Compassion And Grief

Our capacity for both, sometimes at the same time, is astonishing.

I don’t usually write on a personal level. I don’t share much beyond cute pictures of kids and dogs on social media. I’m just a private person in this regard. But today I am compelled to use this space to mourn publicly and rejoice out loud simultaneously. So it is that we take a break from the news of wars—physical and cultural—politics, and the media, to talk compassion and grief.

Last week, my family lost a beloved thirty-four year old niece, her sister lost her best friend, and her parents lost a daughter. Bridgette was a bright light in all of our lives. No one saw the catastrophic series of strokes coming. The sudden death of a loved one is different for families than a lingering fatal illness. Research (and common sense) say something that the word “sudden” itself imparts: shock. Surprise requires time for coping. Add to the shock the fact that this was a young woman, in the prime of life, and the wound deepens.

Obviously, we are grieving, but even in this most trying time, we are moved by the compassion of others, Starbucks, for one. Bridgette was a barista at the flagship store in Seattle. She shunned the opportunity to go into management because she didn’t want to turn away from the public facing job in favor of a windowless cubicle upstairs at corporate.

This week, her friends at corporate, her colleagues in the store, and what seems like a multitude of customers have made a makeshift shrine to her that is now the centerpiece of the store. This comes as something of a surprise to us. Not the customers and colleagues part, but the corporate part. As a friend said to me recently, you just never think of “how-are-the-quarterly-numbers?” types as being a source of what we register as unexpected corporate compassion. That part of this tragedy has been something of a silver lining.

Whenever death claims a child before her parents, we are duly shocked by the alteration of what we universally regard as the nature of things. Generations are meant to succeed one another.

It is not exactly an original thought, it may even border on the trite, but I think it is worth mentioning that it is remarkable that our species is capable of such great kindness (see above), as well as such tremendous evil (see the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Mariupol). This weird dichotomy fuels novels, movies, and history books. The broad range of our love and hate is remarkable to the extent that we cannot stop writing about it. We have been writing about it since the ancient Greeks gave us the dramatic language with which to embrace it.

Most of us live in the middle of these extremes of human temperament and behavior. Few, like Mother Theresa and Pol Pot live on the edges.

I’m viewing certain news stories in a different light. You know them, they’re the glossy, feel-good fluff pieces that close most newscasts. As a (hopelessly cynical) media person, I viewed them with disdain, thinking of them as cheap tear-jerkers, mere palate cleansers; a sorbet after multiple courses documenting man’s inhumanity to man. I’m a lot less cavalier about them this week.

Like the Down Syndrome kid who has been the high school basketball team’s equipment manager is given the ball in the last game of his senior year, and as if Frank Capra directed the scene, the coach puts him in the game, and he scores the winning basket.

Or the elementary school kids with big fundraising ideas that benefit refugees. Some of them bake cookies, some fill boxes with the essentials of life. It’s heartening to see our kids step up in ways we’ve either forgotten about or never knew. Call it instructive as the student becomes the teacher.

My wife’s family gathered in Seattle—literally from all over the world—to tend to the devastatingly sad business of letting a cherished one go. There was a stream of light in the darkness stemming from the knowledge that some of her organs would give sight and even life to others.

In a note of compassion that was unexpected and proved to be indispensable, our California neighbors offered up their home in Seattle, and our far flung family gathered there to our great benefit. When I reached out to offer them our profuse thanks, they said that they pray every day for the chance to help someone, and that to them, the ability to help us in our time of need was a prayer answered. For them, the chance to help friends in a difficult time was itself a gift. For us, it was the answer to our prayers.

Bridgette, the most compassionate of souls, would have loved that.

©2022 Jon Sinton