Compassion

Don't tell me
What I don't want to hear
I'll blame you
Blame you for what I fear.

My mother agrees. That person who told my cousin whose child is being treated for brain and spinal cord cancer that she lost a child to this kind of disease was inappropriate, and my cousin deserves to be outraged at that crass behavior. That story should never have been shared with a woman whose child is fighting this at this moment.

Isn't it a bitch to be asked to be compassionate for someone who has faced what we now fear? Isn't that just crap? I mean, shouldn't they be compassionate for us and just keep hidden any experience that might stimulate our fears?

I watched women shop yesterday for a special.  Lots of pushing and grabbing and ignoring people around them.

To me, this is all part of the same thing, the thing I was never able to achieve in my life.  I don't know how to be so inconsiderate of others, so bereft of compassion, that I can blame others for getting in my way.  

It just seems so adolescent, so immature, to be that self-centered. This woman shares with my cousin, and I am sure prays for a different outcome with her daughter, and my cousin gets upset, and has that upset affirmed by so many people.  

Is blindness holy?  Is needing to stay ignorant so we can hold the faith really faithful? Or is faith when we give our most loved things to God, knowing that we have to have the strength to change what we can, the serenity to accept what we can't and the wisdom to know the difference?

In the past she has said that the family has to keep to the same schedule of extracurricular activites that they have in the past.  Do they, or is that just voodoo, so that if we don't change anything nothing will change?

Facing death is facing hard choices about what you value, if that's a 6 year old with brain cancer, an 81 year old with prostate cancer, or an 81 year old with heart failure. 

But shouldn't compassion be one of the things we all value?  Can we actually accept it if we can't give it to others who face or have faced similar challenges?