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2003-03-20
10:13 a.m.
As I was about to walk into the door of the office this morning, I was suddenly accosted from behind by one of my coworkers who rather accusingly said, “I need to explain something to you.” Startled, I stopped dead in my tracks and turned to her expectantly.
Here, you have to understand that the office had a big potluck lunch yesterday with lots of good food and a nice bit of conversation if you chose to thus engage yourself. Rob and I sat alone for most of the party (that was really a going away/wedding party for a coworker), and we simply enjoyed the free food that gave us the most sustenance we’ve seen at lunch hour in a long time.
After the potluck, I went into the kitchen and saw one of my favorite coworkers. Noticing all at once that she hadn’t been at the potluck, I said to her, “You weren’t at the potluck! What were you doing?” She just looked at me calmly, said, “I was hiding,” and abruptly turned to someone else to begin a conversation.
You have to understand that this particular coworker has always been one of the happiest, most outgoing people in the office, and, when I didn’t see her at the party, it seemed odd that someone so social would purposely avoid it. When she stopped me this morning, she harshly continued, “You seemed so shocked and amazed that I wasn’t at the party yesterday.” And before I could say anything, she rushed on, “Maybe you didn’t know, but my father died three weeks ago.”
Three weeks ago? Her father? Yeah, I guess I had been notified by e-mail that she’d lost her father, but this woman is probably in her forties. It can’t come as that much of a shock when a parent dies at that point. Her parents had to have been at least in their sixties, possibly their seventies. And I understand that it’s never easy to lose someone, but how was I supposed to remember that e-mail from three weeks ago? Besides, a different coworker who was VERY close to her father, also lost her father recently, and she was back in full force four days later.
I said to her, “I’m sorry. Are you okay?” at which point I noticed a tear running down her cheek. She quickly stated, “No, I’m not okay. That’s why I wasn’t at the party.” And she walked away before I could say anything else.
She made me feel really awful. I was just trying to be nice by saying we missed her at the party, and she felt the need to pull me aside and explain that I shouldn’t have opened my big mouth because she was hiding from the world, reminiscing about her dead father, and it was all my fault.
This is the sort of situation that upsets me beyond expression. If there’s one thing in life that I know extraordinarily well, it’s how to live with the kind of pain that makes you constantly feel like you want to jump out a window or shove a pair of scissors through your chest. And it’s the fact that other people assume I know nothing about pain that makes me extremely sad. That’s the reaction that tells me there’s nothing I can do.
I can never do anything.
It’s one of the worst conditions of life to know that you have the experience and ability to help someone and they're just not ready to be helped. The experience today made me feel awful. My coworker has probably retired to her office to do her work while trying desperately to forget about her father. Now, instead of just her being upset, I’m upset too. I’m upset about the world for having such trauma. This is the trauma that I worry about in life. This is trauma on a personal level that can only be handled from the heart and soul of a compassionate person. This is the trauma that matters.
Fuck the war in Iraq.
