Integrity usually comes to people slowly and takes them unawares, as part of a natural process of maturing or through the need to be there for someone else who is counting on them. But it can appear full-blown in times of crisis or loss. In my work I have seen many people recover a greater integrity because they have lost something or someone very dear to them.

I remember walking down many a clinic corridor, an impatient, judgmental, and angry young person, and opening the door of an examining room. Waiting there would be an anxious mother and her sick child. Closing the door, I would become in that moment very much more the person I am now. Yet at thirty this was not my usual way of being. In the setting of my work, I was much more whole. As I knocked on that examining room door, I had access to a greater wisdom, compassion, and perspective than was mine only moments before. It was as if I could take a tuck in time. Such happenings are very common. They are often called forth by the needs of others.

With certain people we may get to try on a greater wholeness for a time, to actually experience being more. These experiences are a sort of grace. They help us to know not only the direction of our personal wholeness but how it feels and even tastes. Everyone's wholeness is unique and even such common role models as Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Schweitzer can distance us from ourselves. Our wholeness will look different than theirs. Our wholeness fits us better than theirs. Our wholeness is much more attainable for us than their ever could be.

We usually look outside of ourselves for heroes and teachers. It has not occurred to most people that they may already be the role model they seek. The wholeness they are looking for may be trapped within themselves by beliefs, attitudes and self-doubt. But our wholeness exists in us now. Trapped though it may be, it can be called upon for guidance, direction and most fundamentally, comfort. It can be remembered. Eventually we may come to live by it.

We have all read stories about people stepping past life-long limitations in response to extreme situations. Such an experience may happen to an entire nation at the same time. The stories that emerged out of England during World War II suggest that many English people had the experience of wholeness when under bombardment by the Germans. But most often the experience of wholeness happens in us in the midst of ordinary times. It is common to not even notice.

One of my patients, a young businessman with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma was concerned from the moment of his diagnosis about how his wife would be able to manage both his illness and the possibility of his death. He described her as painfully shy and retiring, fragile even. They had eloped because she could not face having a public ceremony. He could not imagine how she would be able to deal alone with their children and with the very successful business he had developed.

When I first met her she was very much as he said. Yet as he struggled with the difficult chemotherapy, as he lost ground, as disappointment after disappointment led to his premature death, she underwent a remarkable change. It was she who supported him in taking risks, she who called doctors and other experts all over the country, who took over more and more of his business, learning as she went, who supported and comforted their children. Her courage, both in her personal and her business life was as awesome as it was unexpected. By the time he died she was running the business and afterwards continued to make a success of it alone.

A few years after he died, she called for an appointment. She had wanted to discuss some decisions about her children's education and ask me if he had indicated any opinions that might serve as guidance for her now. The person who came to visit me not the woman I had met only three years before. I commented on the changes and on the remarkable strength she had shown in dealing with her husband's illness and death and in making her own life. Had she known that she would be able to do the things she had done in the past few years?