Discussion The Worthiness of Suffering

[Your Own Ghost]

I'd like to share four accounts of suffering combined from personal and found experience. I speculate it's a factor of the human condition for the survival of the species as a whole to readily deny the truth of or stay ignorant of the degree of others' suffering, and I was going to write about that, but I got sidetracked by this idea of the worthiness of suffering – to get someone to acknowledge your pain but then fail to help because they don't think you, your life, or your situation is worthy of that pain or worthy of relief from that pain. From my experience, this hurts all the more and seldom gets talked about.

The following narratives portray this idea and are meant to start a conversation about how you may have doubted others' worthiness, how others may have doubted yours, or how you may have doubted your own. Maybe that's why some of us are even on the Sanctioned Suicide forum. I think it has a way of making the subject feel abandoned in a cruel world, and that could easily be a fate worse than death.

Situation One

Jack drank a bottle of vodka every night for the past twenty years. He tried to quit so many times he lost count. He tried to change but he always ended up in the same spot. When his liver started to fail him he ended up in the hospital in agony. The nurse called him a goddamn drunk and thought he deserved what he was feeling and so delayed his pain meds at every opportunity. Meanwhile, she knew she would never let herself get like that. She had a glass of wine every now and again but that's all. She thought if there were more people like her in the world, there would be less suffering.

Situation Two

Fred's girlfriend died of a heroin overdose. He knew she had a reoccurring problem, but he loved her and refused to give up on her. As he mourned, he missed a couple weeks of his college classes. One of his professors had found out he lost someone and was acting sympathetic until Fred told him that drugs were involved. The professor said "Oh," and then immediately lost all tones of sympathy and turned away.

Situation Three

Anthony's mother, Debbie, was naturally distraught over the suicide of her thirty-one-year-old son, but felt guilty over the sense of relief she held because he was finally out of the house.

In the past, all of Debbie's friends had told her how lazy Anthony was and that he should be kicked out. She and Anthony would always fight over his antidepressants – he said they made him feel worse and she said he needed to take them and try harder. He always said he was trying as much as he could.

The autopsy revealed a golf-ball sized tumor in Anthony's brain and several lesions, all of which were speculated to have affected Anthony's motivation. After several months, Debbie overheard her friends saying how she should "get over it already" since Anthony was "a no-good lazy bastard, anyway."

Situation Four

Alexa was looking for advice on what to do with her last days. She had struck up a conversation online with a guy named Bob. Bob was a fifty-five year old man with terminal cancer. When he found out Alexa was only nineteen he erupted and said a bunch of words that ended with "…You have your whole life ahead of you!" Alexa looked down at her legs that were pinned back together from a car wreck and then wrote back, "You have your whole life behind you!" He replied, "That's not funny," and so she demanded to know, "Where are the scales that weigh any individual's suffering, and who are we to say that one's suffering is not as heavy as another's?"


So share with us, what are your stories or thoughts on the "worthiness" of suffering?

 

[FTL.Wanderer]

Thanks for sharing these stories and for starting a discussion. I can at least sympathize with each story's main character. We don't know what others' histories are and can only guess, often very inaccurately, about what others are feeling. Combined with our native preoccupation with ourselves and our own suffering, our unawareness can frustrate empathy. What's most sobering to me is scientists' recent findings that humans share physical deterministic characteristics with other great apes and other genetically closely related mammals associated with significantly higher prevalence of social, emotional, and physical aggression. If this kind of gene, neurology, and species-behavior evidence continues to mount, it may say something less than flattering about human beings in general. It may dim at least some of the hope many have that we'll soon outgrow our harmful predilection for aggression or that the "right" social policy interventions can solve many of the persistent problems we deal with--like poverty, bigotry, and social-pain related addictions.

 

[Kyrok]

Very interesting. Thanks for opening this issue.

We often lose our compassion towards a person once we identify some vice. Even if the vice is not the cause of the suffering, we will quit caring if we pass a negative moral judgment... Perhaps thinking that the suffering is deserved.

Another phenomenon is what is often called "caregiver burnout." You see it among family members caring for a sick or disabled loved one, hospital staff, social workers, etc.. Maybe being too needy is taken as a vice, or resentment sets in.

 

[Your Own Ghost]

I agree, "caregiver burnout" is an interesting topic, too. In the beginning of my downward trajectory, I was writing a collection of stories focused who we think we are as opposed to the things we actually do. For the discrepancy, I crafted a metaphor character merely called a Creature that lives among us but always in the periphery, and it's only in times of major stress, drugs, or biological dysfunction that these creatures are seen.

For caregiver burnout, I wrote a short story about a woman who had to take care of her father. Her father had a neurological condition that trapped him inside of his own body. And so instead of graduating from University and changing the world, she had to stay home and change her father's diaper. Here's the end of it so maybe others will have a better understanding:

(From the Creatures Collection)

…My boyfriend broke up with me when I wasn't at school the next semester. He said he found someone else. I asked him why. He said she had initiative, and she was the type of person who works hard and is going to change the world. I turned off my phone and sat beside my father on the couch.

"Do you want to watch M.A.S.H., papa?" I said. That was his favorite show. One year for Father's Day I bought him the complete series and he hugged me until I had to appeal to my mother for freedom.

"Do you want to sit on the back porch, papa?" I said, and I would push him out in his wheelchair to the screened-in porch to where he used to like to sit and watch the birds in the backyard birdbath.

"Do you want to listen to Johnny Cash?" I said, and I would put on Johnny Cash playlists while I cleaned the house or made sure his medical paperwork was in order. I tried to study on my own in those first few months, but it proved to be too much. I kept thinking how I was failing.

The in-home nurse would come three days per week and that would allow me to go grocery shopping. The nurse said I should try to go out and forget about things for a while, if I could. I'd sit in my car at the grocery store and slouch down in my seat so no one could see me crying.

At nights I would strip my father naked and sponge him clean. I had never before seen my father naked before he got sick, and it never occurred to me that one day I might have to. I would dry him off and put him in his flannel bed clothes and lay him down to bed, only to start it all again the next day. In the fifth month of his silence, I hurt a disc in my back and it never got better. I hadn't time to let it heal. In the seventh month, I had to start putting household expenses onto my credit cards.

I began to cry all the time. I couldn't help it. I felt alone, even with my father. He wasn't there. He didn't see me, and I would cry when I sat beside him watching TV. I would wipe my eyes when I gave him a sponge bath. And as I grew more tired and more depressed, I couldn't bring myself to keep up the one-way charade of conversation. I began to go through the motions of care.

It was in the fourteenth month of my father's silence. I had begged many doctors to tell me how long he could be like this. I was looking for a way out, any way out. They all told me that he could be like this for years. I could send him to a care home, but the costs would mean selling the house out from under me. Freedom would mean that I would have nowhere to go.

There was a long succession of days where all it did was rain. The house was banished from the sun, thunder shook the walls and rattled the family photos, and the nurse kept calling off. She wasn't sick, but didn't give any straight answers as to why she couldn't come for the day. "Your house doesn't feel right," she said, and I cried on the phone and when she hung up as well. I cried and my hand shook as I extended a spoon of mashed peas to my father's mouth. I cried after dinner as I knelt down and started to put his feet into slippers.

"Joy," my father said and I dropped the slipper and looked up into his eyes. "Every day that demon stands behind you and waits to see if you smother me."

"Papa?" I said, but he didn't move or make another sound.

He died a week later on the back porch, watching red birds play in the water as I made dinner. I found him with his chin on his chest in his wheel chair. I wrapped my arms around him and I cried. I took him to the bath and I cried. I cleaned him one last time and I said goodbye to him, and then the coroner came and took him away.

Only after that did I realize I hadn't been lonely. I had never been lonely. What I was feeling all along was love. It was the part of love that hurts, the part that makes love worth it, and the part I wouldn't trade for anything.