Taking Stock

     

for Cathy

Like you, I have been in that low place--suffocating under the wet, wool blanket of inconsolable sadness, wallowing in the muck of self-effacement, sinking in the quicksand of grief.

We need some time in that place. It's humbling and equalizing. It's how we reach empathy.

To climb out, though, you need only look around. At a moment's notice, you can turn on the television and say: at least it's not a mudslide, a tsunami; at least the children are safe; at least I have a family. And the list goes on.

At three, my daughter slammed her fist on the table and said, "Why can't the news tell the good things people do to people!" How do you explain to those brown eyes that we are motivated by the misery of others? Sometimes we are gawkers. Other times, their misfortune moves us to action; it helps us to locate our own blessings.

Your headache is another's cancer. Your leaking bathroom is another's devastating flood. Your unemployment is another's poverty.

The other day, I took a three-mile walk up my street. My ears were the meat in a headphone sandwich, and my head was bobbin' to Bob Schneider's I'm Good Now (a song, ironically, about finally being good once we're dead) on a bright, sunny day when all was right with the world. To my left, through the bay window of a brick Cape Cod, I spied a man in his eighties, parked, in his wheelchair, in the sunlight.

I smiled and waved, but he didn't move. Perhaps he couldn't or didn't want to. Or perhaps he didn't see me because he was basking in the blessings of light and sun and spring.

Like hope and faith, our blessings keep us keeping on until the day we can no longer measure the misery of others against our own tragedies and come out ahead. It's why the woman with breast cancer gets up in the morning. It's why the mother whose young children have been murdered can fight for their legacy. It's how slaves and survivors of holocausts can pray for yet another day.

What's most remarkable is that some of these people don't even seem to recognize their own adversity. They find their blessings in every breath.

Cathy, a friend who runs a weight-loss support group, lost her husband unexpectedly to a heart attack. A month later, she apologized to everyone for having been unable to provide support for those who needed it while she was gone.

My mother has a story about the father of a student, a boy named Melvin, who was bused in the 60s to her school from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Baltimore. He seemed to have nothing, and his father was unemployed due to a serious injury. Every year at Thanksgiving, her school sponsored a canned food drive for needy children. On the last day of the drive, my mother was called out of the teachers' lounge at lunch time. In the hallway stood Melvin's father, who had pushed his crippled and mentally retarded daughter in a wheelchair all the way to the school. He held out a bag toward my mother. "Melvin forgot his food for the poor children," he said.

We are often sympathetic to--sometimes even piteous of--those we think must surely have fewer blessings to count. They humble us. We can't help but feel a little shameful for blathering on about a few gained pounds. It's not to say that credit card debt and headaches and dying mothers aren't the fiery curses we feel them to be, only that we can temper them with a little perspective.

What are your blessings? I count among mine a few simple things, like the way the dogwood tree looks against the sky, the sound of birds in my yard at first light. I count Cathy and Melvin's father. Look around you now. Maybe you know someone like them. If you do, you have surely found an angel. And that might just be your biggest blessing of all.