Style: Narrative/Reflective
Statement: I originally wrote this piece a few years after my father passed away for an English 11H assignment. Reflecting on how we as a society and in the world of education both perceive and teach empathy, I wanted to share my own experiences with being empathetic whenever people share their grievances of varying degrees of significance. We are often told as young kids, “Empathy is putting yourself in others' shoes!", but the reality is it is so much more complex than that; there is no way for you to understand the various factors that are piling onto someone, and so all we can do is be there for them rather than try and feel what they are feeling. An empath cares as much about a breakup as a death in the family.
“Oh my god, I just completely bombed that test. My parents are going to kill me”
Aw, I’m sorry. I understand. But you know it’s really not a big deal, right? Life goes on.
“No, you don’t understand, this is going to ruin everything!”
Oh no, really, it’s not a big deal, I think everything will be fine.
“Quick, wake up! Your father is in the hospital. He was out on a bike ride and collapsed.”
Failure, Rejection, Disappointment. To be an empath is to bond over a shared experience.
To overcome an issue that both of you, through some benign but common experience, can relate to and solve as a unit. To offer support for someone going through something that you had to suffer alone because you, more than anyone, know no one else should have to bear such
suffering alone.
ECMO. Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation. A life support mechanism used when
the heart and lungs, the epicenter of the entire human body, decide they have pumped one too
many drops of blood and oxygen and give up. It provides the necessary elements for human life
as if they are still there, alive and well, breathing normally beside you. As if. You tenderly hold
your mother, who no one can empathize with, How can one lose a partner of decades in the blink of an eye?
War, famine, disease. To be an empath is to attempt to comprehend the horrors of people
who only exist in the daily evening news broadcast or the depressing statistic you read every
morning with your coffee. Maybe to be an empath is to tsk or yell or maybe even shed a tear at
the suffering aliens on the screen before you switch it off and continue about your day?
Or not. As an ocean separates you from the squalor, only the eyes that look you up and
down in the mirror judge you.
Prayer. The soft rise and fall of the stomach of a sleeping parent would generally be
comforting if it wasn’t accompanied by the jarring beep of an ECG monitor. The artificial breath that you try and pretend is real, but deep down you know is driven by a machine. The faint smell of putrid bodily fluids attempting to hang in the air before they are immediately knocked off by the pungent sterile fumes of chemical-grade sanitizing alcohol. “There is nothing we can do but wait.” You hope that somewhere, a distant being of unimaginable power has empathy.
Law and order. Empathy straddles the fine line between legally dubious and morally
necessary. True empathy supersedes the law and the social contract. A true empath puts
themselves in the shoes of a migrant worker in a Third World country, with a young family
depending on him for survival, who makes less than three dollars a day, who turns to crossing the border illegally; if he were to wait for the excruciatingly long visa process his family would
surely starve. A true empath does not frown upon a family man who breaks his promise with
Uncle Sam to keep one he made to his wife.
Brain death. The complete and irreversible stopping of all brain functions. A brain that
was active, intelligent, and brilliant not 24 hours earlier ceases to think another thought. The
doctors pull back the nests of tubes and machines that kept him alive, revealing a man at peace
in an eternal nap. There is no empathy. How can you empathize with a creature that no longer
breathes?
Frustration. True empathy is feeling for your mother, who won’t let you out of the house
without access to your location and who doesn’t want you to drive when droplets rain from the
sky any faster than the rhythm of a slow waltz. She does not mean to inconvenience you; she just cannot subdue her protective motherly instincts, which are only worsened by her tragic loss. A true empath will suck it up and return before curfew and pick up every call in an effort to ease her suffering as much as possible. I am not a true empath.
Grief. A crowd of colleagues, friends, distant relatives, fills the gloomy hall. Fixed below
your wailing mother, who curses and begs and cries for him to come back, he lies in eternal rest. Dressed in a pink dress shirt and treated with enough chemicals to keep the body humanoid for long enough to be viewed, you reach for a stone-cold, rigid hand. One by one, solemnly lined up, they approach you offering condolences. “Are you doing OK?”, they sympathetically inquire as if the answer isn’t made plainly obvious by your wailing mother, whose whimpers are interrupted by shrieks that pierce the hall. They are just trying to be empathetic. Maybe it’s the thought that counts.
Perseverance. To be an empath is to understand it is not the end of the world. Life will go
on. The memories fade, you forget the chords of their voice and the smell that wafts in as they
enter a room. True empathy extends to yourself as well and does not punish you for simply
moving on. You deserve it. A true empath extends the same hand of support to themselves as far as they do to others.
Self-empathy loosens the knot that tightens around your chest and restricts your breath.
Selflessness. To be an empath is to put aside obstacles you have dealt with for years when
someone complains about the most mundane and mild annoyance. If they were to experience
what you have been through, live their life in your shoes, their complaints would be rendered so inconsequential, it would retreat into the deepest recesses of their conscience, never to be granted a passing thought. To them, it is important. To them, it is all they know.
“Oh my god, I just completely bombed that test. My parents are going to kill me”
Oh. That’s terrible. It is a big deal. Let me help you.
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