A couple weeks ago I was refilling my coffee mug at work when a co-worker asked if I had heard the news about a former co-worker. I said “no,” expecting to hear something about a new job. Instead he told me that the guy’s 24-year-old daughter had committed suicide just a few days before.
“Oh, no!”
I had never met the daughter. I vaguely remembered pictures of a wife and a couple of kids at different ages on the guy’s desk. But the news immediately dissipated my good mood and left me feeling as if there ought to be something I could do to help. I immediately tried to remember the faces in those pictures on his desk.
But there wasn’t, really, anything I could do beyond offering condolences. When tragedy strikes in the family of someone you know well, you can offer to help run errands, offer emotional support, or maybe drop off a casserole. When I was a kid living in small towns, whenever tragedy struck anyone, you made a casserole and delivered it to the family, so they could eat without someone having to go to the trouble of making a meal. If you didn’t feel you knew the people well enough to deliver it yourself, you might get a group together from the church and a couple of people who knew the family better would be deputized to deliver the food.
It’s a bit different now in the city. People don’t expect that sort of thing, and if it’s a co-worker rather than a personal friend, you often don’t know where they live. I know which suburb this guy lived in, but that was it. And we were co-workers for only a bit over a year, he left for a job at another company almost three years ago. We never had any contact outside of the office. If I did track his address down and showed up with a dish of food, it would be weird and awkward.
Plus, now you have to worry about whether people eat meat, and if they don’t are they ovo lacto vegetarians, pescatarians, or full-on vegan? Maybe his wife had to have only gluten-free food. Or maybe someone has a food allergy.
It still leaves you feeling as if you ought to be able to do something to help.
That same impulse is what most of us feel when we see news such as the bombing at the Boston Marathon, or the shooting at the school in Newton, and so forth. We feel powerless, and if we don’t know anyone directly affected, we can’t even offer condolences or emotional support.
I saw a lot of people on various media and forums admonishing anyone who seemed to be obsessing about the news. To be fair, it was usually admonishing people for repeating unsubstantiated rumor and speculation, but a lot of those admonishments certainly implied that there was something wrong with being anxious to learn more. In those discussions there were lots of references to fear: you want more information because at least subconsciously you want to assess the risk of how likely more people might be in danger, et cetera.
But I think another thing that fuels the need for more information is that feeling of wanting to help. When I heard about the suicide of the former co-worker’s daughter, during my urge to make a casserole, I tried to remember whether he had ever mentioned which neighborhood he lived in. Maybe we had enough information between several of us to at least have flowers sent, you know?
After the bombing in Boston, it was heartening to hear the news of how many people turned out to donate blood, to give money to a couple of funds to help with people who were stranded, and the set up a way for locals to offer places to stay for the stranded folks.
If feeling about this event leave you wanting to help, remember that you can always donate to the Red Cross. Even donating or volunteering at your local Red Cross can help make sure that resources will be available to help in the next disaster or crisis.
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