Our Desperate Wish for Fairness

Human beings want so desperately to believe in fair that they’re willing to sacrifice the feelings of others to avoid that conflict. For as many stories of people who have survived through personal disaster, whose faces cover NY Times Bestsellers and whose stories are known across many countries, or who have exposed themselves even to just their friends the heartache they have known….I would guess that there exists thousands of others whose experience has hurt them beyond repair.

Human beings want so desperately for those around them to be strong, to not show their suffering, to not break down in despair that we drive those who are hurting to experience that pain alone: on the floor of their living room or fetal under a bedroom comforter.

When a child struggles in school through a shattered home life, physical or emotional or mental disabilities, we recognize that difference but wish so badly for them to be the exception. To rise up and perform to the level of children without those barriers in their way because we want hope that Life balances itself out if you try hard enough.

When a widow sits out at dinner, still in shock with the vast chasm of aloneness and longing for her soulmate staring her daily in the eyes, those that pulled her out of the house for a meal feel the need to enlighten her: “You’re young! You’ll find someone else. You’ll have a family and you’ll be happy again.” We want hope that someone else will take care of her and we can be relieved of that position if she just opens herself to the chance for disappointment and heartbreak again.

...As if she doesn’t realize her age. As if that is what she is worried about. As if her husband could ever be replaced by logging onto a dating site and picking the first attractive face she sees in order to fill a box on the bookshelf labeled “husband”. As if gathering the pieces of a heart that will never be whole again is an easy task.

When you share the universe’s decision to not grant you fertility, people want to tell you about their coworker’s friend – the one that went through 3 rounds of IVF or 2 miscarriages, or had cancer in her 20’s – she adopted! She has a beautiful happy family. See? You can be happy!

When someone shares the devastation of receiving a life-altering diagnosis – Parkinson’s, cancer, ALS – many times those surrounding them want to rush in to assure them that “we’re going to kick ___’s butt”, “treatment options exist” and “new medications are being discovered daily.”

Let. Them. Grieve.

Realize that the widow will always wonder how beautiful her life with her first husband would have been. He will always be her first choice.

Realize that the mother will never have another first-born child or may never have another daughter. She may have an oldest surviving child or she may have future pregnancies but the miscarriage or the stillborn baby or the child that died decades before his/her time cannot be replaced. Cannot be forgotten.

Realize that the beautiful family brought together through adoption may be parents making the best of a devastating situation. They can love their children that are not their genetic makeup but they may still shed tears for losing the chance to experience what a pregnancy feels like physically and emotionally. They may wonder what color eyes their son or daughter would have had when their unique set of genes came together. They may imagine how short or how tall, how creative or how quirky or how proficient at sports would have been produced when the two of them made another life. They may wonder what beautiful being they could have made if Life had dealt them different cards.

Realize that regardless of the outcome, the diagnosis that was just received is devastating. Their friends, their neighbors, the asshole at work that complains about everything: why do they have their health still?

What did I do to step in this pile of Life’s shit?

You, friend, your role is not to help this person fix or figure out or plan for anything. Your role is to sit silently. Your role is not to imagine what you would want to hear but to listen to the one that is affected by Life’s cruel twist. This is not a time to put on “big girl panties” or to “be strong” or “one day it will get better”. You don’t know that: whether you’re 20 or 70. Your life’s experience may have shown you that people can survive loss, that some have the support and resolve to continue and to play the cruel and biased game of Life with the most recent hand dealt.

Your life’s experience may not have shown you the family that lived forever in poverty after the loss of their breadwinner. Your life's experience may not have shown you the couple that couldn't afford to adopt and loses the chance at Christmas with grandchildren in old age, whose holidays are alone, and whose name dies when they do. Your life’s experience may not have shown you the widow/widower who passed away a year after their partner, their heart broken and their health shattered when they lost their other half. Your life’s experience may not have enlightened you to the soldier that survived the tour but silenced the nightmares 6 weeks or 2 years or 30 years later. The experience, the pain, the support, the personality, the resolve: all of these may be different for you than that person sitting before you.

Life does not give everyone the same chances, the same happy endings, the same opportunities. It gives them different struggles, different paths, different frequencies and intensities of pain. Life kills children and geniuses, homeless and wealthy, it maims and destroys those with the tenderest or the cruelest hearts either at random or sometimes, it would seem all toward 1 person or family. We cannot expect everyone to embrace the loss of that beautiful human being they relied on in a positive way. Death and suffering are realities but they are not something to expect our friends to “embrace” any more than murder or rape or genocide are horrifying experiences for some human beings.

Your friend, your loved one, your acquaintance, they will experience this episode of Life being ridiculously unfair in their own way. It is not for you to tell them that someone else you know found happiness, that another person has gone through this or worse and thrived. Because they haven’t. No one on the planet has entered the current struggle exactly the same. Each human being has an emotional body burden in essence, and their relationship with others and their relationship with themselves is not the same as the face in that book or move or on that blog who shares their story about surviving through personal disaster. It is not for you to tell them that it will get better. Only they can learn if that will be their future.