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I HAVE NOT USED THE
word “ego” much in this book. I have left it out deliberately because that one little word—“ego”—contains a complex concept that is often misunderstood and misused in popular culture. And to confuse matters more, different traditions use the same word to describe different ideas. In certain psychological schools of thought, there's a healthy ego and an unhealthy ego. The healthy ego gives one a strong, authentic selfhood that can play well with others, while the unhealthy ego is wounded and weak. It's the part of you that views life through an obsessively competitive, comparative lens. Some spiritual traditions describe ego as the mistaken notion of a separate self. The true self feels connected, while the ego feels threatened.

Here's how I tried to explain the ego to my four-year-old grandson, Will. Two of my grandchildren live in my town. Their parents live here too—but it's those grandchildren I'm after. On Thursdays I pick Will up at preschool. When I go into Will's classroom, I feel more privileged than if I were walking the red carpet. To be part of his childhood is a rare gift in this fractured age of family diaspora. I don't take being a hands-on grandparent for granted. Holding those little animal bodies close to mine is a form of medicine for me. And because I'm a professional voyeur of human development, daily exposure to grandchildren makes me as lucky as the astronomer with top secret clearance at the Hubble Space Tele
scope. Grandchildren are the ultimate laboratories for witnessing little human beings navigate the art of becoming themselves. Parents don't get to watch that. They're too close, too invested, too exhausted.

Thursdays are my Sundays in the church of grandparenting. I get to be with Will all afternoon, beginning with the car ride home. If you've raised kids and you also drive, you know that your car is the best place to find out what is going on in a child's mind. There's something about the intimate yet private quarters of an automobile—you in the front seat driving, the kid behind you, staring at the back of your head—that makes children open up and say something other than “nothing” when asked that most offensive question, “What happened in school today?”

Today, as I drive Will home, I am listening to a radio interview about the ego, between Oprah Winfrey and the spiritual author Eckhart Tolle. Tolle is a soft-spoken, elf-like man from Germany whose books have sold millions of copies around the world. I have the volume turned down low, just in case Will decides to actually talk to me. Like most little kids, Will has a remarkable ability to practice selective hearing. Whether it's a radio talk show in a car or a conversation around the dinner table, one never knows if he's paying rapt attention or completely ignoring the grown-up world. One would assume that a preschooler would tune out Eckhart Tolle, what with his hypnotic voice, German accent, and esoteric subject matter.

So there we are, me driving, pondering Tolle's words about the ego, with Will in the back, slouched in his car seat. I look in the rearview mirror. Will is gazing out the window, his eyes on the treetops. I turn my attention back to Oprah, who is asking Tolle about the patterns of the unhealthy ego—patterns that keep us
isolated from each other, or in conflict, or unable to be in loving, constructive relationships:

TOLLE: Every ego wants to be special. If it can't be special by being superior to others, it's also quite happy with being especially miserable. Someone will say, “I have a headache,” and another says, “I've had a headache for weeks.” People actually compete to see who is more miserable! The ego doing that is just as big as the one that thinks it's superior to someone else. If you see in yourself that unconscious need to be special, then you are already free, because when you recognize all the patterns of the ego—

OPRAH: What are the other patterns?

TOLLE: The ego wants to be right all the time. And it loves conflict with others. It needs enemies because it defines itself through emphasizing others as different. Nations do it, religions do it, people do it.

Suddenly I hear Will talking to me from the backseat.

“Granda?” That's Will's name for me.

I turn off the radio. “Yes?”

“But Granda,” he says with grave concern, “I
want
to be special.”

I try not to laugh. I know this is the age a child builds his healthy ego—his sense of being an autonomous and valid person. I know that Will is only four. But it sounds so funny coming from a child, this obvious ploy of the emerging ego. I try to explain what Eckhart Tolle means anyway.

“Well, Will, you are special. But so are all the other kids. You see—”

“No, Granda,” Will says, with great authority. “Only one person can be special. That's what ‘special' means.”

I laugh out loud. “You're right. It does mean that. But everyone wants to be special. So either everyone is special, or no one is.”

In true four-year-old fashion, Will pretends he hasn't heard me. That's OK. Like all human beings, if we are lucky, we spend our formative years building up a healthy ego that can go forth into the world, establish boundaries, and express the soul's purpose. And if we are even luckier, we spend the rest of our life learning how to tame that ego when it gets puffed up or deflated. If we want to know love and experience community, if we want to be part of creating a more peaceful world, we will work to understand this: Either everyone is special, or no one is. Putting yourself or another human being on a pedestal—making yourself or someone else right all the time—is a sure recipe for disappointment or conflict or loneliness.

As I unstrap Will from his car seat and help him out of the car, Will says to me, “And also, Granda, I want to be right ALL the time.”

I think of asking him this question: “So, Will, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” But I decide not to. He'll have to learn this himself. He'll have to go on the same damn journey we all do—first the strengthening and then the softening of the ego. For now, at four, he's taking his first steps: being special and being right. An appropriate phase for a kid. But if you are older than four and are struggling with the people in your life, you may want to consider moving beyond those steps. Spiritual maturity is the territory beyond being special and being right. It's also the territory beyond thinking other people are inherently better than you. Both are afflictions—symptoms on either side of the authenticity deficit disorder spectrum.

I actually remember when I first met my own ego. It is a vivid, visceral memory. I must have been six or seven. I was with my family—my mother and father and my three sisters. We had left our car in a parking lot by the beach, and were heading out to spend a day at the ocean. I ran ahead of the family down a path lined with dune grass and sea roses, feeling a rush of independence, as if the need to be me, and not part of a group, had dropped suddenly from the sky and lodged in my psyche. When I was far enough away from the others, I stopped and dug my toes into the soft sand. I felt the sun on my body and heard the muffled sound of the waves crashing on the shore. I was alone in the dunes. I was me—just me. It was a big, new feeling, one that needed to be marked. I picked a sea rose and put it behind my ear. Then I turned toward my advancing family. I wanted to say, “See me? See how unique I am? How special?” But I didn't say it, because along with the rush of exhilaration at my sovereignty came an equally strong feeling of shame and self-consciousness, as if a reproaching inner judge had also dropped from the sky.

And so, there it was—my new friend, my ego—in all of its authentic finery and all of its delusions of grandeur and all of its lonely confusion. Thus began a lifelong spiritual journey—the journey toward knowing and loving my uniqueness, even as I understand my unity with all, my nothing-specialness because we all are special. Both are true, and until we make peace with our uniqueness AND our oneness, life here on earth is hard. Here's the truth: It's not either/or. It's both . . . and more. Ego is not the enemy. But it's not the whole story either.

We come into the world a potent little acorn, a distillation of the oak we were put here to become. The ego fears it is less than others, or it strives to be better than everyone else. But the acorn only yearns
to be the oak. That's the better urge; that's the original urge—to be the oak. To be the oak we do not have to keep others from growing into their full selves. We can stand side by side and still reach for the sun. We all belong here. There is room for all of us.

Humanity sure doesn't act as if there is room for all of us. How did we get to this place of trying so hard to elbow each other out of town that the end result may be a planet that can't sustain any of us? And how can we work on making things better? My answer always comes back to the most basic human pairing. You don't have to join a United Nations peacekeeping unit to make a difference in the world. You can start small—with your husband, your kid, your friend, your sister.

Sigmund Freud famously said in 1929, “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?'” Seventy-five years later, another smart dude, the Nobel Prize winner Stephen Hawking, was asked by a science journal what he thinks about most often. “Women,” he answered. “Women are a complete mystery.” This from a man who has unraveled some of the most complex mysteries in cosmology and quantum physics.

I have an easy three-step suggestion for Freud and Hawking: (1) Ask a woman what she wants. (2) Respect her answer even if it differs from your worldview. (3) Tell her what you want. Then, together, the two of you might be able to meet halfway and get on with whatever it is you are finding so mysteriously out of your reach. This same line of thinking applies to all sorts of distinctions between humans. Instead of bemoaning that you don't understand how a Republican could think the way he thinks, go have lunch with one and find out. Ditto with your gay cousin. Or born-again
friend. Instead of building a case in your head against someone who looks different, talks different, or whose way of life differs from yours, get to know people, find the acorn in the heart of the other, and share stories about becoming the oak.

There will always be distinctions between people; at least I hope there will be. Diversity is a hallmark of our life on earth. Biodiversity (which includes human diversity) is necessary for healthy ecosystems. It's not the diversity that's the problem; it's our own ego's fear of not being the most special one—the special one in our family, at school, at work. A member of the most special tribe, race, religion, nation, species. The Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki said, “The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.” Outgrowing the ego-shell is the ultimate freedom.

There is a land beyond the ego's striving to be “better than,” or its fears of being “less than.” That land is where we know ourselves to be both sovereign and connected—“part of” as opposed to “better or less than.” When you come home to the truth of who you are in the marrow of your soul, you begin to break the ego-shell.

SEPTEMBER. HERE WE ARE AGAIN,
in the hospital, ready for transplant. It's taken Maggie longer to arrive here than we thought it would. Two weeks after my cells were harvested in May, and just a day before she was scheduled for transplant, the cancer broke through the chemotherapy and began spreading again. Maggie's summer was a haze of full-body radiation and more and stronger chemo—strong enough to assault and destroy all of her bone marrow. Every few weeks she landed back in the hospital with infections and close encounters with the terrifying nearness of death. But eventually, the cancer was beaten back, and Maggie was free of infection and ready for transplant.

After all the complex treatments she has received, the setup for the transplant seems low-tech, even anticlimactic. Just Maggie, in a bed, hooked up to some fluids. The administering doctor explains the procedure. “In a few minutes,” the doctor tells Maggie, “your sister's frozen stem cells will be wheeled into the room. We'll thaw them here, in a warm water bath. Once thawed, I'll extract five million of the cells with this.” She holds up a large hypodermic needle. “And then I will push them into your vein,” she says, examining the central catheter in Maggie's chest.

We wait for more information, but the doctor has finished her explanation.

“That's it?” I ask.

“That's the transplant,” she says. “The whole process will take about fifteen minutes.”

“Then what happens?” Maggie asks.

“Well, it's really quite miraculous,” says the doctor. “Once your sister's stem cells enter your bloodstream, they know where to go. They have a chemical homing signal that directs them to the bones. And then, over time, they engraft in your marrow and start to replenish your blood. You can think of them like salmon that instinctually swim upstream to spawn. Salmon swim for the headwaters. Stem cells swim for the bones. It's as if they remember where they came from and are looking to return home,” she says, sounding like a narrator in a National Geographic film.

The doctor leaves to oversee the transport. The band of sisters (including Oliver, whom we have inducted into the sisterhood) circles around Maggie in the bed. A nurse who has cared for Maggie during many harrowing stays in the hospital is also with us.

“So what really happens?” Maggie asks the nurse. “It's not really as simple as that, is it?”

“Well, that is actually what happens,” the nurse says. “We'll transfuse you with millions of new stem cells. You may feel a little woozy, maybe a little nauseous. But that will last just for a few minutes. That's it. It takes about twelve to fourteen days for the cells to engraft and start producing new blood cells. It's afterwards—over the next months—that you'll have some hurdles to get over.”

“I don't want to hear about them right now,” Maggie says. “Right now I want to dance. Who has music?”

“You want to dance?” the nurse asks, regarding the tiny, emaciated bald woman in the bed.

“It's something we do,” I explain. “When the going gets tough, we like to dance.”

I take out my iPhone. The only danceable music I have is Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean.” I don't recall why I have it on my phone, but it will do. And so for the next ten minutes as we wait for the stem cell delivery, we dance around the room to “Billie Jean.” Several nurses watch from the doorway. This is probably the first time a patient and her family, all wearing masks and protective clothing, have danced to Michael Jackson while waiting for a bone marrow transplant. Maggie dances like a funky little dervish, somehow managing to look sexy at ninety pounds.

There's a passage in Toni Morrison's book
Beloved
where Baby Suggs preaches to freed slaves going out into a dangerous world. We have to love ourselves first, she tells her people. You can't count on anyone else if you don't love yourself first. “In this here place, we flesh,” she preaches. “Flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.” She lists all the bodily things they must love: their guts and blood and bones. “The dark, dark liver—love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.”

I watch Maggie dancing, dragging the IV pole around the hospital room. What courage she has shown as she's learned to love herself—body and heart—even in the midst of cancer's assault. She's loved her flesh. Even as it has drooped and burned and ached and aged, she has loved her flesh hard. Now my flesh will become part of her flesh. Now our physical hearts will beat the same blood through our bodies. Our spiritual hearts—our souls, our true selves,
the prize
—have already merged. This has been the real miracle: As Maggie has learned to believe in herself, as she has loved
her heart
hard
, she has received the prize of love from the whole world. As her frightened ego has released its grip, she has joined the flawed human race; she has danced more freely with the people in her life. She's given herself a soul marrow transplant. And now it's time for the bone marrow transplant.

The doctor wheels a cart into the room. I turn off “Billie Jean.” And sure enough, there are my salmon-colored stem cells, in that same little baggie (well marked). A technician thaws and prepares the liquid gold for the transplant, and then hands the bag to the doctor, who draws up the cells into the big syringe. We take our positions around the bed. I close my eyes and remember something a friend of mine said, right before I was to undergo my bone marrow harvest. She said, “Give from your strength, and give to your sister's strength. Don't be the big sister helping the little sister. Don't be the strong one helping the weak one. Don't be the fortunate one helping the victim. Give from your strength to her strength.
Strength to strength.
”

Now the doctor pushes the cells from the syringe into the central line. I hold Maggie's hand, silently repeating “
Strength to strength
” as millions of my cells rush into her. For a minute Maggie is nauseated and dizzy, but the storm passes, and there she is—lying in bed, part me but still Maggie.

field notes
•
september 10

i was as ready for transplant as any patient; i had waited so long; 6 months from relapse to transplant. just DO IT. just put me in there and torture me however you please, but get ON with it. i was admitted 1 week before the transplant to begin the last round of chemo. on the first day, i began the descent into hell. on the last day, sister katy and liz
videoed me dancing wildly just moments before the transplant began. the team of doctors arrived, a wonderful nurse took her position at the central line installed in my chest. my wrist bands and verbal self identification matched the WELL LABELED bag of stem cells. and then it was time. because liz had produced a tremendous amount of stem cells, they only used half of the bag, and froze the remainder. the nurse drew up the cells into a 20 cc syringe and over the course of 5 minutes gently pushed the cells into the central line. i felt hot, nauseated, ready to vomit, dizzy, and then, i was fine.

we celebrated and i settled in for the fallout.