Compassion or permission?

Somehow you knew it but you were never quite sure.

Or were you simply uncomfortable with the idea of intruding or being mistaken for a busybody who pokes his or her nose into people’s private lives? It’s not a nice situation to find your self in; some faint whisper, doubt, even fear that something is wrong in a person’s life, but not really knowing if it’s serious enough to be cause for concern or justifies intruding. It could be a friend or someone at work, or someone you’ve only recently met, an acquaintance more than a friend.

We’ve all been there, and many of us are also wary about getting involved or tangled up with potentially messy or burdensome emotional situations especially other people’s money problems. Somehow the world has conditioned us to be extremely uncomfortable with such things. So we choose to be polite, we wait for a more opportune or appropriate time and place, somewhere more private. Or we wait for “permission.” Yes, permission to ask “what’s wrong?” or “Is there something bothering you?”  Perhaps even just to ask: “Do you want to talk about it?” even though we are clueless about what “it” may be.

But we all know what were doing when we wait for “permission.”

We are actually committing Omission, copping out, and strategically wanting to get away from what we’ve sensed or have been led to perceive and act on. We find relief as the moment passes, the burden lifts, and soon we forget about that inconvenient moment when someone who needed help passed in front of us… and eventually passed on from this life.

Yes, passed on, as in sudden departure, out of our circle, a sudden death, suicide maybe. Now they are no longer there and no matter how you think about it, there are no more second chances for them or for you to make it up, or to make a better choice between permission or compassion.

My wife Karen and I recently went through such an experience with a “new” friend whom we knew had been going through a tough patch of emotional and occupational issues, forced by process and policy to relocate and consequently having to set aside all her dreams to Have More Fun in the Philippines. The timing could not have been worse as it all unraveled over Christmas season when others were wrapping Christmas gifts and making plans with family and friends. She had to choose what was going into the container, what had to be sold, what would be given away and the rest tossed into garbage bags. While people’s homes slowly lit up with Christmas lights and Christmas cheer, I suppose her life began to dim like her empty hallways and driveway in a home she would soon be leaving behind. But if it did she never showed it. If anything, she remained indignant, a bit impatient, clearly angry but in a very restrained way.

As best I could I reassured her that God had a plan behind all the confusion, that she could easily come back to Manila and we would be there to help her relocate and pursue her tropical retirement plan. All this happened at the tail end of Christmas, a private dinner meant to cheer her up as well as a Despedida. Little did we know that it would be a final going away dinner indeed: Literally our last supper with her.

As my wife and I silently mourned, I could not help but wonder how different would things have been if I simply meddled, if I rudely interrupted the privacy of her veiled agony or depression? Would she still be here with us albeit in another part of the world if we engaged her, even enraged her to fight on, to fight back, not just at the injustice but also at the seeming futility of life. I don’t know, but of one thing I am certain, my compassion for her should have overwhelmed and far exceeded the cultural requirement for “permission.”

Is it really about “permission” or is it fear, fear of being rejected, repulsed or causing offense? Is it possible that we put too much value on manners and not enough on concern? Not all drowning victims get a chance to scream for help, many people in bad situations can’t talk about it or won’t talk about it. I even know of a young boy who curled up in pain, hiding a ruptured appendix because he did not want his parents to spend so much money in the hospital. I know too many victims (too late) who quietly endured pain, suffering and shame because no one acted on their situation out of “respect.”

Yes that is what we call it: Respect for other people’s privacy.

But after all the damage is done, what’s left to respect? Someone’s privacy accompanied her to the grave and the respect I extended comes back to mock me, haunt me even. That makes me angry because I never used to let such “guardrails” stop me from saying what’s on my mind until I got tired of being told off by the world to mind my manners and mind my own business. That’s the trap we all fall into because in God’s books we are suppose to be our brother’s keeper and we will be held accountable for choosing not to correct them or save them. Unfortunately we could not do that for our friend who was half a world away.

The only thing we can do now, and what we have resolved to do, is to be our brothers’ and sister’s keepers. Get into people’s faces if we must, meddle if need be, endure being called busybodies or nosy. We choose to care, to give permission to compassion to rise and take over. This is the best thing we can do to honor the memory of a newfound friend we lost too soon. To do for others what we could not do for her.

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