how to patch up an empathetic heart

 

An empathetic heart should come with a lifetime supply of Band-Aids. It will be broken again and again, patched up over and over, and sent back out to witness, embrace, and tend to suffering in the world. At least, it would if it could.

"It is both a blessing

and a curse to feel everything

so very deeply."

~David Jones~

 

True story:

 

This past weekend I was lucky enough to be able to spend a couple of days with my daughter, son-in-law, and almost-four-year-old grandson, a child with boundless energy, a fearless spirit, and an unmistakable drive for independence. Saturday was a perfect winter day--sunny and cold--so we decided to give snow tubing a try.

 

Just like this: family tubing at Blue Mountain Resort 

 

 

There, tucked in the protective curve of my daughter's arm, her young son felt no fear as we careened down the hill, spinning faster and faster until we were breathless and dizzy. At the end of every run, he would jump out of the tube, begging to go again. No fear.

Three hours later we were headed for the lodge when he momentarily lost sight of his mother in the crowd. And even though I was right there with him, an expression of absolute terror crossed his face. He cried out , "Mommy! Mommy!" until I pointed her out to him just ahead of us. And in that moment he totally relaxed, ran to her, and grabbed her hand. Safe. Certain. Happy. Which is how children should feel.

 

In that moment, though, his fear transported me to our border with Mexico, to the thousands of children who were taken away from their mothers without explanation. Hungry, tired children who wept with fear and confusion. Children who would never find their mothers in the crowd again. A single moment in my life was magnified to reflect an immense humanitarian disaster.

 

That night, after a good supper and a warm bath, we tucked the child into his soft, warm bed, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by a cry for help. "Mommy! Mommy!" My daughter bolted up the stairs to him because she could tell by the tone of his voice that something was wrong. And it was. He was sick to his stomach, and proceeded to vomit throughout the night, while she laundered his bedding and sanitized his bedroom, and finally settled into bed next to him so he felt safe. Then she sat with him the next day and offered him sips of water and soup. She did everything a mother could do to help her child feel better. Which is how it should be.

 

"Nothing you do for a child

is ever wasted."

~Garrison Keillor~

 



 That episode, though, reminded me of the refugee camps in Syria and around the world where children suffer without hope. Without end. Children who are sick and scared. Children whose mothers and fathers grieve because there is nothing they can do to comfort them, to care for them, to save them. Places where there are no Band-Aids.

 

It is unsettling to contemplate the immensity of human suffering when just one moment of terror, one outcry in the middle of the night is enough to break an empathetic heart. To connect it to all of mankind, and make it cry out for some measure of mercy. 

 

"Every cry is a prayer.

Every prayer is for mercy."

~Neo-Kabe~

 

If you are a health care provider or therapist of any kind, a caregiver, or a parent, you have an empathetic heart. A broken heart. A million Band-Aids hold you together. Maybe you needed one the day your patient died on the operating table. Maybe you slapped one on when your colleague took his own life. Perhaps you needed several of them when your son overdosed. When the dog died. When they slipped the IV into your child's arm.

"The heart will break,

  but broken, live on."

~Lord Byron~ 



Hopefully, someone showed up with Band-Aids for you. Hopefully, you will show up with a few for somebody else.

 

jan