empathy

Empathy work

/ jdunderwood / 2 Comments

In a class I took a few weeks ago, the instructor read “Kindness,” a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, a poet whose work I have enjoyed for several years. Here are the first few lines of it:

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

She then, in the way of really gifted poets, begins to paint vivid pictures with few words. Here’s one of them: “Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness / you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho / lies dead by the side of the road. / You must see how this could be you, / how he too was someone / who journeyed through the night with plans / and the simple breath that kept him alive.“

“You must see how this could be you.”

Those words…

My mind brought up the first death I witnessed as a chaplain.

I was gaining clinical hours as a chaplain student at a community hospital in a neighborhood of Chicago. It had a single ICU with about 15 beds.

The chaplains were paged by the nursing staff. The paramedics had brought in a man found down in the street. He’d overdosed and was barely alive. When staff contacted family, they learned more about him. He’d just gotten out of prison and it seemed he had made the common error of taking drugs at the same level of use that he’d been using before going to prison. He didn’t think about the fact that his body was no longer used to that level and had overdosed on what he thought was a safe amount.

The morning we were paged, his condition had deteriorated, and the nurses knew he would die within hours. Family was planning to come in, but they were trying to figure out transportation for multiple members in different locations, and all this was taking longer than planned, and the nurses did not want this man to die alone.* So they paged the chaplains’ office to see if we had any bandwidth that morning to be with him.

My mentor chaplain took me with her to his room. We stood on either side of his bed, holding his hands, listening to the varied sounds of his breathing, watching the effort of his chest as it lifted and dropped. I tried to keep my eyes from the monitor showing his heartrate and oxygen levels slowly–so slowly– dropping. I remember thinking that it took a very long time for him to die (it often does, but I didn’t know that then). I remember looking at his closed eyelids and thinking how strange it was that I would never know the color of his eyes. I remember the mental work I did as I stood there. I was listing out the aspects of his life that seemed unimaginable to me and so different from my own, and I was setting them aside, one by one. Drug addiction, incarceration, overdose…

It was like I was going backward into his life (my imagination of his life) and my own, to a time when the different circumstances of our lives hadn’t yet so drastically changed our trajectories. And an image of him as a baby suddenly flashed into my mind. Cuddled in blankets, held in love in someone’s arms, the lashes of his eyes spread across his cheeks in peaceful sleep, his cheeks soft and warm.

I remember thinking this: “We were infants about the same time.” Life stretched ahead of us and for so many reasons that I did not know (though I could guess at some of them, such as the different colors of our skins, the socio-economic positions of our families, the educational opportunities afforded us, our families’ housing situations…), they took very different directions so that, in that moment, far from our childhoods, he was the person dying in the bed, and I was the one standing by his side.

“You must see how this could be you.”

Not like me… and also like me.

Change just a few of the things in our very different pasts: take away my dad’s medical degree and give it to this man’s father; let my genes be slightly changed so that my skin looked more like the darker skin of my father than my mother’s pale flesh; get this man enrolled in a fantastic preschool and elementary program…

and our roles could be reversed (though he might have chosen a more lucrative path than hospital chaplaincy 🙂 )

In that moment, the dying man became someone to me in a way he hadn’t been before.

The truth is that he was SOMEONE all along, in the same way that every single human is a SOMEONE: important, valuable, individual. The work for me was for me to recognize his “someone-ness,” for him to become someone to ME.

He was someone.

I was someone.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness … You must see how this could be you.

The dying man and the chaplain were no longer “he and I” to me. We were “we.”

*NODA (No One Dies Alone) is a program at many hospitals. It was started by a nurse at the Mayo Clinic (see this video to hear the story of why she started it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHbQwHHR7WI&t=98s) and has since spread to many hospitals. Most programs are run by volunteers, so if that sounds like something you would be interested in, just Google NODA and the names of your local hospitals to see if they have a program.

One Skin, Skeleton, Skull… (Empathy series)

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My job closely connects me with the impact of the body on people’s lives. There is my actual work with persons who are seriously ill and/or in pain, and there is also the daily walking around and through an adult hospital that’s right next door to a children’s hospital. The halls and common spaces have far more than the average number of assistive walking devices, beanies and caps covering chemo-bald heads, oxygen tanks, prosthetic limbs, etc. Every day I pass parents pushing children in wheelchairs or pulling them in wagons that hold not just their child but also some kind of bulky medical device. And then there are unhoused persons, many of them with skin sores and swollen hands or feet, drawn to the safety, climate-controlled open spaces, and generally welcoming attitude of a public hospital.

One morning, as a colleague and I walked the two blocks from our office to the building where our Spiritual Care Department has its daily huddle, we passed a middle-aged woman pushing a young man (20s, maybe?) in a wheelchair. Both his feet were gone, and the skin at the base of the amputation sites was pink and puffy. Once we were past them, I said, “I’ve seen them every morning this week.”

She sighed. “That skin looks painful.”

“It’s gotten me thinking about our specific bodies and the ways they shape our lives.”

“Say more.” (What a good chaplain she is!)

“These bodies of ours determine so much of our existence and even how we become as persons. I know there are lots of factors–socioeconomics, geography, family background–but the presenting aspects of our bodies–our skin, any disabilities, any anomalies–those impact how other people look at us and see us, and then their reactions shape how we think of ourselves.”

She nodded. “And then it shapes the opportunities that are open to us–or not–and the groups that are available to us for belonging.”

“Yes,” I continued, “and all I know is the experience of my one body and its specifics, but I tend to think that my one experience gives me information and insight into other people’s embodied experiences.”

I’ve continued to think about that conversation, and I’ve done a little practice with it.

First I listed out my identities that are connected with my actual body, starting with those that are most obviously connected (*the full list of the identities I used is at the bottom of this post). And then I explored each of those a bit.

For example, I am able-bodied, with all my limbs, ten fingers & toes, normal range of motion in my joints, able to use all my sense organs (seeing, smelling, hearing) in a “normal” range. This has been true since my birth. I followed a normal timeline of crawling-toddling-walking-running and my coordination and balance were again in the normal range. I wasn’t great at sports, but I could engage in them and never be the last one chosen when the kickball captains picked their teams (what an awful practice–why did we ever think this was a good idea?).

Then I tried changing one thing that is listed in the above paragraph and imagined how that would have impacted the actual life I’ve lived. What if I’d been born with one hand that I couldn’t use “normally”? Just one. What are the things that I engaged in as a child (like knitting, swimming, cooking…) that would have been impacted by that ONE change? How would I have been seen differently by my peers–in school, in sports? What facial expressions would I have seen regularly on some people’s faces when they noticed my hand? How would that have changed how I felt about myself, how I interacted with them? What about my daily life now? What adjustments would I need to make? What would I need assistance with? How would this change how I get around my city?

ONE change–and I could be a completely different person. I could have a completely different outlook and way of relating. I could walk around seeing my world and other people from a viewpoint that I (in the body that I inhabit) can only imagine.

I have to admit that this was not a comfortable practice for me. I am very used to life within THIS skin, with this particular skeleton, skull, organs, and mind. I know only THIS lived experience. This practice forced me to imagine my life from a different experience, one embodied “bit” at a time, which made it–for me–a little more real and possible than trying to imagine myself as a poor child in a war-torn country around the world from my own.

This also helps me to understand the compounded and complicated effects of intersectionality (such as a lesbian woman who is African American who’s had Type 1 Diabetes all her life). It was a lot to think of these changes ONE identity at a time; what about holding each one and then adding another and then another!!!! I remember once participating in a training exercise in which the facilitator had our group stand in a horizontal line facing him. “Take a step forward if your parents went to college,” he said. “Take a step forward if you’ve never had a stranger call you a name related to your physical appearance.” With one statement after another, some of us moved forward. Some didn’t. At the end, the facilitator asked those of us closer to the front to turn around to face the group members behind us. (Here’s a link to an example of this exercise: https://www.eiu.edu/eiu1111/Privilege%20Walk%20Exercise-%20Transfer%20Leadership%20Institute-%20Week%204.pdf)

Empathy work is hard work–good but hard. But it’s oh, so important.

*BODY-RELATED IDENTITY LIST (this is the list I created and used for my own empathy practice)

-Gender (from “super” feminine to “super” masculine and all that’s in between as well as the level of comfort with where one lands on that spectrum)

-Skin color

-Size (tall to short, small to large)

-Visible “Ableness” of the body (arms and legs, sense organs, etc.)

-Less visible “ableness”/health of the body (diseases such as sickle cell, diabetes, heart conditions…)

-Anomalies of the body that are visible (strange head shape, facial features)

-Sexuality

Empathy through Reading: Take My Hand

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As one of the 5% white persons in a neighborhood that is 19% Latino/a and 73% African American (based on a 2022 community data snapshot (https://www.cmap.illinois.gov/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/Austin.pdf ), I regularly connect with neighbors who have a significantly different experience from my own. My work as a chaplain/spiritual care provider in a large hospital in downtown Chicago provides me with even more intense connections with people whose experiences are significantly different from mine. Each day I meet with people in vulnerable times in their lives, and I am the member of their team asking how they are doing emotionally and spiritually in the midst of it. I am the one asking what in their lives gives them strength and hope and can it be used in this present moment. I meet with persons who name themselves as agnostic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Buddhist, Protestant, Pagan, Evangelical, atheist, spiritual-but-not-religious…, who come from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds and varying socioeconomic statuses, and who may bear a number of identities that are different than my own. 

Each interaction gives me a little glimpse into the heart and the story of the individual in front of me. I know it is not anything close to their full story, but it is an important glimpse they are granting me. I bear deep gratitude and responsibility for the ways in which they trust me.  

My work in these interactions is that of practicing informed, embodied empathy. There is more to it, of course, but that idea of “informed, embodied empathy” is foundational to my view of chaplaincy, which I see as not only a vocation but also as a way of living. I want empathy to inform my entire be-ing, how I view and interact with my family, my friends, my community, my world, and myself. Though I know that, due to my personality type and my past work, I may have come to the work of chaplaincy with a fairly high level of empathy, I have also come to see empathy as a skill that can be fostered in a variety of ways. I now see my empathy less as a character trait and more as an active mindset that I can engage with. It takes work, and it always will. 

When I look back at my childhood, I see a fairly shy, introverted child who could be quite happy spending entire days reading (one of my favorite Christmas memories was when my mother gave me an entire box of books with a bag of York peppermint patties tucked in at the top and full permission to spend the two days after Christmas reading for hours on end). 

How did that child begin to learn empathy for others? 

In large part she learned it through those books. Not all of them, of course. Some of them were formulaic, supporting a single way of looking at the world as the “right way” rather than simply one particular way among many others. Some, though good stories and less rigid, were not very broad in their scope of characters and places. 

But others introduced her to characters outside her narrow world (or in her world but wearing a different skin or living in a different neighborhood). These books taught her about universal emotions, about the difficulties faced when people either feel or are made to feel different or lesser than those around them. These books allowed her a glimpse into others’ worlds and a chance to feel their emotions. They expanded her ability to imagine what it might feel like to have a different life, to experience both the joys and the challenges of it. 

Those books were a part of her empathy education, which stood her/me in good stead as a teacher and certainly now as a hospital chaplain. 

As I wrote above, I continue to build my empathy through every encounter with every other person—and I also continue to foster it through my reading. Some of my reading is purely professional and some is just for brain break, but much of the time, I challenge myself to read books (both fiction and nonfiction) by and about people who have significantly different stories, backgrounds, and identities than my own. 

So I’ve decided that I am occasionally going to post here about books that have stretched and informed my empathy and that continue to do so. Some will be books I read in the past; others will be more recent. 

Take My Hand is a book I read very recently. I want to highlight and amplify the voices of the authors, so here is the link to the website of Dolen Perkins-Valdez, who wrote Take My Hand: https://dolenperkinsvaldez.com/books/take-my-hand/ 

This book made me want to read others by the same author. I appreciate that she presents the nuances of people’s emotions and views. I appreciate that she explores the desire to “help others” and when that “helping” minimizes or even obstructs the choice of the person being “helped.” One of my core values in chaplaincy is the upholding of the autonomy and choices of the person I am meeting with, and Perkins-Valdez lays out the complicated nature of this as well as several other challenging topics. 

I don’t want to say more; I hope you check out the website above and possibly read the book. I listened to the audio version through my local library (and I highly recommend the audio version).

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms. ~Sterling K. Brown