Bearing Each Other's Burdens

Walking around with a big piece of news like a cancer diagnosis and a recent surgery is a kind of burden. I am speaking here not of the anxiety over the issue itself, but in terms of the unseemliness of talking so much about oneself and the repetitiveness of explaining over and over the story and the details known thus far. News travels fast and sending a few mass emails goes a long way. But still, people are away or are in a circle of acquaintance just beyond the email list, so one is in the position of explaining a lot and often. Or else one opts to say nothing, to say everything's "Fine."

Wendell Berry writes beautifully in the novel Hannah Coulter about a time and a place where it was assumed that one mostly grinned and bore through it, no matter what it was.

"I need to tell about my people in their grief. I don't think grief is something they get over or get away from. In a little community like this it is around us and in us all the time, and we know it. ... But we shut our mouths and go ahead. How we are is 'Fine.' There are always a few who will recite their complaints, but the proper answer to 'How are you?' is 'Fine.'
The thing you have most dreaded has happened at last. The worst thing you might have expected has happened, and you didn't expect it. You have grown old and ill, and most of those you have loved are dead or gone away. Even so:
'How're you?'
'Fine. How're you?'
'Fine.'

There is always some shame and fear in this, I think, shame for the terrible selfishness and loneliness of grief, and fear of the difference between your grief and anybody else's. But this is a kind of courtesy too and a kind of honesty, an unwillingness to act as if loss and grief and suffering are extraordinary. And there is something else: an honoring of the solitude in which the grief you have to bear will have to be borne. Should you fall on your neighbor's shoulder and weep in the midst of work? Should you go to the store with tears on your face? No. You are fine.
And yet the comfort somehow gets passed around: a few words that are never forgotten, a note in the mail, a look, a touch, a pat, a hug, a kind of waiting with, a kind of standing by, to the end. Once in a while we hear it sung out in a hymn, when every throat seems suddenly widened with love and a common longing:

In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

We all know what that beautiful shore is. It is [our community] with all its loved ones come home alive." p. 61

The people the narrator speaks of are not so very different from a lot of people probably. They are not so different from my people.

There is an obvious nobility in perseverence to this sort of stiff-upper-lip attitude and Berry describes it about as well as can be done, but that's not all there is. I think this tendency can also easily fall into pride, the terrible situation of really feeling like it is not all 'Fine' but the inability to admit it or to ask for help. I don't think the narrator's positive portrayal is wrong in this sense or overly sentimental either. But the same stoic demeanor might arise from two different sources in two different people: one is courteous and humble about the universality of suffering, the other is pig-headed and proud.

The other reaction I have is that, however the news gets out, the responding words and sentiments do get through. One might hear the words "We're thinking about you guys" or "We've been praying for you", a hundred times in a row until one would rather just sink back below the radar, to say everything's "Fine" just in order to get on with it and go back to talking about the weather. But then hours later, or in the middle of the night, the realization sinks in that there are literally hundreds of people for whom my situation constitutes a real concern in their life. There are probably dozens and dozens of individuals, not counting immediate family, who have prayed sincerely, maybe even on a daily basis, for the best possible outcome. Which is to say they have, however briefly, centered themselves and focused the whole of their being on bringing about blessing in another's life, in my life. That is a truly amazing fact.