Late Lessons

I think you have to be careful about how bad you feel for someone else because it puts a burden on them that you probably don’t intend.

I realized this long after I’d listened to a friend tell me about her daughter’s suicide. At the time, I felt almost paralyzed by grief, as if there were invisible droplets of nerve gas hanging like tiny Christmas lights all around me.  I listened and tried to manage my body language.

She told me things, the truth as it were, she told me the truth. I tried to reconcile this truth with what I was doing which was eating, I was sitting eating a wrap and coleslaw as if everyday I listened to tragic death stories over lunch. The obscenity of it struck me. What had happened was hideous in all ways. Unjust, terrible, and irrevocable. I nodded but I wanted to rend my clothes, rip my shirt to shreds, but, no, I sat quietly not wanting to reveal my secret bleeding.

The other night, riding around town with two homeless street outreach workers, I asked them how they managed to talk to people in such dire need, say, a man burrowed deep into a tent in the woods off a busy street who would only reach out his hand for a sandwich, and they answered that at the beginning they went home in tears every night.

And then, one of them said, they realized that their sadness was a burden on the people they were trying to help. This wisdom struck me. I was reminded of Thomas Cromwell’s advice to “arrange your face,” and it occurred to me that it was the easy thing to indulge this secondary sorrow, to well up and cry about other people’s pain, but it was a hard thing to manage yourself, to restrain your reactions. To know your place.

After I talked to my friend about her daughter’s suicide, it seemed that she pulled back from me. We weren’t terribly close friends but connected in odd ways too hard to explain here. But I could tell in our communication that a veil went down. It was a while before I realized that she was probably protecting me.  I wanted to say to her, “I can take it!” but the truth was I probably couldn’t. And she knew that.

I loved her for protecting me but I wish it hadn’t been necessary.

I learned this from my friend and from the outreach workers: Draw a circle around your grief and sadness and pull the knot tight. Don’t let your sloppy tears fall on people who are already crying. Don’t be someone who needs to be comforted by a person sick with grief. Arrange your face to be the comforter. That is the right thing to do.

I’m lucky to have learned this but I regret that it took so long.

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Photo by Ben White on Unsplash