Nancy Abernathy was a professor teaching first-year medical students a seminar on decision-making skills. That winter, her husband, age fifty, died suddenly of a heart attack while cross-country skiing near their Vermont home.
“With some difficulty, she managed to make it through the semester and carried on with her teaching,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
Late that semester, she shared with her class that she was “dreading teaching the same course the next year,” David writes, because “during one of the first sessions of the course, she asks everybody to bring in family photos so they can get to know one another.”
Nancy was worried she wouldn’t be able to share a photo of her late husband without crying.
“The course ended,” David writes. “Summer came and went, and fall arrived and, with it, the day she dreaded.”
As Nancy walked into the classroom that day, feeling anxious, she sensed something was different.
“The room was too full. Sitting there, along with her current class, were the second-year students, the ones who had taken her class the year before.
“They had simply come to lend their presence during this hard session,” David writes. “They knew exactly what she needed, and didn’t need to offer anything more.”
What’s at play here? Compassion. “A simple human connection between the one who suffer and one would heal,” Nancy would later share.
2: This week, we’ve been considering what it means to accompany someone else. We must be patient, willing, and open. We must embrace our role as witnesses, not teachers. We must be playful.
But perhaps, most importantly, we must be present.
“Presence is about showing up,” David writes. “Showing up at weddings and funerals, and especially showing up when somebody is grieving or has been laid off or has suffered some setback or humiliation.
“When someone is going through a hard time, we don’t need to say some wise thing; we just have to be there, with heightened awareness of what they are experiencing at that moment.”
When David was a professor at Yale, he had a student, Gillian Sawyer, whose dad died of pancreatic cancer.
“Before he died, she and her father talked about the fact that he would miss her major life events—a wedding she might have someday, her children growing up,” David notes.
After her father passed away, Gillian was a bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding.
“The father of the bride gave a beautiful speech about his daughter’s curiosity and spirit,” David writes. “When it came time for the father-daughter dance, Gillian excused herself to go to the restroom and have a cry.
“As she emerged, she saw that all the people from her table, many of them friends from college, were standing there by the door.”
Gillian gave David permission to quote from her paper describing this moment: “What I will remember forever is that no one said a word. I am still amazed at the profoundness that can echo in silence. Each person, including newer friends who I knew less well, gave me a reaffirming hug in turn and headed back to their seats.
“No one lingered or awkwardly tried to validate my grief. They were there for me, just for a moment, and it was exactly what I needed.”
3: The greatest gift of friendship “is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self,” the essayist and poet David Whyte writes in his book Consolations.
“The ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
David Brooks says of accompaniment: “Everybody is connected to everybody else by our shared common humanity. Sometimes we need to hitch a ride on someone else’s journey, and accompany them a part of the way.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Thinking back on my life, are there moments when someone showed up and was present during a difficult or challenging situation?
Action: Be proactive. Reach out and say “thank you.”
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