Before, and After
You don’t know what it’s like until you know.
A long time ago a colleague at one of all those many places I’ve worked at expressed a little impatience with the depth of another colleague’s ongoing grief after the death of that woman’s mother. The bereaved woman was old enough herself, our colleague said, for this to have been a reasonably expected event and how long was she gonna go on about it?
I said everyone dies, everyone knows we’re all gonna die, a gazillion billion trillion people have died before us, and how many of us are all that comfortable with the idea of the reaper coming to our door on his own schedule? She said yeah you’re right.
My people are excellent at grieving. The rituals—and almost identically so in Islam—surround you with the comfort and support of the community. You are held up and not left alone.
In the development I grew up in—and in any community with sufficient numbers of Jews anywhere—you knew that while the family was at the service and burial, a few neighbors stayed back with your keys so they could put out the spread, the deli meats and the bread and sides and the drinks, put up the coffeepot, and for the whole first week of mourning, the official condolence-paying time, people would keep bringing cake and pastries to be served to the consolers and meals for you; you had no need of doing anything, and it was their place to listen to anything you needed to say, and it’s always surprising how much laughter might accompany the tears, because there are so many stories to tell and there’s no formality other than the order of the rituals themselves. The number of shiva sittings I attended in my life, there ain’t anything unfamiliar about the pain. We all know what it is, when somebody loses someone.
And yet when my own mother died I was like the first child since the birthing of the universe to be hit in the face with that baffling anguish. God was it humbling to realize I hadn’t had a clue, all those times I offered my sympathy to others. I still don’t really know if I can be said to actually have loved my mother but that first year without her was the absolute worst year of my life. It’s true that the circumstances of her death—the medical mistakes and the five months or so it took the doctors to kill her, inflicting ever worse and unspeakable suffering—were pretty bad, and our helplessness, despite even having a professional medical advocate on our side to try to get our healthcare system to behave a little better, was a considerable part of the agony, but still. You are never ready to become a motherless child. For ever after, it will always seem a derangement of how things ought to be, that you could ever find yourself without your mother somewhere in this world, to love or hate at your leisure. You will never be the same person you were before.
To become a parent profoundly alters you too, in ways you can never prepare for. Your children bring out from you your true nature. You achieve your ultimate reality. It’s not necessarily true, that it enables you to finally understand your own parents. Sometimes it makes you find their choices, their actions incomprehensible.
It was irritating, in the years before I had my own child, trying to be understanding of how friendships must inevitably change when someone you know becomes a parent. My friend from fifth grade, we laughed about that recently, she said tell me about it because she, who has no kids, was the one who had to deal with the new irritating me. She’s accepted it now, three decades later, but it sure had come as a shock.
Sympathy, compassion, joy on someone’s behalf—they’re only words until you know.
A few years ago I had an accident that left me temporarily unable to use my right foot. I had a dinosaur boot and a walker and a transport wheelchair used once to get me to a follow-up medical appointment, and though I really didn’t enjoy the pain, I came out of it grateful to finally understand what it can mean to be disabled. How awful it is, to look down a long distance and know you have to traverse it somehow; that the brisk easy walk to your own door is now an exhausting journey. That standing at the sink to brush your teeth requires complicated adjustments of balance. That you can’t carry a mug of tea to the sofa; you’re stuck resentfully at the dining table until you finish drinking it. I’m not the same now though I made a full recovery.
And the beginning of this week—I saw on TV the flooding in California and felt bad for all those people. But on Tuesday, turning on the hot water at my kitchen sink, the knob flew off and suddenly it was geysers in Yellowstone, the knob had exploded and couldn’t be put back on, the cutoff valve below the sink was frozen in place and all I could do was open my front door and scream help! help! and a few neighbors came running, they called the emergency number, the guy next door got his wrench and shut off the water but by that time it was all over the kitchen floor and starting to soak the dining room carpet, and a lovely young couple brought bath towels and extra paper towels and a flashlight, because in the middle of all this the power went out, I was terrified I’d blown up the apartment but fortunately it was just half the town going dark, and I’m standing there soaking wet and the heat was off now too but within a few minutes the super and another maintenance guy showed up and replaced the fixture, though they couldn’t bring a shop vac because the elevators weren’t running.
But in an hour or so the power was back on and the heat was too. And the young couple with those hearty towels of theirs, believe me that was some water-grabbing brand, and the guy with the wrench, they’d saved me; the cleanup I’ve been doing ever since ain’t nothing like a torrent of water and ice and mud and rocks coursing through your living room and where the kids have to sleep.
But I know now, a little bit, what that terror and despair feel like.
It's this kind of personal disaster that has made me see just how good people can be!
How very true. Try as we may with all our sincerity, none of us can really understand until we experience it ourselves. No matter how heart-felt and
deep our empathy. What a wonderful post SCA, thank you.