In some ways, I feel like I've become rather cold or unempathic. When it comes to death, I'm very divided. When it comes to older people, understand and feel some remorse, or at least imagine what I think that someone who is close to that person might be feeling, and feel sympathetic. But it generally doesn't affect me directly, emotionally. When my uncle died this summer, I felt bad and sad, and really I felt bad for his daughters and wife who were part of his every day life and I felt bad for my parents and their siblings who were also very close to him. But I also felt detatched from it. I didn't burst into tears because I was overcome with grief. I wrote at length about my mixed feelings regarding his death and death in general.
However, when I hear about a relative stranger, or even a fictitious instance, of a child dying, I am tremendously emotionally affected. When Andrea and I watched Benjamin Button, at the end he dies, having finished his aging process and becoming a newborn baby. Even though we followed the story and understood that it was an old man drying, the imagery was that of a baby closing its eyes and stopping breathing (I'm starting to get a little choked just writing this sentance), and both Andrea and I were just sobbing and sobbing. Today I read about the death of John Travolta and Kelly Preston's son, Jett, and again just reading about it I had a very hard time keeping from bawling outloud. It makes SENSE to me, since one of the foremost events in my life right now is raising Felix. It just brings home the notion (not sure if I heard this somewhere and I'm paraphrasing or if I'm making this up, but I think it holds true, SHOULD hold true) that once you become a parent, every child becomes your child.
And perhaps its an evolutionary mechanism, even if it clearly does not work for everyone. After all, if evryone felt this way, things would be a lot different in a lot of ways.
1 comment:
We experience this too. I remember when Jim & Claudia had their daughter, Claudia made a comment about how any negative news reports involving children just tore at her heart...now I know what she meant!
I know when you wrote about your feelings after Roger's death I thought that it made sense. After all, you saw them occasionally but not alot...you didn't live near them like Dave did as a kid and it didn't change anything about your daily life.
When my grandpa Bartel died, I felt that way. He was never very communicative or involved with us kids. Shortly after, we had to have our cat Frisky put to sleep and mom and I cried tons...she even felt guilty about being more upset over the cat than her own father. I said that the cat was part of her daily life and gave unconditional love. Grandpa was there but distant and an alcoholic and I would guess the relationship had it's own issues.
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