility where we can learn to take on the responsibility of creating (recreating) the family feeling in our lives. We decide to continue or begin some of our own family traditions. In this place of hope, we may learn to be the unconditional givers to those we love. Here we may learn to create our own family, which may include close friends. Or maybe, we will need to create a family that is comprised only of friends. In this place, it is possible to broaden our concept of family to combine all of humanity. And it is here where we may begin to feel that it is necessary to act- to offer assistance to all who are suffering.

I often wonder when will we redefine our realm of responsibility -our boundary of concern -so that we will not tolerate another day of hunger in this world. When will we be able to overcome the fearful hesitancy that keeps our hands in our pockets instead of reaching out to those in need?

When my parents died, I began to understand that I had to take some of this responsibility for others upon myself. Do we have to lose our parents to begin to understand that we must continue to foster empathy and compassion in this world? That we have to share in the responsibility and care for all of those who surround us? Must we wait for our losses to eventually push us into broadening our area of concern to include not just people, but animals and the environment too?

It is my hope that when we all encounter the passage from this Middle Place to full adulthood that we re-think our position in this world. Personally, I hope to find the right balance between my values and my actions in order to live a life completely harmonized by integrity. I hope to foster within myself pure motive guided by empathy and the best for all concerned. May all humanity make it successfully through this Middle Place. And when the time comes, may we all graduate into the Upper Place with the will to live in peace with each other; be it our family, friends, neighbors, and also extended out to all religions and to all countries. I am confident that this understanding of the Upper Place represents a kind of graduation for all of humanity.

May we all find ourselves living this vision of peace.

Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life.

Dalai Lama