Stolen Wallet

Published in Waking Up on the Planet

Wake-Up Call: Private Wounds

By Karen M. Jones

A friend of mine had her wallet stolen last week. Even as she goes through the hassle of canceling her credit cards and replacing a dozen other identifiers (do you realize how much we carry in our wallets?), she says it's the violation of her privacy -- the idea that an ill-intentioned person has her address and a raft of other personal information -- that's most upsetting. Then she quickly adds that, compared with what others are coping with in hurricane regions and war zones, her troubles surely don't merit lost sleep.

A stolen wallet no doubt is preferable to shelter living, and comparing our troubles to others' tragedies can often diminish their impact. But my friend's assessment made me think about how many other people are feeling guilty for mourning personal losses of all kinds, be it the financial loss of a home or job; a health crisis that eradicates independence; or the human loss of a loved one to illness, aging, accident or crime. Somewhere, someone is devastated by the death of a beloved animal companion and compounding the grief by devaluing it in the face of "larger" calamities.

Human suffering isn't a contest. One person's difficulties aren't necessarily more deserving of compassion and assistance than another's. If they were, we would be constantly judging the worthiness of people's pain. (What would be the criteria?) In reality, there is plenty of sorrow to go around, in infinite varieties, all of it in need of healing. The wife who is burying the husband who succumbed to cancer and the widow of yesterday's hurricane victim share a shattered heart.

In fact, you may do a greater service by comforting the friend whose pain won't be alleviated by public outpourings of sympathy and aid, who may even feel that his or her loss doesn't merit the melancholy that, even so, won't go away. Anguish exists in our own homes just as surely -- and tenaciously -- as it does in every corner of the world. Our job is to loosen its grip where and when we can, whether or not it ever makes headlines.

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