The Harrowing Wisdom

Late last year, the necessity arose to move my father-in-law, age 95, into a care facility as a result of a combination of physical mobility difficulties compounded by the onset of Alzheimer’s. This decision, finally, fell to my wife and weighed heavily on her emotionally. Fiercely independent, both my father-in-law and mother-in-law rejected any subtle nudging toward such a decision until circumstances forced their hand and my wife stepped in to rescue both from possible catastrophe. After several months, both my wife and my mother-in-law realized the timeliness and sensibility of the move, despite the initial upheaval and lingering self-recriminations.

Throughout these changes, I watched from a type of aesthetic distance, offering support in any and every way possible. I most noticed that the emotional responses of my wife and her mother, when not overburdened by guilt and an expected degree of fear, tended toward sympathy for my father-in-law. In short, they felt sorry for him, and to a certain degree, themselves, and each other. In the year or so that preceded his move to the care facility, in the time I spent with my father-in-law, I developed less a sympathy for his condition and plight than a sort of evolving empathy that gave me a clarity not only about his condition and situation, but also about him as a man, a person, within that condition and situation. As a result, I gained a new and deeper insight into sympathy and empathy.

Sympathy resonates from the intellect filtered through the “abstract” heart, manifesting in compassion. Sympathy is a reaction toward another that begins essentially as a kneejerk reaction that runs too often to sentimentality. Common responses run along the lines of, “That’s a sad woman,” “Those are pitiful people,” or, “I feel sorry for them.” This distances the actual person or persons by making them an object of our sympathy rather than embracing them by way of empathy. We then seek more to act by doing something for the person, to offer compassion, rather than seeking to effect a specific change in his or her circumstances.

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Empathy, on the other hand, arises from a direct interrelationship between two people with little or no filtering through or by the intellect but rising spontaneously through an organic response within the psyche or soul. Empathy, then, becomes a shared experience—a sort of harmony of emotion that resonates between two people in an instinctive or intuitive relationship that binds those two people together. Thus empathy resonates with at least some aspect of a person’s being.

Empathy allows us to experience, if not the entirety of another person’s experience, at least multiple facets of that experience in such a way that we no longer simply feel sympathy for the person; rather we actually feel that person’s responses as our own and, with often harrowing clarity, we gain an emotional response that allows us not only to act on the person but to also act on the causality of that person’s situation to try to resolve or ameliorate the situation. On a broader, less personal scale and in light of recent tragedies, surely empathy can bring more social and psychological change for the people devastated by these tragedies.

This indicates empathy as an integral tool for problem solving. Sympathy tends to offer only a temporary fix for the person in a difficult situation. Empathy, through a stark awareness of being the person in that difficult situation, shifts focus from the plight of the person to the cause of their plight. Such insight, while not disregarding sympathy altogether, goes beyond sympathy toward a deeper understanding—even wisdom—that becomes a practical response rather than mere transitory pity.

Reflecting on my visits and long talks with my father-in-law in the summer before taking him to the care facility, I recall an afternoon sitting together in front of his house mostly watching and enjoying the day. Suddenly, my father-in-law said to me, “Sometimes, when you think about the world today, you have to wonder if there is a God.” This took me aback not because we had never before discussed God or religion but because in that instant, in a kind of Joycean epiphany, I entered my father-in-law’s experience and knew the uncertainty and trepidation of growing farther away from the present both mentally and physically, of confronting, not so much death, as the silent receding of life. That shared experience helped me to see more clearly that what I felt toward my

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father-in-law was not sympathy but empathy. Free of guilt and with a greater understanding of his situation, it became obvious that placing my father-in-law in the care facility was not done to him but for him. By allowing his experience to become mine, the acquired knowledge of his situation provided a valuable insight that improved my chances to assist him in his journey and perhaps lessen its impact by my becoming, at least intuitively, an active participant in not only finding but also feeling a way through his difficult transition.

Through empathy, and its harrowing wisdom, I’m able to experience his fear and confusion rather than imposing my own onto him, thus allowing me to understand his responses to the fear and confusion as part of the process. I’m able to continue to see the man, the whole man, not as a man to be pitied but as a man who needs to be, as much as possible, met on his terms and within the context of his situation and condition.

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