My deepest sympathy

MANY mo ons ago a close friend lost his mother and my immediate reaction was to send a message of comfort. The problem was that it was sent as a text and in my haste to reach out I typed congratulations! Fortunately, he was gracious enough to text back and ask if I didn’t mean condolences. That is a prime example of sympathy gone horribly wrong, but we express it often when the need arises.

But what is sympathy, and how different is it from its close cousin empathy? A definition I came across said that sympathy is feeling sorry for someone but empathy is understanding the distress. I guess my failed attempt to console my friend was what was expected of me as a close friend, to sympathise.

Had I put myself in his shoes and harboured his pain I would be empathising as I would understand what he was going through as opposed to just mouthing off something I had heard people say in times like these. I’m sure there’s space for either but some would argue that not to empathise is forgivable but to not sympathise is evil.

I mean who has to explain that when someone is in need they need a friend indeed, also even if you don’t know the person a life lost is a life lost or are there different rules to this sympathy game? Then there are those who are seemingly indifferent to both these related but different emotions, these would be expressing apathy to the situation at hand.

Have you ever been invited to accompany someone to a funeral of someone you don’t know and were never going to meet? Assuming you would accept this invitation what would your disposition be, would you be suitably sympathetic or empathetic because as already stated, this person is a complete stranger but obviously means something to the person inviting you.

Apathy though isn’t always emotional detachment borne of choice. Sometimes one will choose not to show any emotion towards a tragedy because they are traumatised by something they witnessed or heard. If you’ve ever been involved in a car accident, it’s not a space you’d want to revisit even if it happened to someone else.

SURVIVOR’S REMORSE

You might still have survivor’s remorse asking why you survived and others didn’t if there were fatalities, or maybe you were driving and the scenes keep replaying in your head of what you could have done different. So apathy becomes a defence mechanism, it shields you from feeling because when you allow those feelings in it triggers other feelings, akin to someone not allowing themselves to fall in love again because of a bad relationship in the past.

Be that as it may I hope this is making you think how readily you personally sympathise; it should also probe if you understand that it’s not necessarily empathy but it beats expressing nothing. Here is my other question though, do you go fishing for sympathy or is the grief yours to go through, whether people sympathise or not there are reasons why they might not.

If they don’t at the very least sympathise are they any less of a friend, or do you put on your big boy pants and understand that sometimes when life hits you hard, people express sympathy but empathy is only for those who have gone through something similar, or those with very high emotional intelligence. Loss is universal but also very personal.

You can have many father figures in your life, but you only really have one father. Some may grieve more at the loss of a mother figure than a mother because of strained relationships with biological parents, but typically, blood is thicker and richer, hence it’s loss cuts deeper and the emptiness is more pronounced.

This depends in part on your psychological makeup, how you roll with punches. But it also depends on when it’s your turn to express your deepest sympathies how deep are you being. I remember like yesterday when my dad passed away and a friend came over to express his condolences, he hugged me and encouraged me to let it all out and not hold back because he understood this was a trying time for the family.

It was the most bizarre experience as there and then I needed sympathy not empathy as I was yet to process what had transpired with the mighty tree falling.