Sunday, May 5, 2013

Is Sympathy Even The Right Approach?

There are some things in the physical world that we cannot wrap our heads around. We know that the universe is really, really large and we know that quantum mechanics deals with things that are really, really small. We know the double-slit experiment is mystifying. But the pain felt by a parent's loss of a child is so much more incomprehensible than anything. People close to someone going through this are completely ill-equipped to even know what needs to be provided, let alone having the ability to provide it. Recently a family member received the paralyzing phone call in wee hours of the morning that their 19 year old son had died in a car accident. I had witnessed this happening to a mother and father once before in my life, and the experience after the countless hours huddled in a hospital waiting room until the doctor finally "called it" is scorched into my memory as a feeling of complete entrapment and helplessness. You no longer exist in the world, you are enveloped by it. The amplitude and quantity of raw emotion produced by the realization of what has happened, even for a friend of the family requires every synapse and neuron in a body to process. Attempting to even describe this experience with words like Tsunami, Flood, Avalanche, or the like is not even approaching the feeling because it implies that there is still an earth to stand on underneath these events.

Although my wife and I sense that the only real power that we have is to "be there" and provide a spiritual energy field to capture pain waves emitted from the family, we also feel that we should send *something* physical across the country along with our daughter, whose boyfriend's brother has just died. This is where my adventure in the "Sympathy" section of the greeting card rack begins.



In the car on the way to the store, my wife reminded me about the type of card that I should be looking for, to which I responded "I think I can handle this one." then shot a testosterone ray at the dashboard,  vaporizing the GPS and powered through to the store. I picked up the first card that looked, for whatever reason, like it might be the card that would provide the needed "Sympathy".

I opened it.


Although I held no criteria for judging which card would be the correct one, I had a jolting feeling of the supreme inadequacy that what I was holding in my hand would improve whatever thing I can't understand that I sensed they needed assistance improving. It was so painfully obvious that this was not working that I had to shake my head. There is no section in the card rack for "Loss of a Child" so I entirely blame myself for trying to use simple arithmetic to do string theory. However, I decided to press on.


"You need..."? What chutzpah this grand poo-bah of consolation, "The sympathy card" has to tell someone in mourning what they need! This is like sending Steve Balmer from Microsoft to barge through their front door. No. This will never do. I began to realize that there is only one criterion - the card with the fewest words. I was looking for a card that would draw their attention, but nothing else. It would not command, suggest, uplift, commiserate, or...sympathize.

It most certainly would not provide an emotional forecast.



At about this time, my 7 year old son provided his choice for consolation.



Who am I to ignore an opportunity to enjoy my child's innocence considering the existential void that is being suffered by these parents? "Freeze this moment a little bit longer. Make each sensation a little bit stronger." - (Time Stand Still by Rush). May God bless you Neil Peart. Everything helps right now, especially from a father with...experience. I focused my attention back on the rack, and noticed that I was impregnating every attribute of each card with hope that it would provide some sort of positive indicator that it will provide...something positive. The typeface. The color. The texture. The image, embroidery, layout, content. Each became a metric in this impossible pursuit. Until I finally accepted that the impedance mismatch between the solution domain and the problem domain was irreconcilable. For the first time ever my wife was right, and I was wrong: I *couldn't* handle this. Meeting me at the card rack, ostensibly to figure out what was taking me so long, she reached in and plucked one out and walked to the register as if she already understood the meaninglessness of the content of any selected card. Something that I had been discovering for the past 15 minutes. 


So, there it is. The least ineffective of them all.


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