Tag Archives: Megan Devine

Courage at Twilight: It All Comes Down to Empathy

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Among the green blades of Japanese Iris I found a scattering of soft-gray Mountain Chickadee feathers, the chitting chiding black-striped bird who came and went from her birdhouse in spite of my irksome gardening presence.  Her house is empty now.  But the Wilson’s Warbler hops and pecks through the shrubs and flits up to the birdhouse Gabe painted last year.  I hated to trim the shrubs, but several had grown to engulf sprinkler heads, hogging water.  Mom looked askance when I came to dinner in shorts and flip-flops, and I answered her unasked question over cheesy tuna-noodle-green-pea casserole that I had resolved to audit the automatic sprinkler system, ten stations, perhaps a hundred heads, after dinner.  I adjusted the angles and flows and station times and arcs and entered the house completely soaked and dripping and wanting fresh-brewed cacao on the nearly-July night.  Dad rolled down the ramps the next night, still anxious he might tip off the side and crash for his unsteady hands on the controls, and followed me as I cut back the shrubs.  I stopped frequently to ask if I was shaping the bushes how he wanted.  “Just cut off the spikes” of new growth, he instructed, then “use your own best judgment.”  Several times I looked over at him, to receive his smiling thumbs up.  The trimmings filled a 50-gallon can.  Neighbors comment that I must like yard work as much as Dad, which may be true, but my main motivation is not the yard’s beauty so much as his happiness with the beauty of the yards and beds he can no longer garden.  I offered him the hedge trimmer, but he observed what we both already knew: “I can’t do it.”  In his momentary grief, I let myself be his hands and feet and strength, and together we did the job, and together we were proud.  My recent commuter reading has included books on parenting styles, marriage relationships, emotion coaching, community race culture, shame resilience, vulnerability, wholeheartedness, forgiveness, grief and grieving, outward mindset and outward inclusion, active bystandership, American history, mass incarceration and justice equity, the Bible, and I think I detect a common thread: empathy, the act of sitting with someone in their pain, without judgment—empathy, the boiled-down essence of human happiness and success.  “Empathy isn’t about fixing” anything, Brené declares.  Empathy is “the brave choice to be with someone in their darkness [and] not to race to turn on the light so we feel better.”  Empathy is “using our own experiences to understand others’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors from their perspectives without judgment” (quotes from Brené Brown).  I believe what Megan and Brené and others say, but to be honest, I need lots of practice.  I’m an old student on his first day at their school, and I am striving at my homework, wanting to pass the tests, hoping to earn my degree.

Courage at Twilight: Thank God for Megan

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Left unchecked, dandelions can proliferate and kill the grass with their broad, flat leaves anchored to thick stems.  But Dad has the best tool for purging the lawn of dandelions, and I pluck the weeds mostly for the pleasure of utilizing the tool: a forked steel poker on the end of a long wooden stick.  A thrust into the turf cuts the weed at the root, and a flick tosses the severed plants away to die and dry.  I don’t even have to bend over.  I almost feel sad when I cannot find anymore dandelions, and have to stow the forked tool in the garage.  As I wander the yards, I sometimes slide into the sadness of mistakes made and opportunities lost: taking a week to patch a child’s bike tire; grumbling at the boys wanting new wooden swords because last week’s have already broken; not knowing my child was hurting inside, or knowing but not knowing what to do or say; being stretched and stressed and overwhelmed and unpresent when she wrecked my car and wanted reassurance but I was empty and numb and could not come out of my darkness, and she silently walked away.  And I anxiously foresee losses yet to come, portended by deteriorating strength and health and means and memory.  And I slip into seeing life as a series of sadnesses strung together.  Of course, I could choose to see my life as a collection of connected joys—but while I live for these joyful moments, I tend to gravitate toward grief, to swirl in the emotional eddies of mourning.  Megan, however, is teaching me that grief is not an illness to be cured, not a problem to be solved, not a process to be rushed through, not an incident to put behind me, but a natural human pain, a pain that is an inseparable part of love and loss, a human pain to be tended with tenderness and carried with compassion.  Thank you for teaching me.  So, now, I want to sit with my grieving neighbor dying of cancer, and to sit with her grieving spouse; I want to sit with my children in their sicknesses and joblessnesses and injustices and lonelinesses; and I will sit with my mother and my father as they approach the end of this phase of their life-existence.  I will sit with myself in my own pain, tending to it gently and patiently.  And as I wandered the yard, Sarah hugged me and praised me for the beauty of the dandelion-free turf and bragged to Dad about how hard I had worked in the yard and how beautiful the landscaping looked, and insisted he come and see, right now.  And he motored around the yard in his wheelchair, looking at everything, studying the yellow and orange marigolds, the red geraniums, the reviving arborvitae with new poking green, the weedless beds, and thanked me with, “Everything looks really nice, Rog: just perfect.”

(Pictured above: Mom’s and Dad’s back yard with the backdrop of the Wasatch mountains.  Notice the wheelchair tracks in the lawn.)