Heartbreak comes with life, I believe. I don’t know a single soul who has escaped it.

Love and trust fail us, what once brought meaning and safety runs dry, our friends hurt us,  we fail at work, suffer a devastating illness,  go broke,  lose a parent or sibling or friend, say goodbye to a dog, live in a time of great conflict and anger.

My heart breaks quite often when those things happen – and they happen to everyone at some point in their lives –  and we suffer.

I suffer.

My heart was broken a few months ago when my book publishing career ended in a sad and hurtful way. What I imagine is my last book editor in my long and wonderful life as an author ended in the most disheartening of ways.

For the first time, I have an editor who will not speak to me, and a publisher that does not want my work. My editor is indifferent to me and contemptuous of my writing.  Since this has never happened before, it hurts in a particular way.

Several years of my work life was lost, and a happy and successful career ended harshly.

I will work it out, without rage, lament, or drama. I have already gotten to a better place; I get to write every day; I love every single thing about my blog. Instinctively and without awareness, I saw it coming a long time before it happened.

Today, Maria complimented me on my decision to be neither bitter or angry and to move forward into my good and abundant life. I have lost the taste for drama. “I admire you for that,” she said.

I was proud to hear it.

I am richer for this, and better. I have never been happier with my writing or my life.  My heart is working for me in new and powerful ways.

It’s working for other people as well. I never knew what to do with my pain; I think I always turned it back on others; it left me no space to love or live or change.

“What can we do with our pain?” asks the author Parker Palmer. “How might we hold it and work with it? How do we turn the power of suffering toward a new life? The way we answer those questions is critical because  violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with suffering?”

My life was violent, psychologically, spiritually, and socially. Just ask the people around me.

I know a lot of people who’ve suffered the loss of one or more of the most important people in their lives.  At first, they fall into grief, sometimes disappearing there. They lose the belief that life will ever again be meaningful or peaceful.

But again and again, what I’ve seen – with people, and yes, with the loss of dogs and animals – that these wounded people slowly, sometimes painfully, emerge in their own time, often to find that their broken hearts have grown broader and deeper.

They feel compassion and empathy in new ways. Their idea of being human often changes.

They return to life in a new and different way. Some people’s hearts open, some close, some get supple, some get cold. Pain and loss are inevitable. Suffering is a choice.

Every time my heart is broken – in love, life or work – I have become a better and deeper human, more able to understand and feel the sorrows of other people, better equipped to write about people differently.

This does not happen despite my suffering, but because of it. You see, my heart doesn’t break. It opens.

Heartbreak exercises my heart, just like exercising stretches muscles. It makes my heart more intuitive, more responsive. When I look at some people in political life, I don’t see evil but a hole where empathy and compassion might live if the heart opened.

The psychologists say that suffering breaks our hearts, but the heart can break in different ways. There’s the brittle heart that closes up, breaks into pieces, and can break us with it.

Then there’s what Pamer calls “the supple heart,” the one that opens, not breaks, the one that grows and deepens and changes.

The more I’ve suffered, the more I’ve come to understand suffering, the more my heart has softened and opened up to learning how to help other people.

It turns out I don’t have to be good to do good.

I had a complicated relationship with my friend Susan,  and she broke my heart more than once, and again every time I see her smiling in the photo above,  as her own heart was broken again and again.

Her personal response to her suffering was to pull away from people, to close up and withdraw even from the people closest to her.

Her heart seemed to break into shards. I think she died of heartbreak in many ways.

My heart, literally and spiritual and medically broken, took me in a different direction. For most of my life, I would have fled from Susan and her awful plight. There was nothing heroic about my rushing to help her. It was not my business.  Except it was.

It was simple and immediate instinct, for me, for Maria, for her friend Donna. There was no choice but to help her.

My heart is strong and open and is getting plenty of exercise – the Mansion, The Army Of Good, Bishop Maginn High School. I know what it is to suffer; I know what it feels like.

And perhaps more importantly, I now know what it feels like to ease suffering, and that is perhaps the greatest gift of all.

My heart may stop one day – I’m counting on it – but I know it will not ever close again.

This has made me stronger, not weaker, more transparent, not confused. I know what I need to do.