After days of struggling to find the write words, I finally messaged B - my black friend of a couple of decades. Her life has had more than its fair share of difficulties. Many years ago, her step-son was shot to death just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. We never talked about it. That is the way it has always been with B - the pain is buried and never mentioned. It becomes sacred ground that no one is allowed to tread on.
She copes by expanding the scope of her grief. It is just not her step-son but many young men from the community who have suffered in the same way. And its not just about the community, around the world there are groups and classes of people who are victimized, marginalized and killed because they are the "other" and in the "out" group. B will have transformed her pain to become part of this much larger global pain, wrong done to her can at once become a drop in the ocean of wrong and also be the infinite source of sadness.
The more she deflects and diverts the pain from her, the more she seems to suffer. I have seen this for years and have never found a way to support her. No surprise, my most recent attempt to express solidarity fell flat on its face. I would have regretted not having tired to reach out to her but I regretted that I did and unwittingly hit some raw nerve despite my efforts.
I realized there is something self-ish about our need to be there and support our friends in what we perceive to be their time of need. We seek validation that our pain is not in error and infact real. When that gesture is rebuffed, we could feel isolated and confused in feeling our particular somewhat undeserving grief that has no place to go because we are not sure we were even allowed to feel it in the first place.
B by refusing to accept my gesture with kindness, had invalidated my right to feel anything about the situation here in our town and the country. I was not deemed deserving enough, close enough to the cause. I had been placed in the "other" and "out" group, chastised silently for "pretending" that I may have kinship to her cause.
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