Harvest moon shinin’ down from the sky, a weary sign for all
I’m gonna leave this one horse town, had to stall till the fall
Now I’m gonna crawl, across the great Divide
- Across the Great Divide, (The Band version)
Yesterday’s post mentioned the sharp lines of understanding that divide our usually heterogeneous species – differences that put us either on one side of a critical experience or the other.
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| Today's Photos Continue Yesterday's Taken Recently By My Friend Gordon |
I believe I’ve learned a few things about the great divide. First of all, these dividing lines tend to be one-way. From yesterday’s examples, you either have lost your spouse or you haven’t, you’re either a picked-on Jewish kid or you’re not. And the exception proves the rule – I was deeply moved by my friend’s description of joining the multitude of people at the moment of their death, because he is a rare person who lived to tell that tale, like dying people who describe seeing their body on the operating table or the famous tunnel of light.
These sharp divisions are usually one way because once you’ve crossed a line, you can see both sides in a way that was impossible before. I thought I was sensitive to the rights of “the disabled.” Then I thought I really knew a thing or two about coping with disability during the years I spent trying to get Mary, as her health declined, around Europe, then around the US, then around town, and finally just around our house.
In reality, I was a piker, I knew very little. When I contracted myasthenia gravis and hung the blue and white disabled parking tag on my rearview mirror, I learned two things. First, when I thought I was an expert but before I was disabled, I knew lots of facts - but no feelings. I didn’t understand the combination of fear, humiliation, and outrage that was a relentless feature of Mary’s life for years.
Furthermore, I now have a new perspective on Mary's life, because now I know I still won’t ever fully understand what it was like for her – my own disability has opened a door into her experience, but I can’t step through that door. Around town or out shopping, I see people with greater disability in powered chairs and I know most of all that I don’t really know. As a consequence of this lesson I only park in handicap spaces when my illness and the distance force it – otherwise, the next person with a disabled tag could very well need the spot more. This is the precious gift of beginning to understand my lack of understanding.
The one-way nature of these lines of intrinsic difference, like the inability to see across the sunrise marsh that I described yesterday, creates a few obligations. One is that phrase I learned from the people of Not Dead Yet: “Nothing about us, without us.” Divided by circumstance from a slice of humanity, you cannot speak for them.
I can’t tell you how many people who had evidently never lost more than a pet hamster felt welcome to instruct me about grief and loss of a spouse, after Mary died. Anxious to appear empathetic and “sensitive,” whites tell African Americans about blackness, straights assure gays they know how it is – and you can add on to the list, we all can.
I think it's a good idea to be respectful, to work on being sensitive to those who are different from you. But it’s a bad idea to speak as if you know how it is for them, or to speak for others, or to read a couple of articles and a Wikipedia entry - and then tell us all about it.
The second lesson for me has been, if the line that divides us is one-way, there’s a responsibility for those who have in some sense crossed, to reach back and grasp the hands of those on the other side. Not to pull them across, but to lessen the alienation and loneliness on both sides; to recover and restore mutuality; to seek and give understanding, and comfort.
When Mary was diagnosed with ALS, a certain number of people, when confronted with that horrifying news, stepped back from the great divide, not to be heard from again. When Mary died, more fell away – just as others, by the way, stepped up smartly. The one way-ness of the great divide of Mary's suffering and death has become prominent for me in recent months, as I seek to understand my share of responsibility for the disappearance of certain people from my life. If people are frightened at Mary’s unembellished reminder of their own inevitable extinction, that’s up to them. To the extent that I am a dark emotional vortex that taxes others – that’s on me. And, I can do something about it.
Finally, I want to say why it’s worth paying attention to the great divides, aside from the fact that lord knows, humanity is divided up enough as it is.
The seeming impenetrability of great human emotional divides leads to the creation of victims and also to feelings of superiority. When you hold exclusive or arcane knowledge, you may conclude that you’re better, or at least advantaged. You might want to say, well friend, if you could only understand what it’s like to be Jewish or gay or undocumented or widowed – but since you can’t, you’re just not a member of my club.
It's just as useless to obtain superiority through victimhood. I can use misfortune to separate myself from others due to special status as Jewish or gay or undocumented or widowed. In either case - superiority or victimhood - you invite people who don't share your characteristics to give up on empathy, to back away from the brink that separates you. And so we all end up more isolated, more hurt, more lonely.
It’s not easy pushing past some of the deep gulfs when the barriers appear to create a refuge. I never told my mom about the crowds of grammar school kids who took turns kicking me – I never told anyone. It’s hard to talk about my wife’s suffering and death, and not fear that people will wish I'd just go away.
I’m pretty sure that every person encounters these unbridgeable differences in life, how could they not? That makes for a glorious truth: one feature of human existence that isn’t ever divided, in which we all share, is that we will at times find ourselves alone and scared, unavoidably separated from the people around us. It's a comfort to know that we all have to sometimes navigate what we can’t share - the great divide unites us all. This understanding can help any of us survive the inevitable trials of life.
I woke up this morning to one of those glorious salt marsh sunrises, the water rapidly turning purple then red then pink and then turquoise. I looked at the line of black trees to the east and thought of the days of Mary’s dying, when I looked at the same sunrise and couldn’t imagine what this very day would feel like. This morning I reached back over my shoulder to that frightened and lonely guy from two years ago – and we embraced at last.
