Seeing Others Grieve
The group again, but much smaller than Will remembered it. He had competing urges: sit alone in the chair at the end of the semi-circle, or find out all he could about these people. He recognized at least one face from his first meeting, and he wondered about the half-dozen or more people who weren't there anymore. Were they all healed? Had the camaraderie, the shared pain, the opportunity to vent and to get on-the-spot therapy from Eli-had that all accomplished what the poster on the telephone pole had promised? Will wasn't sure whether it was naive or positive to even consider the possibility.
He worried about the alternative, people dropping out of the group as they might from an ill-considered cooking class which they'd seen advertised on the bulletin board but eventually discovered they had no time or inclination for. Or even worse: people feeling that they were too weighed down with grief to attend a grief class, the cure defeated by the virulence of the disease. Will remembered one woman in particular who hadn't said one word and spent most of her time with her eyes directed downward at the space between her shoes. He'd seen her flinch once when the voice of one of the men rose sharply, and then again when Eli asked her a question and she eventually just shook her head silently, apparently unable to muster energy for any level of interaction. Will found it hard to imagine that someone like her had derived all the good possible from the group and was now happily on her way to a better life. What was she doing tonight? Why wasn't she here? Why couldn't anyone do anything to help her?
Eli was well dressed tonight, as if he had more life-affirming plans with less forlorn people later in the evening. Will resented that, even though he knew there was no good reason to do so. He wanted everyone and everything to be down here in the muck with him and the rest of these people that God had frowned upon. It wasn't rational, it wasn't generous, it wasn't particularly mature, but that's how Will felt on evenings like this, the temperature cold enough as it was and the wind chilling the air even more, his neighbor's dog barking when Will was trying to read or get to sleep, his life generally falling apart in a flurry of pettiness and grief.
"Thank you all for coming this evening, everyone," Eli was saying, and Will adjusted himself on his chair. "I see some familiar faces-you know who you are-and I see some faces that have been away for awhile, and"-he looked around the room, confirming-"I see some brand-new faces."
Will caught the eye of a woman who was looking around the room as he was. She stared at him lazily, her gaze lingering much longer than it would in polite society where it might be mistaken for flirting. She was not quite looking at him, Will realized, as through him or past him, as if his face had just happened to get in the way of something she was staring at or somewhere else that she wanted to be. Her eyes seemed glazed over and when she turned away she just turned away, with no smile, no acknowledgement, no marking of the fact that a connection of some kind had been made and was now being broken.
"I'd like to know an activity that each of you did during the past week," Eli said. "It doesn't have to be dramatic or anything like that, but I'd like it to be something where there is a detail about it that you think is a positive sign. You know, that you reacted more positively than you would normally have expected, or you did something good and forgot about your own situation. Anything like that. Would someone like to start?"
Will felt he was back in junior high again, and had not done the assigned reading. The time seemed to drag but nobody spoke up.
"Will, would you mind getting us started?" Eli asked.
Will looked up. "Ah, listen, Eli, I'm not sure what you want exactly. Something positive?"
"Well, not the best news in the world necessarily-you know, winning the lottery or something-but just any situation, even something everyday and ordinary, where you think you were able to deal with it or react in a more po-deal with it better, you know, not let it get you down."
Will smiled at Eli and shook his head.
"I don't want to be crude or anything, Eli, or unappreciative. I mean, I do appreciate what you're doing, but I hope you can understand where I'm coming from."
"Please, Will, please say whatever is on your mind."
Will took a breath, and smiled as he breathed out slowly and thought of his abandoned yoga classes.
"Well, the thing is, I guess, that I seem to have only two modes, and neither of them is very positive. I'm either powered down all the time, sort of depressed, where I really have trouble caring about anything or even doing anything. The other mode is negative, like a kind of low-level anger all the time. At no one in particular-well, at no one really at all, but I just feel that I have a burning and a tension in my gut that I can't get rid of. I don't know. This probably doesn't make any sense."
Will looked around quickly at the crowd just to confirm that he wasn't crazy, that he wasn't being relentlessly negative in a situation where a better man would simply pick up and move on. He saw people nodding their heads, though, and the second saddest woman in the group, the one who actually managed to make it there, smiled at him.
"I know where you're coming from, Will, I really do, but-"
"Have you ever lost anyone, Eli?"
"Pardon me?"
"Has someone close to you ever died?"
There was silence and everyone was now staring patiently at Eli, waiting for an answer.
"Not really, Will. But I think one can extrapolate-"
"Listen, Eli, I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm not a rude person, I'm really not. But my opinion is that until you've gone through something like this, then I don't think you can really know what it's like. I don't doubt that you're a caring and intelligent person, but I also feel that you can only come to an approximation of what I am-well, of what we all here are going through."
Eli looked straight at Will.
"You've probably got a point there," he conceded. "However, I've not had a totally sheltered life, believe me, and in any case I do think that I also have good empathetic skills-you know, I think I can at least imagine the suffering that you, that all of you here, are going through."
"Imagine?" Will said.
Eli sighed. "I think the main point I'd like to make," he said, "is that this room, you, this particular bunch of people-you can all be good for each other. This room can be a forum for bringing up issues which perhaps wouldn't come up otherwise in your regular life. I really don't need to be the expert or anything like that. I've never seen myself that way in facilitating this group."
"I guess that's fair enough," Will said. "And, listen, I didn't mean to be a prick about it. Pardon my French."
"It's OK, Will. Now, would someone else like to tell me something positive about their week?"