I Can't Un-Hear Their Voices

“I never realized there was so much pain and suffering in the world.”

We hear this admission - an exclamation spoken with surprise - enough that we realize how many people are not well-aware of the overwhelming instances of distress, disease, and despair that is a common condition of the human experience everywhere around the world.

Life is hard for all of us. We hear the stories every day. Yet, we don’t despair. 

Listening to those stories could lead us to despair. But in the end, if we listen closely enough we also hear the hope, the resilience, and the light beyond the darkest shadows that test our human resolve and our human relationships.

But when we resolve to not run from the darker aspects of the world and this life, by acknowledging them and being willing to accompany others through them, we also feel and experience the overwhelming human strength and power to find a way through and to triumph over the profound challenges that we all, in one way or another, face.

Let me speak for myself.

After four decades of listening professionally, I have become increasingly attuned to the struggles that our fellow human beings face every day in their lives. 

I also know that I was born with an ability to viscerally feel empathy, an ability for noticing when others are struggling, and an ability for acting with compassion regarding the challenges that others are experiencing, challenges that make their lives unrelentingly harder. I am convinced that is what has led me to do the work I do today - imperfectly, to be certain - and have done throughout my professional and personal life. 

Temperament and personality assessments indicate that empathy - feeling deeply for others, in their pain and in their joy, has been listed as my greatest strength. Listening without trying to tell others what they “need to do or feel” is also high on the list. That makes me deeply attuned to others’ distress and anxieties. And it also means that I am, at the same time, attuned to the light and promise that exists beyond and within their circumstances.

In fifth grade, I remember my classmate Terry, who wore heavy metal braces on his arms and legs as he labored to walk. It seriously inhibited his ability to join in most class activities, including going outside to play during recess. Our teacher noticed that I and one other boy befriended him and paid more attention to him than others did, and asked us to be his companions on field trips and in the classroom. I found in Terry a boy who was still so much more like me on the inside than his disabilities on the outside would show.

I always loved history, and in middle school I chose to read The Diary of Anne Frank for an English class project, because I was drawn to her family’s tragic story during the Holocaust. Yet, I was made fun of for it because I was reading a story about a girl, which, I guess, was not cool for a typical young teenage boy to do. While hers was a story that led to her death, it was also a story that continues to speak all these years later to the indomitable strength of the human spirit.  

In college, I chose to major in Public Service because I wanted to be actively involved in helping people’s lives to be easier and better. I followed that with a graduate degree in Divinity, for the very same reason. It is this passion to help alleviate human suffering that has never wavered, no matter how hard the work can often be.

I’ve had the absolute privilege of traveling to Cuba, Jamaica (four times), and Ukraine (six times) not for vacations or leisure, but to understand and grow to know what people’s lives in other nations - economically-struggling nations - were like. I had the distinct opportunity to live in the homes of many of the people in each of those countries while I was there, and came to cherish those intimate immersions into their daily lives. Again, I felt and saw, in those immersions, a spirit of resilience and joy beyond the daily struggles that the people of each country endured.

Years ago, I took an extended American Sign Language class to better support an older couple in my community who were deaf, and the husband was diagnosed with cancer. I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of compassion for them as they had to navigate the health care system without the verbal communication abilities that most others have. I simply wanted them to know that I was someone who wanted to “hear” their voices when so many others couldn’t. 

I’ve had four decades of listening to the stories of people who were grieving because loved ones died, who lost jobs or mobility or relationships, who were living with profound regrets or immobilizing fears or chronic diseases that robbed them of their joy or a dignified end to their lives. You learn a lot about the human experience when you listen that often and that intimately to others.

I, myself, am also the father of a son who lives with profound intellectual disabilities and autism, which has demonstratively changed and marked my family’s life together. This very personal experience with a child, a sacred human being, whom I love dearly, inspires me to notice and hear more clearly, to love and cherish more dearly, and to connect with others more nearly, day by day by day.

Life is so often not very easy. It takes strength, perseverance, and resolve to choose every day not to despair or give up on hope or descend into resentment and anger at the pain and suffering I’ve seen and heard about throughout these past 40 years. 

I can’t un-hear the declarations of others’ heartbreak and despair that I’ve been told over the years that violently upend human lives - 

“ It’s cancer.” 

“His plane has crashed, and he’s dead.” 

“This marriage is over. I want out.” 

“We’ve decided to go in another direction; your job is being eliminated.”

“I’m a stranger and feeling utterly alone in my own home.”

And while I wish I never would have heard any of it - because it is heartbreaking to know how much people can suffer - I still consider it a sacred privilege that I did. I know that all of my Someone To Tell It To colleagues feel the same way about what they’ve heard, too. 

To be invited into some of the most profoundly intimate emotional moments of others’ lives, even though they are hard to see and hear, is a distinct privilege. To be deemed safe enough to hold Someone’s story - that often is never told to anyone else - is a distinct trust. To be considered empathetic enough, caring enough, and compassionate enough to hold another’s pain, distress, and grief along with them is a distinct gift of sacred respect. 

None of it is easy. But all of it is worth our efforts if it helps Someone to find hope in the despair, peace in the turmoil, and clarity in the mess.

Speaking for myself, it has made me more empathetic, more compassionate, and more sensitive to others’ suffering, and pain. It provokes in me a more intense and intensive search for the light in other’s lives, as well as in my own, to notice both the profound darkness and the profound light beyond it. 

I can’t un-hear any of it. I don’t want to un-hear it. I still hear their stories; they are embedded in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. But I don’t despair or begrudge any of it, because every day - and I really mean every day - I see continuous gifts of light and hope and wonder and goodness and reassurance and support through it all.

Photo by Tolga Gezginiş on Unsplash