Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse, and a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed. The shadow is very much a part of human nature, and it is only at night that no shadows exist. – Carl Jung

On the last night of the month an OD I worked with recently told me he has held at bay any imaginative experience of the deaths of the four children in Iowa City on Easter night. He was surprised I hadn’t and he urged me to realize “no good” could come from thinking about them. He regarded my willingness to reflect on their suffering as prurient in some way, and he scoffed at me when I explained myself. In the local paper I read a letter from a psychologist proffering a call to “love and healing.” I found myself responding to the perspectives of both men with quite a bit of resistance. I sent the young doctor a brief going-away note on text page and I said: “If you can think deeply and painfully about things, you might never find yourself in lower City Park, trying to drown.”

How do we deal with extremis? I am frequently the witness to it, though only rarely in my life the one who has dwelt within it. Years ago, this community failed another family who had to face the slaying of their son – this time at the hands of the police, utterly without cause. The family let down the community by not “moving on.” They were unable to make lemonade from the bitter fruit given to them; they would never grace the cover of a People magazine, and they were never going to make us feel good about ourselves. Surrounded for a brief season by the well-wishers of this city, they eventually found themselves outside comfort altogether. People had grown weary of their continued anger and sorrow.

The truth was that we didn’t know what to do with the eternal nature of their grief. It didn’t fit the platitudes we like to pull over our heads like a blanket against the dark, and finally quite a lot of people simply became alienated enough that they were willing to judge the family harshly. I am still kind of amazed by what I witnessed in those days. The Sueppels were smart as well as compassionate to one another in the wake of the murders. There is jackal nature in most of us, and we’re drawn to signs of weakness. Their choice to frame the killings in such a natural manner, with services at church incorporating the one who created the trauma, will serve all the survivors in the family well. This will most importantly protect their living children, and I admire them for it. But it is not the healthiest response, and most assuredly it is not the most embodied response to what happened, for the powerful piece of darkness that took those children and their mother off the planet is lodged right there in our need not to look directly at the shadow in ourselves and one another.

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition of any kind of self-knowledge. – Carl Jung

Now it’s Mother’s Day. I am proofing Italian milk bread while I do the laundry and try to read some of Perfumes: the Guide. In it, Turin and Sanchez describe the scent I have worn for forty years: “Comfortable and well-lit, like a warm spot on the floor where the cat sleeps.” I’ve always been careful about the sillage thrown by my perfume, wearing it secretly. Still, many people have asked after it over the decades. I wear it only for myself, just as scent should be worn, as a companion providing solace and whimsy, a place for the bird of the soul to rest, however briefly.

Yesterday Kim and I were browsing through a local department store when a clerk sidled up to us with evocations of Mother’s Day. “Our mothers are dead,” I snapped, surprised by the heat and tone of my voice. I heard my father’s voice in my head then, saying what I had heard from him countless times: “It’s not what you say, Jessica, it’s the way you say it.” The clerk responded defensively: “My mother’s dead, too.” When Kim floated around the corner to try on a blouse, the clerk whirled to me again and shot me a dark look. I stifled a giggle – the stink eye acts on my psyche like a pratfall, and I adore slapstick.

Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries. Only monkeys parade with it. – Carl Jung

“The healing serpent of the mysteries.” Jung wrote nearly a hundred years ago of “the wildest and most moving dramas” played out in “the hearts of ordinary men and women who pass by without exciting attention.” My life’s work participates in vivid attention given to these dramas every night when I step into the hospital and struggle to allay the suffering I find there. “Jessica,” a patient told me last Thursday night, “I’m so lonely! So lonely I’ll die from that all by itself.” Believing now that her body has become the host for a trio of diseases including the ALS that killed my father, she still soldiers on, marked by homelessness, her face and hands burned by the sun she wanders beneath in all seasons and conditions. “Farmer’s tan,” my father called it, a badge of honor in his world, a world where it meant hard physical labor, pitiless, thankless work in the service of hearth, home and community.

Is it any wonder that I experience all physical work as a baptism and a catharsis? Working out of doors I feel nothing less than justified in my existence, even refleshed. Recently I saw this caption painted on a pick-up truck: “Those who beat their guns into plows will plow for those who don’t.” For a full minute I was charmed, thinking it would be lovely to clear and plant for everyone, even at the end of all things. Then I realized what was meant – a slam and a warning to candy-assed pacifists just like me. I mused sadly on the simple stark violence of intention that litters our days and dogs many of us into unsafe, wretched nights.

Once more my imagination flitted to Easter night, to the four children and their mother. Eyes on the prize, I thought. Keep your eyes open in the dark, or that sunlight blazing around us will hide the truth of our lives.