The Human Gift

Compassion is not a natural human gift, that being automatically given as a matter of course. We find ourselves drawn to acts of kindness  given to those we agree deserve it. This is at odds with the most valued of acts of compassion, those  acts of kindness extended to those we would rather hurt or put down for their nature does not agree with our own. Kindness is rare, as we are a judgmental lot. It is its rareness that makes it come to our attention, for despite ourselves, we all wish it extended to us unconditionally, and we know we are miserly.

In our work with ill infants and children, we are predisposed to give kindness more freely, and yet it is not unfettered here either. We must remind ourselves that compassion is a gift best given without condition, that as we must write a story to put this person, this family, in context we should work to make that story a positive one that allows us to give kindness without expectation. Compassion, kindness, is truly our most unique of human gifts and is greatest among them. Nothing but good can come of it, in the end, if not for the one who receives it, for us who give it.

In winter

He thought that if he cried, it wouldn't hurt. It didn't work out that way, in large part because he found himself unable to cry. Anger, frustration, had taken up that part of him that emoted, and he had long been beyond crying. So he just sat there on the bench, grumpy, agitated, and cold. He had been grumpy, agitated and cold for weeks now.

 

The stone face of the mountainous train station behind him forced the Siberian wind downwards, increasing in penetrating meanness as it hounded him. Or so he thought. He beat his arms and rubbed them for warmth, the cold nizzling its way through his bulky gloves, wool ushanka pulled down over his ears, sturdy coat and scarf, turtle necked sweater, vest, two fully buttoned shirts, and long underwear to reach his fatless reddened skin. Any more layers and he would be unable to move, like a matryoshka. He was sure he would lose something to frostbite, but in reality he hadn't been outside for more than a few minutes and was well bundled against the northerly wind. Dmitri was just having a bad day. He waited for Casimir, who didn't understand the concept of other people's time, or how the cold affected it. This was odd, being they lived in Minsk, arguably cold frequently enough one should be thoroughly familiar with it, and where no one had the patience.

 

The massive ornate wooden door of the station creaked open narrowly and a slurry of reluctant people flowed out carrying the equally unwilling Casimir within it. He saw Dmitri, waddled down the icy steps toward the bench, gestured with his head for Dmitri to join him at the bottom of the stairs. Dmitri sat a moment then unstuck himself from the icy bench and joined Casimir. Two furry giants among the herd of people making their lurching way.

 

"You gotta cigarette?" Casimir asked chatteringly, wooled hands buried deep in his coat pockets.

 

"What? Are you kidding me? Even if I did would I bother to to freeze giving it to you?"

 

"Eh...", Casimir grunted.

 

They walked then in silence, too focused on not falling and not letting the cold in to have much to say. It was getting dark, and the gas lamps had not been lit for over a month. It took several more minutes than it usually did, but they found a crowd outside a department store where someone rumored there was toilet paper, and they waited in the queue. It didn't matter what they actually would fine, whatever it was you needed it or could sell it.

 

"So... you going tonight?" inquired Dmitri, gazing up with as little movement as possible at the taller man.

 

Casimir made a face that offered something unpleasant, "I don't know... I have this thing about getting arrested. It upsets my stomach."

 

"Yeah, there's that, you with the stomach of a baby...", replied Dmitri. They shuffled forward in the queue. "I don't know which is worse, getting arrested or working. At least you get to go home after working, but then", he hunched his shoulders, "maybe that's not such a good thing either."

 

Casimir looked askance, "I'm tired of being cold. In summer I get tired of being hot, in winter of being cold. At least in prison factory the climate is constant, eh? There's that."

 

Dmitri chuckled, "I am tired of always being hungry". They shuffled forward again, the throng moved murmuring, huddling like penguins. "I am tired of always being angry...".

 

They came to the front of the line, and learned it was bread that was being sold. Two small nearly frozen loaves a piece, then they made their way towards the street their small apartments were built over. Along the way they stopped at a small shop and left a loaf each for the old lady who lived upstairs, then continued on home. Dmitri went with Casimir, together they crowded into Casimir's kitchen, and made a fire in the stove that quickly overwhelmed them in their heavy clothes. They started shedding layers as the room warmed, piling them mindlessly to the floor. The cats gathered and took refuge in the layers.The fulfilling smells of bread, soup and vodka being heated on the stove filled the room.

 

"So, Dmitri, I know you are upset..."

 

"Yes, but I don't want to talk about it. The anger keeps me warm at night, I don't want to give any of it up."

 

"It was his fault, you know it was, and there is nothing to be done. It's in the past, he's dead, and he needed dying, that one."

 

"This is my consolation, Casimir? That this, this zasranec, he's dead, but Myrna, she has to live her life knowing what he did to her?"

 

Casimir shrugged, carefully lifting the glass carafe of vodka off the stove with a handkerchief and pouring half into Dmitri's cup, the rest into his own. "It is what it is, Dmitri. You would rather she too was dead? There is nothing to be done."

 

Dmitri said nothing, sipped his vodka and took the warmed bread Casimir offered, spreading the thin preserves over it, dipping it in the vodka and popping it whole into his mouth. He looked into the bottom of his cup, swirled it, sipped then drank the entire thing in one gulp, grimacing. He handed it towards Casimir as he lifted another warmed carafe and refilled it.

 

"I am going tonight. I will come", Casimir said, setting another carafe on the stove to warm.

 

Dmitri nodded in agreement, "Good, good. No one gets arrested tonight." He held his cup up towards his brother, raised it to Casimir's, clinking them together gently.

 

"And nobody dies", Casimir offered.

 

"And nobody dies...".

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The Human Condition

He stood on the side of the road, silent, and wind swept, deep in The Valley of Lost Souls. He knew how he had come to be there, he knew why, but it didn't matter. There was a time when being alone was what fed his loneliness, a wolf that succored at his soul. There was a different ghost there now with no name, but a pallored visage that lacked definition and resembled emptiness. Where once a man existed there was now a void that lost all sense of being. He was an empty vessel, no dreams or aspirations, no will, no thought, no desire. He simply was. He simply was broken.

 

He looked skyward, looking into the starry night, into the depths of the universe unfettered by anything for billions of light years. He seemed less significant in this scheme of things, and his emptiness deepened, his concerns irrelevant. In his own skin he had lost meaning, and in this wide sense of being he was far less than he already was. He did not know who he was for being shown he was was an enigma.

 

This was not the way it was supposed to be, but it was the way it was. He felt he was not unhappy, only empty. He did not know which way to go, but he knew standing here accomplished nothing. One cell in his brain knew this was not his nature, and that in truth, things were not as dismal as the rest of him felt they were. His broken heart wanted nothing but for the deep ache to wane, it felt no compulsion to move in any direction until he could breath. He found solace in not caring, not worrying, being nothing, being alone. He believed in himself, and in that there was hope.

 

So, for now he stood there and gazed in loving wonder at his universe. He knew he was, that he mattered for himself, and that this would be the spark that would find him and renew him. He would heal, he just needed to stand here for a while, alone, unthinking, unfeeling, unbothered...

 

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To sleep sweetly, sleep...

I lay upon the lush grass that grew right up to the tree, and looked up through its leaves and branches as the light shimmied and danced between. A sparkle, a star of light, a flash here then there, all the while the warm colors of the leaves imbued in glowing greens, reds and yellows. The breeze lead a dance of light and color along with the music of the gentle percussion of one soft dying leaf upon another, entwined with the lilting melody of a lone songbird. I sighed deeply and let go of my troubles, those shallow and blown easily away, those deep so they only cooled but stayed. I closed my eyes and the color was gone, but the light show dazzled in whites and reds, and with the songs of the tree and the wind, I fell into natures loving embrace in peace and quiet, and sleep came ever so sweetly.

 

 

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Stand

A line formed to one side and the world stood beside it

judging those who chose one side or the other

for nothing more than that choice.

Most found themselves by birth where they stood

and yet it was found that they too deserved to be judged.

They were bullied, beaten, raped, tortured and destroyed.

The victors were stronger or more driven by hate,

rarely in any way superior that mattered.

In that moment where one was not in focus

stand silent and inhuman before inhumanity.

And this was what mankind was about

deciding the greater and the lesser

and keeping the lesser in its place

for no more reason than it made the lesser feel greater.

How will we judge ourselves

when there is no one left?

 

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Trust Fallen

Trust is a shimmering veil of hope

entwined with desire and faith

that betrayal need not be in keeping

with imaginary and real onslaughts

against a feral and cunning nature which it is

to be human.

 

Forged deeply into the character

it exists in thin lines easily broken,

hard to weave into a fabric that sustains,

so much so that it is often ephemeral if not non-existent.

It comes, it goes, here for a long while,

or never having existed at all.

It is oft known to have been only when it is felt

that it is lost.

 

Trust is such a thing that entire lives are spent

learning if it is carved into one's narrative

alongside those things so deeply valued it is life itself.

Betrayal is a dark and stormy place in which

trust goes to die,

and with it a willingness to continue this mortality

fearful of falling into that unseen abyss

and that searing pain that comes of trust lost.

 

In its dying it withers all hope of return

breaking the seals that held together our better nature

and making us forever shy and forlorn,

wild beasts that see hurt and shame in all corners

and find no solace in words spoken,

actions taken,

promises given.

 

Trust knows the death of itself lies in betrayal

that this long and arduous notion

cannot but seem virtuous and fair,

but when feigned rings hollow and deceitful

a machination of Machiavellian proportions,

its own being lost for being used as a folly.

A drama unfolds seen by one,

yet judged by those blind to the path

and in this comes an unabiding sadness and turmoil,

so twisted on itself it goes free only by breaking,

shattering asunder,

leaving searing and ugly scars that never fully heal.

That thing left behind can never trust again.

 

Trust is a virtue.

Trust is a gift.

It is by its nature a thing given and not taken,

lost never to be found,

and at its center it is our very human nature.

Such a thing as this should be sacred

for it is indeed a rare and cherished emotion,

and it is what makes us

good or evil things.

 

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An Ordinary Extraordinary Life

She thought about it a lot before she died. The details of her wonderful, ordinary life were not the issue. It was that she was now in her late eighties, frail but able after her recent illness, of impaired ability to move, hear, see or speak, and that while ripe of mind she had little to say of interest to anyone. As she thought about the people in her lifetime, whom she loved dearly, well, most of whom she loved dearly, she knew that to many she was a frail shadow of an old woman. None of them seemed to realize that she was once one of them, had been for a very long time.

 

Georgette had known a touch of all the things life has to offer. The wonders of childhood with usually loving, always providing parents, now long gone. The angst of her teen years, with her first love, her first broken heart, and her first really big mistake (her second was pretty remarkable too, truth be told). She had known loss, suffering. She had seen most of the world, not all, and had watched the advances and failures of civilization such as they were. She watched the waxing and waning of peoples, of history. Witness to great beauty, to great tragedy. She had, in fact, been young for most of her life, having only recently found herself old. She had lived a usual life, though if you had asked those who knew her back then, it was actually nothing short of extraordinary. To her, ordinary.

 

She looked over at the built-in bookcase in her tidy, well kept cottage, at the photos of her in her younger years. She was a beauty by any standard, emerald of eye, dark of hair, fit of figure. She had been an athlete, and a pilot for several decades flying C-17s in the Air Force. In "retirement" she flew in Africa and later in the Middle East after the Great Religious War, for various humanitarian organizations. It was all there, in fragments, on the shelves of her life. She heard the children in the yard next to hers, and she smiled, remembering of her childhood, and the childhoods of others she had shared. There were too few actual memories left, but she remembered how it felt, and smells, sounds, glimpses out of the corner of her eye, could bring back a thought from years ago, untethered from context. Most of her memories came to her in her dreams, fleeting, ephemeral mixtures of people, time and place.

 

Several of the photos included her wife, the last twenty or so years ago, a few years before Sharon had died suddenly after complications of an accident, an accident that killed their two adopted children, a boy and a girl. Sharon had died younger, and there were no memories of her as an old woman to overshadow who she had been. No one remembered Sharon in the image of an old, frail, inconvenient woman. Decades ago Georgette and Sharon had been among the first to be allowed to legally marry. What a wonderful time that was! This memory was forever intact in every detail, though some fifty years past. This deepened Georgette's melancholy, deepened by the understanding that Sharon was remembered by too few anyway, and when Georgette died, no one, really, would ever think of Sharon again. Sharon had never know her birth family, and had always said her life began when she met Georgette.

 

Georgette's history was filled with stories, moments that ran from the mundane to the exceptional, and it was filled with ordinary and extraordinary people, each with their own stories. One seemed to move through one's own space and time, she thought, with illuminating moments when one was aware, if but for a moment, that others too had life stories unfolding around them, separate, independent, and in an overwhelming number, completely un-reliant upon hers. We are each meaningless to the vastness of humanity. There was the sense that even the lives she had touched would have gotten along fine without her. Nature always finds a way. This was loneliness, feeling one did not matter in the scheme of things.

 

Love was like that, unrequited. She had loved many, oh and how palpable and frightening, painful and joyous was that love. She felt she never knew if anyone really ever loved her like that, perhaps not even Sharon. I mean, she thought, who loves like that? In her heart she knew Sharon had loved her, but she was sure never quite as much as she loved Sharon. There were the words, things done, but were these tangible, real, or social scripts in motion?

 

Several days had gone by before anyone noticed she wasn't there anymore. They found her in her bed, alone in her cottage by the sea, comfy under her Tanzanian quilt. She had fallen asleep while reading and seemed peaceful, ordinary. Her windows at the foot of her bed were open upon the postcard vista that had been her village all these years, always wanting it to be the last thing she saw before falling asleep.

 

"We found the old lady," he said into his radio. "Yeah, she's dead." No one gave a moment's thought that this too was their fate, if they were lucky, to die old in bed while one slept. She was buried a few days later, unattended, a small grave with a small headstone in the village by the sea, next to her love, Sharon, and their children.

 

It was a few years later that Stephen crossed her obituary online, quite by accident. Someone had incompletely coddled it together, with a photo of an old gray haired woman in thick glasses, hunched down in her chair, who had died fairly well off, willing her small treasure to charity. His father had died recently, and he realized more cogently with his father's death, that this was it. This one life lived. Every life mattered for every life was a story of untold richness. He felt compelled to learn her story and to share it, to see the young vibrant woman who sat in that chair, and died alone in her cottage by the sea. It took far less time than he had thought, to find people who had known her and remembered her easily, who had photos of her, tales to share with much exuberance and love, from all around the world. People who were shocked to learn not of her having died, but that they were only now learning of her death. People saddened to their souls that she died alone, forgotten, an old woman.

 

The snow had only just began to fall, the winter's first. Some three hundred people gathered with Stephen at Georgette's modest grave, he who had only recently come to know Georgette, but now knew her more than any one person there did, for he had compiled all of her story that he could. He did this because her life mattered. They all came laughing, smiling, renewing friendships, remembering her and how she mattered to them. All had come, some eagerly, some sadly, some shamefully, to be with Stephen and Georgette this November morning. And all of them remembered Sharon.

 

Not one remembered Georgette as an old frail woman.

 

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