Connecting More Deeply with Others

If you've been following my blog you might remember that I've been listening to an audible book by David Brooks titled: How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. I'd love to claim that I'm intellectual enough to have known who David Brooks is before I started this book, but I'm not. All I knew was that Bill Gates has the title on his 'Must Read" summer reading recommendations list and that two of his takeaways from the book are about understanding the power of curiosity and how to acquire empathy building skills. After a little more digging I learned that he's a conservative columnist for the New York Times and that Barack Obama is also a fan of David Brook's writing. That was good enough for me to invest my time and money into the book. I fangirl both Gates and Obama.

I was not far into the book when I decided to try out one of the suggestions for how to draw people out when I found myself at a dinner table with The Art Professor and two former child psychiatrists---one is my neighbor who I've nicknamed Robbie's Mom because of her dog. The other psychiatrist at the table I've never written about so let's call her Sarah, which may or may not be her real name. I tried on the nicknames The Caregiver, Liberal Lucy and Sam's Wife (since I know him better than her, having spent six hours teaching him how to play mahjong and having played with him every Wednesday since March). But she is more than all those nicknames as are all my fellow residents who I've given nicknames to.

Anyway, I'm getting off track here. When it came time to ask each other what we did that day (which is always par for the course around here at dinner tables) Sarah shared that she'd taken her husband to the dentist and I replied, "That must have been exhausting." "It was!" she replied and the Art Professor looked confused.  "Why was it exhausting?" she asked. Sam is a big guy and Sarah's petite and he's confined to an electric wheelchair and has to transfer in and out of a manual, transport chair for outings. Long story slightly shorter we got into a discussion about how going to public places you never know how steep the incline ramps are or how disability friendly the parking lots and restrooms will be, not to mention pushing a big guy in a chair is hard physically. And Sarah said, "It takes three people to get him out of his transport chair and into the dentist's chair." Then she turned to me and said, "Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to vent!" Wow, I thought, the book suggestions actually work!

The Art Professor then spoke up to ask how can friends and the community help family caregivers? Sarah hemmed and hawed but didn't say anything so I jumped with, "Time," I suggested. "Offer to sit with a disabled spouse so the caregiver can have a few hours to run an errand or two." 

"I had a friend with a disabled husband, "The Art Professor replied, "and she always turned me down when I offered. I guess she didn't really need a break."

 "Well, sometimes you worry all the time you're gone from your disabled spouse," I tried to explain, "and it's not always as enjoyable as one might think." 

"Worry about what?" 

"About what could go wrong. Bathroom issues. Falls. My husband, for example, had swallowing issues," I said, "and could choke to death if he wasn't watched like a hawk." And here's where I was rendered speechless.

"That could be a good thing. It would speed up the dying process and end a caregiver role." 

So much for empathy! So much for The Art Professor not noticing that I dropped out of the conversation and was boiling over with ambivalent thoughts. I wanted to both rage at the coldness of her careless and/or callous statement and at the same time I wanted to use it as a teaching moment that might embarrass the crap out of her---and tit-for-tat me would have been happy if it did. It's three days later as I write this and I STILL want to tell The Art Professor that choking on some potato chips a friend let my husband have off his plate was ultimately what killed him. Even though a nurse happened to be close by at the restaurant and preformed the Heimlich to save him that day he unbeknownst had ingested potato chips into his lungs where they caused a fungi to grow and by the time he was hospitalized weeks later it was too late. The fungi had taken over and he died 10-15 minutes after being taken off life support. Yup, choking on his food DID "speed up his dying process" but it was by no means a good thing for me or for him. 

That conversation was the only social experiment I did based on David Brook's book but it probably won't be my last. However it will be a while before I strike out again to teach myself to connect with others on a deeper level. Quoting this author: "There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood. And yet we humans don’t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood." In the course of this one dinner I felt both empowered by helping one of my neighbors be seen but I left that dinner table feeling invisible and if I wasn't a blogger I don't know where I would have dumped the pain and guilt that bubbled back up regarding the way in which Don died. ©

 

The Goldfinch and the Book Club

When I first looked at the novel my monthly Book Club selected I was overwhelmed. It was 771 pages and as I thumbed through the book I felt like I was back in grade school where I often got hopelessly bogged down in the minutia of trying to sound out words. The book was filled with foreign words and art and antique terms that were so far out of my vocabulary that they might have been written in Klingon and I knew I’d struggle too much to read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Perfectly timed to my dilemma, a gift from the gods of Amazon came along---an offer for two free audible books appeared in my email box. I downloaded The Goldfinch so fast I’m surprised my Kindle Fire didn’t squeal like a stuck pig in the process, but I soon figured out that the volume on the device was so low that even with my hearing aids in I had to sit in my La-Z-Boy with the Kindle on a table three feet away. A master at multitasking I thought about knitting something while Kindle read to me, but instead I ended up following along, my eyes touching every single word in the entire book. Wow!  Thirty-two and a half hours of listening and I did it all over five days which should tell you something about how highly I’d rate the book. That's definitely the way to devour books that intimidate you. 

I loved the characters, loved the story line and looked forward to discussing them both in Book Club. The depth of the author’s knowledge and/or research abilities blew me away. The book is being made into a movie coming out next year and out of curiosity I wanted to see how IMDb summed up the plot and can you believe it, they did it in one lousy sentence! “A boy in New York is taken in by a wealthy Upper East Side family after his mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Wikipedia did a better job saying: “The novel is a Bildungsroman told in the first person by Theodore Decker who, at the age of 13, survives a terrorist bombing at an art museum in which his beloved mother dies. Staggering out through the debris, he takes with him a small, Dutch Golden Age painting, The Goldfinch, which will serve as a singular source of hope as he descends into a world of crime. The painting is one of the few surviving works by Rembrandt's most promising pupil, Carel Fabritius; nearly all of Fabritius' oeuvre was destroyed in the Delft explosion of 1654, in which the artist himself was killed.” I dare anyone reading this to tell me what “bildungsroman” means without looking it up. Give up? It’s just a fancy way to say it’s a coming of age story. 

Book Club took place just a few hours before a major snow storm was due to hit the area. All of us showed up with the same plan to stop at the grocery store on the way home so we'd have supplies to hunker down for the weekend weather siege. But no one seemed to be in a hurry to start discussing the book and finally it came out that only four of the twelve us had finishing reading it. What a disappointment! Those of us who read the book spent the rest of the hour answering questions from the others who hadn’t read it wanting to know how this or that aspect of the complicated plot turned out. And for once, I came to club super prepared with my answers to the Readers Guide Questions written out, complete with page numbers to passages like: “Because our secrets define us as opposed to the face we show the world, the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not.” I thought about that passage a lot and I wanted to know if the others in the club agreed with that passage. Am I defined by the secrets I keep? Are you? As much as I’ve written about my life, I still have a few secrets tucked away. 

I’ve been reading a lot of books lately. Some good, more a waste of time. I’m getting better at not finishing those that don’t hold my interest or are riddled with stuff that drives me crazy. I mean come on, if you set a scene in Minnesota on Christmas you don’t have your characters splashing water in a backyard swimming pool! I checked, the author lives in California so maybe she didn’t know that back yard pools get drained in the fall in climates where water freezes in the winters, but that's what Google is for, isn't it? You research what you don't know---but how do you know what you don't know? Oh well, wordsmiths like Donna Tartt who take your breath away and make you think more than make up for the writers who don't. ©

Dialogue from The Goldfinch