Other People's Pain

I’m hardly a sheltered innocent from suburbia, but living in Buffalo showed me a side of the world up close that before I had seen mostly from a distance, through smudged bus windows or on newspaper pages I skimmed over, not feeling an intense connection to my life.

When we moved there in 2004, I thought, “Well, it will be pretty much like Ohio only colder.” I’d grown up in East Cleveland in the 1960’s and figured that lake effect snow would not be that hard to take. But the city was far more depressed, both economically and emotionally, than I was prepared for. Once a very rich city, with gorgeous Victorian architecture fit for shipping magnates and captains of industry, hard times had moved in a long, long time before we did.

Main Street was block after block of crumbling storefronts between the remains of the city center and the artsy/depraved Allentown section where we lived. Pedestrian traffic was heavy on clients of the Salvation Army temporary hotel and a methadone clinic. A block away Allentown had bars, art studios, transvestites, good food, more bars, tattooed hipsters, and a few streets with beautiful old brick houses built close to the matching brick sidewalks, flowers on every porch, and garden havens in back. (In one of those gardens I met an angel named Margaret, but she deserves her own story so I’ll save that for later.) Though I tried hard to find beauty and I’ve heard there’s been some resurgence since we left, little of it felt like HOME while we were there.

Main Street divides the rest of the city from the East Side – once a Polish and German neighborhood, it’s been tragically devastated by neglect, bad management, and the flight of people and dollars. The Erie County Medical Center, where Frank had his first four months of chemo, is among the East Side landmarks, along with dozens of churches, the Broadway Market, and the beautiful old Central Terminal. ECMC is a top-rated trauma center, sad to say in part because of the prevalence of gun violence, in particular on the East Side. Across the street from ECMC stood an informal memorial to the cost of that violence – a phone pole covered with stuffed toys, and a sign marking the number of consecutive days without violence.

One day during Frank’s initial hospitalization I saw a rather turbulent small crowd outside the entrance – hysterical girls, and young black men tense with anger, coiled to strike but lacking a target. One had pit bull on a chain, and I thought of them at the time as “the pit bull boys”. There had been another shooting overnight: one boy dead and another gravely injured. I learned his name was Desmond, after Bishop Desmond Tutu. Now he lay in a darkened room with his face to the wall, partially paralyzed and refusing to speak. 

That supposed pit bull boy had a name, and a mother who I saw in the hallway, her face layered with exhaustion, adrenaline and fear. I felt so ashamed for having reduced those boys to a label in my mind.  Leaving the hospital that day was when I first noticed the sign that said, “0 Days of Peace”.

While trying to come to grips with what I wanted to say about all this, the following quotation attributed to that good Bishop appeared in my Facebook feed:

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side 

of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and 

you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

I’ve struggled deeply with writing about this experience. At the crux of the issue – of Desmond, of the East Side, of so much of life – is what we choose to do with, or about, other people’s pain.  It is far easier to bear your own pain than to watch the pain of someone you love. Up close there’s no insulation, no suburbs to flee to. Some people are very difficult to help. And it’s not wrong to take care of yourself too – you can’t give what you don’t have. But if we could not distance ourselves from the pain of strangers, how differently might we choose to live?

My heroes are people who consciously add to the days of peace, fixing damage they didn’t cause – not out of guilt or penance, but from that cheerful unwillingness to wall off other people’s pain. I was fortunate enough to find many of them on this long journey and they can’t know how much they helped. Unfailingly kind Ingrid; Zale, who had every reason to quit and never did; Aggie, waiting on Frank like he was visiting royalty and making him laugh; Carter and Ann and Grace, who I can never fully acknowledge… 

I could go on and on, my notebook is full of names and stories, and some day perhaps I will have told them all, but each will always be remembered, and is already written in my heart.