What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

What gave me pain was seeing him so much older. Not that he’d ever been handsome, but still. The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you’ve loved grow old.

Be kind, because everyone you meet is going through a struggle. Often attributed to Plato.

Youth burdened with full knowledge of just how sad and painful aging is I would not call youth at all.

there are no truly stupid human beings, no uninteresting human lives, and that you’d discover this if you were willing to sit and listen to people. But sometimes you had to be willing to sit for a very long time.

What are you going through? When Simone Weil said that being able to ask this question was what love of one’s neighbor truly meant, she was writing in her native French. And in French the great question sounds quite different: Quel est ton tourment?

I think it will make it easier, she says. So long as it’s a comfortable, safe, attractive place. I’ve done a lot of my best work—my best thinking—away from home, on visiting fellowships, for example, on meditation retreats, even in hotels. I think it will be easier to prepare—to focus on letting go—if I’m someplace where I won’t be surrounded by intimate, familiar things, all those reminders of attachments, and so on.

This is how it is with people, she tells me now. No matter what, they want you to keep fighting. This is how we’ve been taught to see cancer: a fight between patient and disease. Which is to say between good and evil. There’s a right way and a wrong way to act. A strong way and a weak way. The warrior’s way and the quitter’s way. If you survive you’re a hero. If you lose, well, maybe you didn’t fight hard enough. You wouldn’t believe all the stories I get about this or that person who refused to accept the death sentence they got from those nasty stupid doctors and was rewarded with many, many more years of life. People don’t want to hear terminal, she says. They don’t want to hear incurable, or inoperable. They call that defeatist talk. They say insane things like As long as you stay alive there’s a chance. And Medical miracles happen every day—as if they’d been keeping track. They say, If you just hang in there, who knows, they might find a cure. I never knew that so many smart, educated people were under the illusion that a cure for cancer is just around the corner.

Not that I think they all really believe what they’re saying, she goes on, but they obviously believe it’s what they should say.

Someone has said, When you are born into this world there are at least two of you, but going out you are on your own. Death happens to every one of us, yet it remains the most solitary of human experiences, one that separates rather than unites us.

I’m sorry, he said. Is there anything I can do? Said it reflexively, as people always do, this formula that nobody really wants to hear, that comforts nobody. But it was not his fault that our language has been hollowed out, coarsened, and bled dry, leaving us always stupid and tongue-tied before emotion. A high school teacher once made us read Henry James’s famous letter to his grief-stricken friend Grace Norton, held up since its publication as a sublime example of sympathy and understanding. Even he begins by saying, “I hardly know what to say.”

I don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.

I want to know, why don’t I feel more. I want to know how, where once was everything, nothing could be.

School, in general, made me feel loved. I can remember the feeling very clearly, she said, even if I couldn’t have put it into words. That somebody wanted to teach me things, that they cared about my penmanship, my stick-figure drawings, the rhymes in my poems. That was love. That was most surely love, she said. Teaching is love.

Everything that a writer writes could just as easily have been different—but not until it’s been written. As a life could have been different, but not until it’s been lived. —Inger Christensen

Those writers who believe that the way they write is more important than whatever they may write about—these

But what if God had in fact gone even further. What if it was not just to different tribes but to each individual human being that a separate language was given, unique as fingerprints. And, step two, to make life among humans even more strifeful and confounding, he beclouded their perception of this. So that while we might understand that there are many peoples speaking many different languages, we are fooled into thinking that everyone in our own tribe speaks the same language we do. This would explain much of human suffering, according to my ex, who was being less playful than you might think. He really did believe that’s how it was: each of us languaging on, our meaning clear to ourselves but to nobody else. Even people in love? I asked, smilingly, teasingly, hopefully. This was at the very beginning of our relationship. He only smiled back. But years later, at the bitter end, came the bitter answer: People in love most of all.

Dying is a role we play like any other role in life: this is a troubling thought. You are never your true self except when you’re alone—but who wants to be alone, dying?

Always the same inane advice, the same clichés about the power of positive thinking and miracles happening and not giving up and letting cancer win. And all it did was remind her how hard it was for people to accept reality, my friend said to me. Our overpowering need either to stick our heads in the sand or to sentimentalize everything, she said.

And I kept wondering, she said, if there ever came a time before the end when someone actually saw this woman. Saw her.

Memory. We need another word to describe the way we see past events that are still alive in us, thought Graham Greene. Agreed. Agreeing here also with Kafka. And, at the same time, with Camus: The literal meaning of life is whatever you do that stops you from killing yourself.

I have tried. I have put down one word after the other. Knowing that every word could have been different. As my friend’s life, like any other life, could have been different. I have tried. Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice— What does it matter if I failed.