Yesterday at a bus stop, a man told me he had end stage bone cancer.
I wish I had expressed myself better in the face of such an intimate interaction with a stranger. I wish I had offered words of comfort to this man who without any other introduction, had felt comfortable enough with me to share a painful part of his soul, in a conversation I couldn’t help but wonder whether it would be one of his last. I wish I had expressed empathy but I didn’t.
Here is why.
On the morning that the man told me he had bone cancer, I was irritable. I had woken up early to travel by bus to my first therapy session in almost a year. I was nervous about the prospect of a new approach to therapy I had never tried before, with so much experience with talk therapy and with writing down my feelings and trying for the life of me to find the exact words needed to relieve the pain I felt after a third of lifetime spent feeling dismissed, ignored, pitied and generally misunderstood. I wasn’t sure it was working and I doubted whether this would be any different.
Yesterday, when a man at a bus stop told me he had bone cancer; I was looking at my phone trying to avoid eye contract with strangers. A few minutes before meeting this particular stranger, on the bus that took me to that spot; another man had made polite conversation with me by telling me that the sight of “someone like you” reminded him that his life could always be worse and that he “prayed for people in wheelchairs all the time.” I know from experience that people generally say this kind of thing when they are uncomfortable, and yes I know he was probably just trying to be nice but…Yesterday, when the man at the bus stop told me he had cancer; I wished I could disappear.
I wished that nice people who say nice things to the visibly disabled would understand that I am okay and do not need their reassurances to exist in a space that already has room for me. I wish that strangers with kind smiles would refrain from asking me personal questions or telling me personal tales of tragedy at 9am at a bus stop because my existence is uncomfortable to them.
On the day this stranger told me, that he had been recently diagnosed as terminally ill; I wish I could have offered more to the conversation from the perspective of a fellow human being wanting to connect with someone else. I wished I had told him that things were going to be okay. I wish I had offered an acknowledgement of the space we both shared in that moment, but because I didn’t…I wish that wherever he is, that he is at peace with his life, that he doesn’t take it personally that I am emotionally drained by the niceties of passerby on my way to the grocery store and that he knows that I DO CARE. I just wished he could have offered me the same understanding.
