Empathy is a Bitch

I originally intended to do some crap sort of post about "oh no, I'm 25 now, quarter life crisis, wah wah wah." However, walking home from the post office today I changed my mind.

In order to from the post office to my flat, you have to walk alongside and cross some fairly busy roads, ones that are large enough and full of enough crazy drivers to make you want to just wait for the walk light to turn green.  On the way back, I noticed that traffic was significantly heavier than it was on the way up.  I saw in the distance a few cop cars and just assumed, "oh, fender bender, no big deal." At least, that's what I thought until I saw the long black lump on the ground.

I'm not sure if it's just a sign of how much of a suburbanite I am or if it's just part of the human condition, but when faced with a dead body, the first thought in my mind is not, "oh, that's a dead body."  I actually can't grasp it. I kind of just stared at it, and I remember running through a list of different things it could possibly be that did not include "dead person."  I thought it might be an investigation bag brought by an investigator.  I thought maybe it was some other part of the evidence left on the road.  The closer I got, the more my brain spun trying to rationalize what this object could be, until I saw shoes sticking out the end of it.  I'm guessing they don't make a "one size fits all" body bag.

I don't handle death particularly well.  What limited experience I have with it (which, realistically speaking, I probably have more of it than other people my age in my same relative situation), had not shown me to be a very accepting kind of person.  I hear that they've passed on, I read about it, hell I've seen the person laid out in a casket and it still just has a level of surreal that I subconsciously refuse to overcome.  It's like my brain takes the information and says, "no no, that's unpleasant, we don't know how to deal with unpleasant! Let's lock it away in a box somewhere and forget all about it."

Walking down the sidewalk, catching glimpses of this person between passing cars, all I could do was think about the whole situation.  The cars in line to get around the accident scene probably either thought the way I did, or possibly worse, were annoyed that someone was dumb enough to cause whatever scene that was delaying them from where they were heading.  This man's passing is suddenly reduced to an annoyance, yet another thing to have to "deal" with for some people.  I then thought that while these people were parading past, honking and cutting each other off, they were possibly being the first people to acknowledge this man's death, or at least be aware of it.  Somewhere in this world is a collection of people who don't know that their son/husband/brother/uncle/father won't be coming home.  Instead, he's spending the night in the morgue.  And right there, I felt so strongly for those people, going about their daily lives, never suspecting anything, and I could see it so clearly in my mind the moment when everything changes.  I've had that moment, I've lived it.  It's terrible.  And I relived it all over again in the moments it took to walk by.

So, I suppose, as some kind of lesson to take home with you, please, tell the people you love that you love them.  Be a little kinder and more patient with people who may annoy you.  You don't know when you or they will be ripped from this world.

XO,
L