I got the sweetest birthday card anybody could get, it was from the Mansion residents and aides, birthday wishes on one side, just about everyone there signing on the other.

What a precious birthday gift. It went right to the heart, and thanks to all of you for making this possible.

My connection to the Mansion is wordless, we understand one another, words are not necessary. Neither are thanks. But it can be sweet.

The Mansion has given me much more than I have given them.

Once I learned I didn’t have to escape or hide from my pain, I could join with other wounded healers in a universal search for life and mercy.

Those pains, which can eat us up inside, can be transformed from symbols of despair into signs of hope.

Caregiving heals me and lifts me. Conflict, anger, and fear opened me up for reawakening, to the deeper meaning of things, to the spiritual treasure.

I fell in love with the Mansion right away, because the kind and loving people there taught me to accept that I am not able to control the inevitable, I will grow old and sick and surely die just like them.

We are equal, two parts of the same thing. This liberated me to be a true caregiver, like so many wounded healers.

I know I can’t cure everyone, and I never try, but I can care and be cared for in the deepest sense of the word.

Real care is not ambiguous.

Genuine care is the opposite of apathy and empathy. The real meaning of is to lament, or cry out with – “to be with” the person who is lonely, needy, frightened.

To care means to hear the cry and identify with the pain, the confusion, the isolation, the sense of being forgotten, or left behind.

To care involves understanding, mourning, sympathizing, it means letting the needy and the vulnerable and the weak know they are not alone.