The Gift of Compassion

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

Henri Nouwen

She was the strongest person, I knew with the exception of my Nonna, she’d been no stranger to tragedy or abuse, but she never stopped believing in God’s grace, but like everyone she could build walls, walls that hid those broken places, the pain went far deeper than the amputations, the transplants, it was soul deep.

I’d learn later of the abuse she had experienced, loosing contact with her briefly as she and her young son escaped, and though I try not to one who hates, the more I learned my disdain for this man, I had never met grew, the pain evidence in the words she tried to hide.

But I’ve always been persistent when it comes to breaking down walls, when it comes to showing others it’s okay to let yourself feel, that does not mean your life is ruled by those emotions love, but it helps to build Friendships, it grows the bond of sisters and in a short matter of time, that was who we became, sisters of the heart, because family is not necessarily defined by bloodlines, it goes so much deeper than that.

For a time she did a good job of hiding what she was feeling, the struggle she faced. Just a couple of months before we met, she’d faced an amputee, and by meet I mean our friendship grew through long chats in a msn disability forum, but in time we would meet, something I had taken a lot of time to pray about, and a trip that my Nonna not only blessed but helped me prepare for, even then this was not a trip I’d make alone, a friend and her toddler son would come with me, but our friendship started on a computer screen, sisters who needed each other, and we were just that sisters in time.

The day before Easter Sunday, just a few months following 9’11 she called me, I’d never heard her so upset, she rarely showed the struggle that came with being a new amputee but having a delay in receiving her custom prosthetic leg, broke her heart, because she wanted so badly to walk into Church, and I gently reminded that God didn’t care how she got there, just that she did.

We all have a way of building walls up around ourselves a protection against the blows, but sometimes we forget the joy it blocks us from feeling too, sometimes we allow ourselves simply to function on autopilot afraid to open up to anyone until their comes a point we need to reach out and it helps to have someone we can trust, and we were that.

When my Aunt Linda died unexpectedly of a heart attack, and we got the news late one night, she was my two a.m call, and when she lost a loved one, she’d call me at two a.m, knowing that we would be the proverbial shoulder.

But some of those calls came after the trip, where the four of us would talk late into the night, and on some occasions it would be just us talking, she was one of the few who got to read my stories in handwritten form, and when I shared a fictional story, I had written a few years before about an amputee she showed me what I had gotten right, but I’d learn too of mistakes I’d made not only in writing but in my assumptions.

I saw first hand just how real phantom pain was, and I’d learn just how painful prosthetics could be, I’d see how determined she was to live life to its fullest knowing early on her time was short.

I showed my best friend my sister, it was okay to grieve but you also showed me something too, laugh at the little moments, be silly, have fun, and most importantly hold on to Faith, even when you feel completely broken.

Copyright Michelle R Kidwell

July.19,2022