On acts of service - and selfishness

'We take care of each other. Be careful out there.'

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a day of service, to recognize the power we all have to change the communities in which we live for the better.

I got thinking about that service, and then, selfishness. There is a certain selfishness in the experience and aftermath of grief. At least there was for me.

On Fridays in recent years, when colleagues were tossing around their various weekend plans, I stayed quiet, growing concurrently more sad and more angry, because I was going to buy another phone for my mom, who got in the habit of cutting the cord because she thought it rang too much, or driving to visit her only to be turned away because she had hit a nurse earlier and certainly wasn’t going to be “rewarded” with a visit with the only person she knew, or soon after, for a memorial service.

On Mondays, exhausted, I shrugged and mustered a slight smile every time I was asked enthusiastically, “how was your weekend?!” - a harmless question to anyone who did, in fact, have a great weekend. For me though, it felt like a weekly assurance that my life was harder than theirs in a way that I didn’t feel was ever OK to share.

I realize now the anger was a way to protect myself from hurt but also to curb the jealousy I held for others who were not caught in a web where their life didn’t feel like their own. I became not only selfish, but bitter - an about-face for a person who is inherently an optimist that cared a great deal for other people and for other creatures, as well.

I’m the kind of person who always says “yes” when asked for a favor. A good colleague and friend. The kind of person that donates money to food banks and sponsors orphaned elephants in Kenya. Still, grief had me bound to a view that didn’t allow for the experiences of others. It had stripped me of the empathy that I had always thought was one of my best traits. There were even times when Joe and I started saying “hold my beer” in reaction to other peoples’ hardships. A low point, for sure. We also talked about creating a calendar where instead of happy family photos, it would feature our sad faces with various themes depending on the grief of that particular month.

This is all to say that grief can easily turn you into a person you may not recognize. But it can also bestow some really incredible gifts.

If you think you go into situations considering what people could be going through behind the scenes, what they’re dealing with that’s too painful to be shared, to go through the most painful moments of your life, to come out on the other side and find a way to be optimistic again, to rewrite your biggest dreams and goals with a bigger, varnished-yet-more-beautiful view of the world, that is the biggest gift I can imagine getting out of this experience. There’s salvation in knowing you’re not alone.

I spent a long time living as if I were the one with issues with which no one could relate. But the more time I’ve had to emerge from that cloud of pain, the more I’ve pushed out shame and guilt, the more I’ve seen the unspoken grief happening around me, and that’s given me the perspective that my grief may someday help someone else.

Sharing with you has done that. So I thank you, genuinely, and hope that today’s problems, whatever they are, will be a little easier tomorrow.

Or as a meteorologist said yesterday, when the temperatures in Chicago topped out in the single digits: “We’re Chicagoans. We take care of each other. Check on your neighbors and be careful out there.”