A Suffering With

The Latin root for the word compassion is pati, which means to suffer, and the prefix com- means with. Compassion, originating from compati, literally means to suffer with.

www.compassion.com

There are places in the human heart too raw and terrible to be translated into speech. There are times when the pain of a loved one is so mammoth that it causes you to forget language totally. I have lived inside of pain that is so guttural and smothering that there is no release except to scream until only whimpering remains.

When the sympathetic nervous system is activated in response to a threat, it firmly isolates you inside of your right brain, temporarily cutting you off from the language/processing centers in the left brain. When the panic/grief network is activated in the right brain, the left brain needs to engage to process and control the emotion. However, things like panic disorders and complicated grief in adults can result in a neurological disabling of this process.

So what do you do when your sympathetic nervous system is overactivated or you feel utterly trapped in your right brain? What do you do when all you can perceive from every direction is a primordial sense of threat and therefore panic? What do you do when the grief that results from that existential terror and despair overwhelms your basic ability to speak?

Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?

Mark 15:34

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

Psalm 22:2

When Jesus speaks these words on the cross, is he praying, quoting scripture, fulfilling prophecy, or corporeally entering into the depths of human despair? This question has been a matter of discussion and debate among theologians for centuries. I do not pretend to have the answer, but rather relegate it to the depths of the mysteries of my faith.

What I do believe is that Jesus Christ fully entered into everything that it means to be human, including the most lonely and terrible aspect of humanity: the despair of a child fearing that he or she is ultimately unloved, unwanted, alone, and meaningless. This is the despair of an orphan. And yet, when Jesus speaks these words, he may also be praying, and therefore giving everything that he is and has to his Father, including a suffering and despair that is beyond human capacity to bear.

Did I pray in such a way when I screamed to my father in the echoing halls of Children’s Hospital that Lizzy’s heart wasn’t beating? Is there a way in which naked despair is forced into a type of prayer simply because it is stripped of all pretention to power and control? What lies at the bottom of grief and fear, when the reptilian brain wants to run or freeze and the mammalian brain wants to sob, curling pathetically in a corner?

I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.

JRR Tolkien, The Return of the King, Book VI, Chapter 3

Atul Gawande speaks with aching precision about the ethical complex of a physician who has to tell a patient and his or her family that there is nothing left to do. At that point, a physician is no longer needed, but rather a midwife of death.

What can you do when a loved one lays dying in front of you? What should you do when your two year old is attached to a machine embedded in her neck that is artificially inflating her lungs? What do you do when your spouse or your father is at the end of life, in and out of the emergency room, needing transfusions and oxygen to make it through another night? When your mother or your husband emaciates before you, disappearing in a skeleton as cancer consumes their vital organs?

There are no words for these things. There is a place beyond, beneath, and within language. There is a blindness behind a waterfall of tears and a sanctuary where you must rest before summoning the strength to breathe another breath. There is a counting, a waiting, a staring, a remembering. A place where you float and watch, before re-entering.

When you cannot stop another person from dying–when you cannot stop another person from suffering–what is left for you to do? How can you act in such a way that your actions matter at that moment? And who do you become as you make that choice?

Shh. Surely you and I are beyond speaking when words are clearly not enough….

– Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

I kissed Lizzy’s cheeks, her eyelids, her brow, and her lips as she lay attached to the ECMO machine while they prepared to turn it off. I spoke many words to her about how she had changed my life, how I would live for her and die for her, how she was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and how I would always be grateful that I was chosen to be her mother. I don’t remember most of what I said, but I remember the feel of my family’s hands on my body, passing their strength and energy to me through touch. I remember the feel of Lizzy’s skin beneath my lips, the silkiness of her blond hair beneath my fingers, the feel of her body lying next to mine as it had for every night of her life.

To be with another in the depths of this pain–to suffer silently with another when nothing can be said and nothing can be done–this is an act of grace. This is Mary at the foot of the cross and John the Beloved at her side as she held the brutalized body of her dead Son.

When nothing can be said–when nothing can be done–this feeling of impotence, of meaningless, of choicelessness is undone by the act of compassion. Com-passion–to suffer with–is a choice that empowers and restores meaning to the void created by suffering and death. Compassion is an action when actions no longer seem to matter. Compassion is a word that restores language to a world that has abolished it.

Despair is a place where man encounters the perceived void of God. Therefore, by its nature, despair is a delusion–a profoundly convincing fantasy. Death is an event where man encounters the perceived void of life, which is also a delusion, since the structure of the natural world manifests that death constantly remakes itself in new life.

To suffer alone–to die alone– these are perhaps our greatest fears. To have lived and to fear that your life did not matter to another–this fear seems embedded with a terrible power and persuasion. To stand by and know that nothing you can tangibly accomplish or verbally relate can possibly have any further benefit–this is the juncture at which you encounter the appalling limits of your own mortality. It is too big, too much, and too desperate for most of us to handle. So how do you fight delusion and impotence and meaninglessness?

With a deeper magic, from before the dawn of time.

“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.”

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Compassion carries with it a deeper magic than the hypnosis of despair. Like a child, it walks through the dark to take the hand of the prisoner shuddering helplessly in the dungeon. It carries you through to the eye of the storm where you can rest, catch your breath, and determine to swim out the other side–alive. Compassion has the ability to remind the sufferer that he or she is not alone, is not meaningless, is not a slave or an animal–and it does this all without speaking a word.

There is a time and a place where all that remains is the choice to hold another through the pain. In witnessing the suffering of the other, you are making the other real in the most essential way. You are living inside of his or her story, and you will be able to tell it once words return. In suffering with the other, you stand as guardian against the terror of existential loneliness. Your physical presence becomes a silent and implacable barrier against the fantasy of absolute isolation. Though wordless, your very heartbeat is a reminder that we will not simply leave one another to wither in desolation–that we are not pointless and abandoned and helpless–that we are not orphans.

Do not let your hearts be troubled . . . I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.

John 14: 1, 18

We live in a world of deception and distortion, and this world likes to tell us that there comes a point in human life where you can do nothing else to preserve life or eliminate pain. This world tells us that we’re doing nothing when all we do is sit by the side of another, take his or her hand, and remain. But truth has a way of revealing itself with slow, measured grace and the sheer inexorability of a rising tide. In remaining with another in the depths of suffering, you are not doing nothing.

You are doing everything.