Empathy and making life meaningful for each other

Empathy is imagining yourself in the hard place someone else is in — and how you might feel, or have felt — in order to better understand them and offer care. It's easy to not make this effort. No time for it — I've got my own problems — I don't even know who they are. But caring for one another makes the soul fertile.

It's fabulous to see the earth's fertility returning. Spring swooping — the swallows are back; and chattering — a pair of towhees in the bushes; and poking from the soil — the green of daffodil shoots. The sun today is shedding its light, cloaking the fields and forests and rivers. Melting snow soaks the ground. You can feel the earth shaking off winter.

Just so, empathy can go a long way in helping a hurting person emerge from a winter season and find spring again. It doesn't erase what happened. But it puts someone else there in an attempt to identify — to make it not so lonely — not so impossible.

I've written that our daughter Brenda is just back from a month in Turkey giving nursing care for earthquake survivors — having left in early February. She called the other day with some of the stories. It's like that quote, “Somebody else would love to be having your bad day.”

How can I empathize with a couple not much younger than I, whose adult children and their families had gathered for an upcoming birthday, and wherever they were the walls came down — and this couple lost all eight of their children. The father told Brenda that as he went from grave to grave his COPD kicked up, and that's how he landed in her men's ward at the field hospital.

She did everything she could to show caring for these injured people — from learning to tie headscarves the families gave as gifts — and wearing them daily — to trying the Turkish dishes they brought her. One man went into his condemned home to use the stove so he could cook a thank you for her.

She entered into their culture, and offered a refreshing lemon scented “scrub” for face and hands at the door of her ward tent by way of welcome — just like the people do in their homes when a guest is entering. She created a space outside the tent — for those who were able — to sit in the sun. She talked with them, and even found reason to laugh with them.

Only one patient was released to a house. Even a more affluent man, whose feet were crushed in the 6.3 aftershock that Brenda experienced, went “home” to a tent. One woman had no place to go. Brenda was able to gain her an extra day in the hospital, while shelter was worked out.

One old man — most likely with no one to ever show him empathy — when she asked what wisdom he had for her from his many years said, “Life is meaningless.”

Perhaps the best definition of empathy is making life meaningful for another — when it seems it isn't. Coming alongside in whatever ways we can — however long we can — for a person who is in a troubled place. Shedding light just by being there — and in its time, reaching together for spring.