(WARNING: Please don’t read this post if you’re easily offended.)
“Our thoughts and prayers are with you,” said almost every card and call that came to my mother and my sisters and brothers and I once the word of Bette’s terminal cancer prognosis got around.
Clearly get-well cards weren’t appropriate. Nor were sympathy cards.
So people wrote messages in lovely blank notecards, the most common being, “Our thoughts and prayers are with you. Please let us know how we can help.”
There was an avalanche of religious cards. Prayer cards. Special masses. Cards about saints who we-who-had-rarely- gone-to-Sunday-School had ever heard of. One person even sent a small gift — a plastic night-light of the Virgin Mary.
My sister Susan, from the Bible belt, was especially showered with “thoughts and prayers.”
The exception was her teaching partner. When Susan told Jo the news, Jo in her Australian accent loudly blurted, “Oh, fuck.”
At which point Susan and Jo both choked and cried. Jo was the first person to say what we felt, what we wanted to say, what we wanted to hear. Oh, fuck, our always youthful, always strong 74 year-old mother has just learned out of the blue that she’s going to die soon. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Until this I probably sent “thoughts and prayers” to people too. Empathy is loosely defined as ‘putting ourselves in the other people’s shoes.’ Know that the person dying and those closest to her may feel like their shoes are a size too small and the blisters are killer. Instead of neutral niceties they may welcome the chance to be able to talk with you about how awful it all is.
