Amazing how hard it is to say something meaningful to a friend in pain. Is it because the culture I’ve come from doesn’t provide sufficient amount of words and expressions for feelings? Is it because one comes to realize that there are feelings that have no name, unnamed and lawless, that nevertheless cross the space between our soul and mind like smugglers cross the borders?
I remember agonizing when I had to pay my condolences at a funeral parlor or make a shiva call. Then, one downward-spiraled year, things started happening to me, and I could see for myself how difficult it was to express feelings when it came to your friend or family. It’s not that it was much easier with the stranger, but somehow… yes, easier! At least, a stranger expects less and is happy with getting whatever response. It’s not so with friends. One wants them to be REALLY hurt, and then REALLY helpful, and then listen to your emotions more than to the sound of their own anxious voices. It’s tough call.
Another amazing observation was the range of emotions that friend’s meager attempts at consolation would produce in me. Annoyance and rage, anger and pain – all these feelings fit into tight space between “I’m so sorry [x] happened to you” and the next remark.
As some of them try to insist on hearing you out and then giving (mostly useless) advice, while others run for their life from your anxious, disaster shaded phone calls and e-mails, you struggle with sharing. Then, you find yourself at loss for anything meaningful to say. Either your situation turns into a soap opera for everyone to ponder on, or it gets stuck with no positive change – in the official language of death and dying, they call these near death patients “stable.”
You start avoiding conversations. Your e-mails and texts get short yet hardly sweet. People start avoiding asking you a polite, “How are you?” out of fear to get a long winged answer, but they don’t even know that you’re incapable of any.
And then, a miracle happens. Strangers, caring less and knowing next to none, become profoundly helpful. I remember answering a chat request from a virtual friend who was, of course, a virtual stranger, pun unintended. After the shortest exchange, something like, “So how are you tonight?” –“Things are as shitty as it gets,” a stranger offered… to play for me. I heard some fumbling on the other end of the Web, and then sounds of a keyboard. He improvised for me, or so he said. No one cared for his music. Not as much as I did at the time.