People talk a lot about narcissism and sociopathy these days, and those terms tend to be rather overused. Unlikeable people are described as either narcissists or sociopaths. (Twenty years ago it was borderline personality disorder that took the big hit.) Still, I wonder why there are people in the world, and there seem to be an awful lot of them, who don’t have much empathy. Did something happen to them to make them lose their empathy for other people, or more likely, did they not develop this quality as they were growing up?
Some people seem naturally attuned to other peoples’ feelings and walking in another person’s shoes. For other people this seems to be impossible. They don’t function on the level of feelings at all. Maybe it’s just too painful for them. I remember when I first started dating Max we were sitting at some cafe in DC, on Connecticut Avenue, that had a small number of outdoor tables, enjoying our non-alcoholic beverages, and a homeless man began going from table to table asking for a few coins or dollars. A table near ours was not happy about this matter, and the man’s persistence, and the young men at the table began to punch the homeless man and kick him to get him to go away. I was upset, and scared for the man, and Max began holding my hand. “He’s very drunk and he doesn’t really feel pain” he told me.
I’ve always been a softie, and my mother would tease me a little bit. “Did you manage not to adopt another stray dog today?” But she was secretly a softie too underneath her hard and sometimes disdainful exterior. Once when I was driving with her in Austin we accidentally ran over a squirrel and we pulled over to the side of the road agonizing over what to do. It was possibly still alive and in pain. Was it better to run over it again and put it out of its misery? Or should we let nature take its course?
My Mom had Crohn’s Disease (an inflammation of the colon which is genetic for Jewish people) and would have to take cortisone when it flared up, which made her kind of mentally loopy. When I was about 13, there was a grocery store chain called Big Bear in Austin that ran one of those games where they gave out Bingo tickets whenever you shopped. If you got a Bingo, you could win a prize up to $1,000, which was very good money in the mid-Seventies. We had been collecting Big Bear Bingo tickets for a while.
One night I was home alone with Mom. Dad and my brother had gone somewhere, and I was reading in my room when Mom started insisting we had won the Big Bear $1,000 Bingo. I asked her if I could check the Bingo tickets but she insisted we needed to get into our Volkswagen and go the store right away to claim our prize. So off we went, coincidentally running into Dad and Jon coming home in the Dodge Aspen, and we frantically blew the horn and flashed the lights so that they would follow us to Big Bear.
When we all got to Big Bear in our cars, and Mom announced to the manager we had won, he congratulated us and told us our prize would have to be verified at Big Bear Headquarters in Houston, with the tickets examined under ultraviolet light for tampering. Then he asked to see the tickets. Mom produced them.
Let’s just say they were not the winning tickets. They did not in any way make a Bingo. Mom was just high on cortisone. My brother and I were extremely embarrassed and not at all empathetic at the time. Dad bought us all ice cream bars and we went home.
The First Year Without Sarah 