Don't Worry, Be Grumpy

When Is It Okay to Lie?

An elderly Buddhist woman called me one evening in great distress. She told me that that afternoon she had lied to her husband for the first time since they had been married forty years ago. She said she felt terrible.

Her husband, Don, had had a heart attack and survived. However, he urgently needed bypass surgery and so was put in a hospital ward to wait until he was strong enough.

There were three other male patients in the same room, also waiting for a bypass. Don became quite friendly with Jack in the adjacent bed. So much so that, when Don’s wife visited one evening, he asked how Jack was doing after his bypass operation that had been done that morning.

“Oh, Jack’s fine,” said his wife. “He is recovering in the ICU.”

The truth was that Don’s wife had just met Jack’s grieving family in the hospital’s foyer. Jack had died. She could not bear to tell her husband that his new friend had died from the same operation that he was to have the following day. So she lied.

Don only just survived his own bypass operation. He was on the edge of life and death for three days, but he pulled through. I often think that if his wife had told him the truth, the extra worry would probably have been enough to push him over that edge into death. The lie had saved his life.

So I tell my followers that it is okay to lie sometimes. But only once every forty years!