A friend of mine said something to me yesterday. It was something that I had been thinking too. He was talking about all the people he knew who died this year and other people he knew who were dealing with illnesses. I had my own similar list. But I hadn’t just been thinking about this year.
When you get old enough it feels like you always know someone who is grieving the loss of a loved one or someone who is dealing with some illness or injury. How we handle that probably depends on what we’ve dealt with ourselves. Whether or not we can relate to other peoples’ losses and illnesses. Whether we pity them and feel sad for them or are we able to feel compassion and empathy instead.
Our first child’s birth is when things started changing for me. The birth was a little complicated and we knew that the umbilical cord was around his neck and when our son was finally born, I was standing right there and he had the cord wrapped around his neck three times and he wasn’t moving or crying or anything and I thought he was dead. That was my first impression of our first child. I didn’t know that newly born babies don’t usually move around or cry or anything. Maybe I should have known that but I didn’t. It seems like a really valuable but simple thing that someone would have told us along the way but nobody had and I was crushed. Until I wasn’t. He was fine. But the feeling I had in that moment left a stain on me.
Within 48 hours I was in the ICU of the same hospital with a potentially serious situation. Again everything turned out ok but those experiences left their marks on us and we probably really do have a little PTSD when it comes to health scares and that impacts how I feel when I find out that some friend of mine is dealing with an illness.
Since then we’ve buried several family members so we don’t have to guess how that feels either when we find out that someone we know has lost a loved one.
In just the past few months, a friend’s mother had a stroke, my mother died, a friend had a tumor removed from his brain, a six year old we know had surgery, a six grader we know was diagnosed with leukemia, and a friend’s father died. And that doesn’t include the other things we all find out about that have happened to people that we know but aren’t close with. We all already have our own sadnesses in our lives. Some of them present, some of them lingering from the past and there is always all this other sadness continuing to happen.
So what am I writing about? I guess I’m writing about how we all experience these sad moments and we know about our friends’ sad moments too. Our lives are affected by these deaths and illnesses and that affects how we react to our friends’ sad moments. We feel for our friends but we also relive our own similar experiences.
And there’s no getting around these moments and events. This is part of life. These nearly constant sources of sadness are fully intertwined with everything else that we’ll do and experience in our lives. Sometimes it wears me out. Sometimes it’s hard to see around the sadness to the other aspects of life. Sometimes it’s easy to wonder “Why?”. Sometimes it’s easy to just feel bad about it all. It can be hard to get out from under the sadness. We will always find out about sad news. We can’t hide from it and we know there will always be more.