Last Sunday was Mike's birthday; today was the eight-month anniversary of his death. Oh, well. Grief has been lying heavily on me. I feel like there's a marinade of grief sloshing around under my skin and pressure on my heart. This is all a vast improvement over how I dealt with my dad's death when I was fifteen. Survival was the issue then. I had no time for grief. Now, I am missing both Mike and my mom, who died on October 16, 2001, two weeks before her 98th birthday. I feel so alone. Of course, back when my dad died, I wasn't completely alone. I had my mother, my grandmother, and my sister all under the same roof. My mom had many failings, but lack of commitment wasn't one of them.
I got up before the alarm rang this morning. Elsa led me on one of the long walks around the block. On Sunday, I followed her. I ran into a neighbor I hadn't seen in a couple of years. Ron used to ride his bike up and down these hills for exercise. When I asked if he was still doing it, he said no. He and a group of his friends have gotten into strenuous backpack hikes. They're planning to hike the Grand Canyon. His daily exercise consists of local hikes with a backpack to stay in shape for those excursions.
When I got home, I saw Judy had called. Yesterday, she had traveled up to Havi for a youth ministry retreat. When she got back, she was too exhausted to do much else. I never heard from her. She always checks to see how I'm doing.
I had time before church, so I swept the kitchen and hallway. I did it yesterday, and there was dirt already. I'm learning what a lousy housekeeper I am. Oh, well. A nonissue for me.
Church was church. I was going to speak to Margo about plants I could buy to replace the bougainvillea I would have removed. They are such aggressive growers.
When I got home, Kathrin and I worked on getting the boxes I had packed the day before out to the car to take to B's to store until the tenting was over. She packed up some more stuff in other boxes and shopping bags. Then I lay down to read some of the NY Sunday Times and take a wonderful afternoon nap. When I woke up, I felt much better. Why grief comes and goes like the tide, I have no idea. I'm just grateful that I get a break now and then.
The young man staying here came home from his day at the farmer's market. He showered and got ready for a potluck dinner and a movie. When Yvette came home after 4 pm, I called B and asked if I could drive down and unload the car. He said he had fallen asleep and not created a space for me. He suggested that I move all those boxes back into the house. Then, on Tuesday, he would load everything into the back of his van, where it would stay until we moved it back into the house on Wednesday evening—sounded like a plan.
I got a text from Damon saying he would call in an hour when he was picking up his friend, Eddie, from the airport. He called while I was eating dinner. I can speak to him frankly about how I feel without creating guilt. He won't be here for Christmas as planned initially, which has triggered grief, but it's the reality of my life. Circumstances have dictated that I have to deal with it right now. At least I can still get sympathy for my sorrow. Maybe three years from now, someone will say, "Still?"
I didn't have a chance to read, which has become an enjoyable pastime over dinner. After I got off the phone with Damon, I did some blog work. I have been enjoying not watching TV at night. Instead, I sit in the living room, writing and listening to classical music. Problem: I have to do more work in the library.
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Musings:
Another topic that came up over dinner at Judy's was the difference between empathy and sympathy.
Empathy, as commonly used, includes caring about another person's thoughts and feelings. Sympathy is feeling, literally, with (sym) someone. If someone is feeling pain, you feel their pain sympathetically.
I think both empathy and sympathy can be positive or negative:
Positive Negative
Empathy
Sympathy
Empathy is positive when we can reach outside ourselves and take on the thoughts and feelings of others, which are generally not part of our own set of thoughts and feelings. This would be particularly true when we are in conflict with that person. We seek to understand what their needs are to help defuse the situation.
Empathy is negative when we can reach outside of ourselves and understand the thoughts and feelings of another to manipulate them to benefit ourselves at some cost to them.
Sympathy is positive when we can feel with someone in a way that makes them feel less alone with their experience. 'I feel your pain/joy, etc.' This is because it is something we have already experienced.
Sympathy is negative when it is emotional masturbation, which does not serve the other person. Here's an example. A woman told me a story about her mother, who would be emotionally overcome when anything went wrong. This woman told me that when she was 6, a neighborhood boy put an ax into her foot. She came into the house with her bleeding foot. Her mother was so overcome with sympathetic feelings (No, it was not a fear of blood. This behavior was a pattern.) she was incapacitated. The six-year-old child had to climb up on a chair to call 911.
I have some sympathy problems myself. Seeing others in pain when I feel I can't do anything to help, usually in movies or with people at a distance or in significant numbers, think refugees, causes me to suffer considerable discomfort; I have to escape the situation, i.e., run out of the movie theater, leave the country. Who does that help? Fortunately, I do well if someone needs my help within arm's reach. I'm surprisingly calm and helpful, a surprise given that I am useless in other circumstances where I can do nothing anyway.
Based on my understanding of the terms, people often confuse sympathy and empathy. I know people who sympathize with individuals from a particular category, especially those they label as victims. However, they don't show much empathy for people who don't fall into that category, particularly those labeled 'villains.' For them, every person falls into one of those two categories and only in one of them. Humans often run into trouble when their sympathies are limited to those they assume to be like them, and they extend no empathy to those who do not belong.
Sympathy can follow on the heels of empathy, allowing us to recognize some commonality between ourselves and those who are unlike us. But some confuse sympathy and empathy. It results from an inaccurate view of ourselves; we see others as capable of great evil. We see ourselves and those like us as capable of occasional harmful acts but not as people capable of terrible deeds.
The motto in my family was, "Don't confuse virtue with a lack of opportunity," which means always knowing that you are capable of more than you think; we're all capable of the worst that humanity has ever demonstrated. Capable doesn't mean we will act it out; we can only learn who we are when the opportunity to test our mettle arises.
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