Going Beyond Empathy
Do you ever wonder how your grandchildren will relate to you? Or what you’ll one day relate to them about the days of your youth?
The year my own grandmother was born, women had not yet been declared persons in Canada. There was no such thing as antibiotics or television, and if you wanted a drink, you had to get it from the black market.
Yesterday, she was 99 years old—a few months shy of having witnessed an entire century. And two days ago, I sat at her bedside in the midst of her last few days alive.
Growing up, I didn’t always know how to relate to my grandma. As someone who was raised in a household of 11 siblings—where things like bathtime and meals needed to be done with assembly-line efficiency—sometimes her no-nonsense, “get it done” work ethic intimidated me. And for the last five or so years, her ever-worsening dementia has obstructed almost any sense of being able to connect with her at all.
If you’re like me, you might sometimes doubt, in situations like these, your ability to truly “put yourself in the shoes” of someone whose circumstances are so different from your own. And you might worry that this failure of empathy will therefore prevent the possibility of true connection with that person.
But the other day as I sat at my grandma’s bedside, listening to her shaky, laboured breathing, there was absolutely nothing required for our connection but presence. As she lay there looking into my eyes so earnestly, tightly holding both my hand and my gaze—despite not even having recognized me for years—this occurred to me in my body as the essence of being human. Just to sit here together and breathe, and to see, and to be seen.
Of course, we often make things a lot more complicated. Before going in, I had been scared to see her, not knowing what to say, not knowing how to relate, not knowing how to witness her pain (or maybe more accurately, not being willing). But then, there I was: almost entirely unphased by her near-death state, my body knowing exactly what to do—because there WAS actually nothing to do but to be. This was, it seemed, the only thing she needed.
In so much of our work at AR-GO, I believe THIS is ultimately what we are practicing. It is what Zen priest angel Kyodo Williams calls “the willingness to be undone”: in which, through letting go of needing to know anything, we open up new space for genuine, relational presence. This kind of presence does not require “empathy” in the sense of getting another’s world; it simply requires giving your attention, fully, to the moment that you and another are sharing within it.
It requires far less of us, and far more of us, than we have been accustomed to believe.
And, in the end, there may be nothing more sacred.
-Text by Shaina List