Being present after loss
John Gear
In “The Art of Presence” Bobo (David Brooks, NYT) says one family’s trauma offers valuable lessons on how to comfort those in pain. He actually managed to write a column that’s worth reading. Well, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then…
Tragedy has twice visited the Woodiwiss family. In 2008, Anna Woodiwiss, then 27, was working for a service organization in Afghanistan. On April 1, she went horseback riding and was thrown, dying from her injuries. In 2013, her younger sister Catherine, then 26, was biking to work from her home in Washington. She was hit by a car and her face was severely smashed up. She has endured and will continue to endure a series of operations. For a time, she breathed and ate through a tube, unable to speak. The recovery is slow.
The victims of trauma, she writes in a remarkable blog post for Sojourners, experience days “when you feel like a quivering, cowardly shell of yourself, when despair yawns as a terrible chasm, when fear paralyzes any chance for pleasure. This is just a fight that has to be won, over and over and over again.”
Her mother, Mary, talks about the deep organic grief that a parent feels when they have lost one child and seen another badly injured, a pain felt in bones and fiber.
But suffering is a teacher. And, among other things, the Woodiwisses drew a few lessons, which at least apply to their own experience, about how those of us outside the zone of trauma might better communicate with those inside the zone. There are no uniformly right responses, but their collective wisdom, some of it contained in Catherine’s Sojourners piece, is quite useful:
Do be there. Some people think that those who experience trauma need space to sort things through. Assume the opposite. Most people need presence. The Woodiwisses say they were awed after each tragedy by the number of people, many of whom had been mere acquaintances, who showed up and offered love, from across the nation and the continents. They were also disoriented by a number of close friends who simply weren’t there, who were afraid or too busy.
Anna and Catherine’s father, Ashley, says he could detect no pattern to help predict who would step up and provide the ministry of presence and who would fumble. Neither age, experience nor personal belief correlated with sensitivity and love.
Don’t compare, ever. Don’t say, “I understand what it’s like to lose a child. My dog died, and that was hard, too.” Even if the comparison seems more germane, don’t make it. Each trauma should be respected in its uniqueness. Each story should be heard attentively as its own thing. “From the inside,” Catherine writes, comparisons “sting as clueless, careless, or just plain false.”
Do bring soup. The non-verbal expressions of love are as healing as eloquence. When Mary was living with Catherine during her recovery, some young friend noticed she didn’t have a bathmat. He went to Target and got a bathmat. Mary says she will never forget that.
Do not say “you’ll get over it.” “There is no such thing as ‘getting over it,’ ” Catherine writes, “A major disruption leaves a new normal in its wake. There is no ‘back to the old me.’ ”
Do be a builder. The Woodiwisses distinguish between firefighters and builders. Firefighters drop everything and arrive at the moment of crisis. Builders are there for years and years, walking alongside as the victims live out in the world. Very few people are capable of performing both roles.
Don’t say it’s all for the best or try to make sense out of what has happened. Catherine and her parents speak with astonishing gentleness and quiet thoughtfulness, but it’s pretty obvious that these tragedies have stripped away their tolerance for pretense and unrooted optimism.
Ashley also warned against those who would overinterpret, and try to make sense of the inexplicable. Even devout Christians, as the Woodiwisses are, should worry about taking theology beyond its limits. Theology is a grounding in ultimate hope, not a formula book to explain away each individual event.
I’d say that what these experiences call for is a sort of passive activism. We have a tendency, especially in an achievement-oriented culture, to want to solve problems and repair brokenness — to propose, plan, fix, interpret, explain and solve. But what seems to be needed here is the art of presence — to perform tasks without trying to control or alter the elemental situation. Allow nature to take its course. Grant the sufferers the dignity of their own process. Let them define meaning. Sit simply through moments of pain and uncomfortable darkness. Be practical, mundane, simple and direct.
Ashley and Mary went to Afghanistan a few months after Anna’s death. They remember that as a time out of time. They wept together with Afghan villagers and felt touched by grace. “That period changed me and opened my imagination,” Ashley recalls. “This thing called presence and love is more available than I had thought. It is more ready to be let loose than I ever imagined.”
John Gear
Not long after I got back from my recent trip to Brazil, I called some economists to gain a better understanding of where the country stood economically. To me, Rio de Janeiro felt a little like Shanghai: there was plenty of high-end shopping in neighborhoods like Ipanema — and plenty of poverty in the favelas, or slums. There was also a lot in between. What is most striking to a visitor is how many middle-class citizens there seem to be. Cars were everywhere; traffic jams, I’ve come to believe, are a sign of a growing middle class. It means people have enough money to buy automobiles.
What I saw was no illusion. Though its starting point was quite extreme, Brazil is a country that has seen income inequality drop over the last decade. Unemployment is at near record lows. And the growth of the middle class is quite stunning. By most estimates, upward of 40 million people have been pulled out of poverty in the last decade; extreme poverty, says the government, has been reduced by 89 percent. Per capita income has continued to grow even as G.D.P. growth has slowed.
Nevertheless, the economists I spoke to were uniformly bearish about the short-term future of the Brazilian economy. They pointed, for starters, to that slowdown in G.D.P., which they didn’t expect to pick up anytime soon. Despite the country’s enormous economic gains since the beginning of this century, there has been very little accompanying productivity gains. Indeed, several economists told me that the main reason unemployment was so low was that the economy was terribly inefficient. Too much of the economy was in the hands of the state, I was told, and, what’s more, it was a consumption-based economy that lacked necessary investment. And on and on. I got the sense that many economists believe that Brazil had been more lucky than good, and now its luck was running out. In a recent article about the Brazilian economy, The Economist put it starkly: “The Deterioration,” read its headline.
As I listened to the economists, though, I couldn’t help thinking about our own economy. Our G.D.P. growth was more than 4 percent in the third quarter of 2013, and, of course, our productivity has risen relentlessly. But, despite the growth, unemployment can’t seem to drop below 7 percent. And the middle class is slowly but surely being eviscerated — thanks, at least in part, to those productivity gains. Income inequality has become a fact of life in the United States, and while politicians decry that fact, they seem incapable of doing anything about it. Which made me wonder: Whose economy runs better, really?
A few years ago, Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker wrote a lengthy article about Brazil in which he quoted from an email he received from Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff. “The main aim of economic development must always be the improvement of living conditions,” she told him. “You cannot separate the two concepts.”
In other words, Brazil’s admittedly leftist government doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about growth for its own sake, but rather connects it with alleviating poverty and growing the middle class. Thus, it has a high minimum wage, for instance. It has laws making it exceedingly difficult to fire a laggard employee. It controls the price of gasoline, helping to make driving affordable.
And most striking of all — at least from the point of view of an American — for the last 10 years, Brazil has had a program called Bolsa Família, which essentially hands money to mothers living in poverty. In return, they have to ensure that their children go to school and avail themselves of health care services. There is no question that Bolsa Família has been enormously effective in reducing poverty.
By contrast here in the United States, Congress just refused to extend unemployment insurance. The farm bill envisions cutting back on food stamps. Various other programs to help the poor or the unemployed have been reduced. Even those who oppose such heartless cuts assume that once the economy comes back, all will be well again. Growth will take care of everything. Thus in America, we tend to view economic growth less as a means to an end than an end in itself.
It is, of course, possible that Brazil’s economy could hit the wall and some of the gains made could be reversed. A new emphasis on investment and entrepreneurship could probably help it. The spontaneous protests last summer were the results of the new middle class wanting the sorts of things that the middle class always wants: better services, higher quality schools, less corruption. Still, the Brazil example gives rise to a question we don’t ask enough in this country:
What’s the point of economic growth if nobody has a job?