Member-only story
The Demise of Sympathy
Who do you turn to when everybody’s in the same boat?
Sometimes you just want somebody to feel bad for you.
I thought about going to see my nurse-practitioner to tell her I don’t feel good. I can’t sleep. Everything hurts. I don’t have any energy.
But then I think about the last time I saw her. She and her medical assistant looked like they were working in a MASH unit on the front lines of the Korean War. Their hair was unwashed and uncombed. They were rumpled like people who had travelled a long distance in the hold of a ship.
If I bellyached to her, I’d be able to see her unspoken response in her eyes: “Join the crowd.”
It’s hard to complain that you haven’t had a bath in three days because hot water ain’t free, Jack, when you’ve just read about elderly people and others on fixed incomes who are skipping meals and not taking medicines they need because they don’t have enough money to eat and buy gas and pay rent and take the medicines that keep them alive.
It’s turtles all the way down.
We always had enough to eat when I was growing up because we lived on a farm and because my mom didn’t work outside the home.
