Geiger Counter
When I was six years old, I fell and hit my chin on the edge of a wooden toy chest. It took 19 stitches to put me back together. Last week, my daughter, who is six, fell out of a tree and smacked her chin on a wooden platform on the way down.
“I’m amazed it didn’t split open,” said the doctor later, while examining the deep purple and yellow flower that soon bloomed on the bottom half of her face, lovely colors on a midwestern prairie but troubling hues on your child’s face.
In the moments after it happened, Hadley looked like Jay Leno, her jaw and chin growing by several inches. It was grotesque. Luckily, she didn’t start telling inane jokes and chuckling vapidly at them.
As I examined her, I played the game we parents always try to play, acting like Sherlock Holmes while trying to sleuth out where exactly all the blood is coming from. I had to pretend it was fine, because while I cannot administer hard drugs or even sew someone back together (very well, at least), I can, at the very least, show sufficient emotional stalwartness, which allows the injured party’s panic to ebb a bit.
People often brag about how empathetic they are these days. The standard response, when someone boasts to you that they are an empath, is to reply: “Are you feeling anything right now?”
But really, feeling the pain of others obviously plays an important role in living a good and virtuous life. But it has its limits, in terms of efficacy. One night, last year, a group of friends were sitting around talking about empathy, which is actually feeling the pain of others, rather than just feeling sympathy for those who are in pain, and most of us were talking about how more empathy must be the key to fixing the world.
One friend, who used to work as an EMT, chuckled softly and said: “When someone has been in a terrible car crash, you cannot help them by feeling their pain. When they are lying there, covered in blood, the person who saves their life is the person who is able to set aside those emotions and actually fix them. There is a difference between feeling someone’s pain and actually helping them.”
I had never thought of it that way, and I was stunned by how much sense it made. I suddenly imagined myself in the delivery room with my wife, as she wailed in agony, sweating and panting and clutching at my hand. “It hurts!” she would say. And if I were feeling zealously empathetic that day, I would reply: “I know! I feel just as much pain as you do right now!” It would be a swift and efficient way to simultaneously end a marriage and lose the respect of an entire medical staff, I suspect.
It’s been said that empathy only doubles the amount of suffering in the world.
So I brought my bleeding daughter into the bathroom, a place there you can bleed all over the tiles without causing permanent damage, and I lied as any good parent lies.
“Oh, that doesn’t look so bad,” I said as I held her up and peered at the wreckage of her face. At the same moment, I thought: “This is epically bad.”
My car was broken, its dinged and dirty metal corpse sitting – silently and apathetically - in our driveway. Our health insurance might as well be broken, for all the good it does. My wife was a few hundred miles away on an important trip, and she had the good car.
“I don’t think you need to go to the doctor,” I said to her as she wailed and smeared blood all over my shirt. I thought: “I don’t have a way to take you to the doctor, and I don’t have the money to pay for an ambulance, so we’re just going to pretend you are fine.”
Once I got her mouth rinsed out, I noticed – with some surprise – that she was missing several teeth.
“Hadley,” I queried, mustering my most casual tone. “How many teeth were you missing before this happened?” She was unsure, as was I, so we decided to agree that she had been missing roughly the same amount before and after she smashed her face up.
A few days later, with her face still grotesquely swollen, I called the doctor’s office in the hopes they would say: “Don’t worry about it” over the phone, which is free, rather than in person, which is very, very expensive.
I suspect the nurse I spoke to was an empath. “Her mandibles could be damaged for life!” she said. “You need to bring her in.”
So I did. The doctor who saw us chatted about our new puppy, clacked away on a computer for a moment, took one look at her chin and stated: “She’ll be fine. I’m amazed it didn’t split open.”
Then she sent us on our way. My anxiety could finally dissipate, but I know Hadley’s had been gone for several days. Because rather than feeling her pain, I hid my fears below deck, like the scurvy-addled stowaways they are, and gave her a calm, comforting smile to look at through all the blood and all the tears.
While my daughter’s pain was obvious, mostly because of the screaming, it’s important to remember that people all around us – people of all ages and races and religions and abilities – are often in pain. It is good to acknowledge this, but perhaps better to help them than to simply feel their pain.
I’m reminded of this every week. When you run community newspapers, you usually set aside a page or so for obituaries. Those grim synopses that bookend our lives.
It’s one of the last things to do, when you lay out paper, because people tend to relinquish their mortal coils at times both unpredictable and inconvenient for those of us who temporarily remain.
Sometimes, when we finally do get to the page on which the obituaries go, I look in the folder and discover, with a bit of pragmatic alarm, that there are none.
“No one died this week!?” I’ll think. “This is terrible.”
At this point I usually ratchet it back a little, remembering that a minor inconvenience to me is probably a small price to pay for the time a few people get to spend with their loved ones.
But when you write in the news business long enough, you can’t help but think of things logistically, from time to time.
“A Satanist drove a flaming Peugeot into the local yoga studio?!” you’ll think as you read a police report. “This is going to be a great week!”
But those obituaries, when they do come, are obviously more than just a way to fill space. They are a reminder, not just that people have died, but also that they have left others behind. That their spouses and children and grandchildren are the people you yell at for blocking traffic, or scold on social media for voting for a different candidate than you. Feeling their pain won’t do anything for them, really, but acknowledging it will, and being okay, and calm, in a frenzied world, might be the key to fixing much of what is broken.
