I have been on vacation and generally running amok like a chicken with my head cut off. Shocker. Who the hell isn’t, right? During the amokness, I have been racking (or is it wracking?) my brain trying to come up with a funny blog topic. I’ve had a few false starts, but nothing really culminated into something I could proudly re-read to myself the next day (don’t pretend you don’t do this). Maybe the funny post hasn’t come to me because I needed to write something (dare I say it)…. un-funny.
I need to purge.
Today, I have been thinking (obsessing) about a friend living a parent’s worst nightmare as their sick child slips between their grasping fingers. I cannot comfort her and her family. I cannot lift the darkness for them. I can’t even find words to write to them that aren’t trite and empty. They have been fighting this fight for about a year, I believe, and it has recently ramped up. I have never said anything to her about the situation. I have never written to her. When I see her, I talk about anything else (except the weather… I refuse to resort to the weather). I am ashamed. I so badly want to comfort her; let her know I care. But, at the same time, I don’t want to smack her upside the back of the head and potentially ruin her day by trudging up all sorts of emotion. I’m not going to pretend to understand because there is absolutely no way to really understand her family’s war. So what can I do? How can I help her? I don’t think there is an answer.
But wait! I have more shame. When I think of her and her family, I am also crippled with the fear of experiencing something similar. What if it were my daughter? What if it were me? How would/could I recover from that? The fear is overwhelming. And WHY am I so self-involved that I am thinking about myself? THAT, my friends, is the deepest source of my shame. I am riddled with guilt for being afraid for my own family when I should be concentrating on how to help her family. I know I am human. I know this is how we empathize, sympathize, and all the other -thizes. We (try) to imagine ourselves in their shoes. We try to feel with them. Try. But we don’t even scratch the surface.
I still feel the shame… and the helplessness…. and cry for the power to change the course of events.
How do we face each day? How do we dodge bullets? How do we even know the bullets are whizzing at us? How do we bandage the wounds from the bullets we couldn’t dodge? How do we do this?
We just do. I believe autopilot is involved, most of the time.
I suffer from a rare class of debilitating migraines. Migraines so bad that one of them turned into a stroke last October. I can’t speak, half my body goes numb, I suffer partial loss of vision. And then there’s the headache. ‘Headache’ is the wrong word. Brain explosion. I would gladly relive last October for every October of my life if I could use it as a trade for this family’s path and pain. But God and the universe don’t do trades or barters.
I am ashamed of my helplessness.
As I was tucking my 6-year old daughter into bed tonite – out of nowhere – she said, “I wish ‘sick‘ wasn’t made.” I don’t know what prompted her to say that. I haven’t discussed this turn of events with her or in her presence at all.
Sometimes her timing and eloquence is staggering.
-B(Sting)
Hey B,
First, great web site. Can’t wait to read more of all the authors.
Second, I am glad you put these thoughts on paper because I think they are important human concerns that are seldom spoken of.
I have been on both sides of this story. Two years ago, a friend’s wife died and left the dad with two children roughly the ages of my own. It really tore me apart for the family, but worse, I could not speak to him about it. I did not help him or even offer. I didn’t write him. And I felt ashamed because in his worst hour, I could do nothing.
Then last summer, my worst fears were realized. I lost my own wife in a similar fashion. Do you know that his situation was one of the first things I thought about when it happened to me? Now I was the one who people didn’t know how to deal with.
My lessons: when feeling for a friend’s painful situation, it is only human to feel frightened because you are mentally facing death of your family (though not real). It’s something we as human spend a lot of time trying to avoid. Don’t beat yourself up for feeling that way but don’t fixate on it either. Because if, God forbid, something similar ever happen to your own family you will then recall those feelings while realizing that there is nothing that your friends can really do for you.
I’m not sure your religious flavor, but the thing that helped me most was prayer, faith and all the amazing prayers of my friends and family. That’s the best they could do for me.
Amazing insight, Greg. I have a confession: I didn’t know how to talk to you, either. I suspect sometimes people in similar situations just want to talk about other things. Or maybe they dread the look on our faces when we approach them. Or maybe they’re tired and don’t want to slice open the raw emotions and cry in public (again). I want to be both the person who is there and will be a sounding board and just shut up and listen as well as the person who can just change the subject and provide a quick escape route for a few moments. This is a tough message to convey without negating the intentions. I don’t want to make someone cry but I don’t want to leave them alone. So I’m paralyzed, stuck in the middle.
Mom w/a pen was right on with the letter/card idea. It helps both sides IMO.
Trouble is that often the person who wants to help is a) often gripped with fear and dread of the situation and of not knowing what to say and b) can’t really understand if they have not been there. (That’s not a slam just the naked truth.) I would not want you to try to feel what I did because it’s horrific. I’ve found that the dozens of people who offered help were just not the “right” person at that time. Not everyone can be the sounding board for the person in crisis, but if enough people offer then someone will be. Who that person is depends on relationships. Some of my best friends could not talk to me about it at all and others did very well.
Eventually I also cherished the “change the subject” people because they did not know what to say, so instead we carried on life, which is what the suffering person has to learn to do slowly. You are right, it is not always the time to bear raw emotions.
At this point I am happy to talk about my wife because she was such an awesome person and I’d like people to remember her that way. I try to bring her up sometimes because I want people to be at ease speaking of her and not feel speaking of her is a taboo subject.
I know the feeling Beth . . .
Are you sure you aren’t Catholic? On a more serious note, write a letter. Sometimes words are so hard to come by, but get a card and write what you feel there. Your friend will get it, in private, and if she wants to talk, she will contact you to talk about it. I promise, this is the answer to your shame.
Knowing that you would relive your brain “explosion” every year for the rest of your life, to help console another family… that just shows you that, although, you may be riddled with shame on the inside, you are also just a genuinely good person. As you have passed that on to your daughter as well…
Saying a prayer for your friend…
(Oh, and there is no such thing as a bad blog here. UN-funny or not, it’s all good. It’s simply about life…)
I suffer from the trifecta of religion-induced guilt. I come from Catholic, Lutheran, AND Jewish heritage. I have guilt issues, in general.