Others’ pain an eye-opening experience

While my car idled at a red light I was aware, peripherally, of the woman sitting on the bench on the corner, waiting for the bus. But I had other things on my mind and I didn’t even glance at her until something, a movement, got my attention.

She appeared to be in her mid-30s or early 40s. She was dressed for work in slacks and a blouse and she carried a purse and a briefcase.

As she waited she sat slumped and dejected, as still as a statue, feet and knees together, staring straight ahead with no expression on her face.

Tears, one right after another, poured down her cheeks. What had caught my eye was the movement of her hands, when once, twice and then a third time, she reached up to wipe them away.

The woman wept the way a stone weeps; drawing moisture from some deep secret source until it swells and pools and then slips down the smooth face.

She was the picture of suffering.

I tried to look at her, without staring, but then I realized she wouldn’t have noticed if I had. She was alone in her secret heartache.

The light changed and I drove away, glancing back at her in my rearview mirror.

Then, a few days later, I saw the man. He sat in the cafe nursing a cup of coffee, scratching long columns of numbers on a yellow legal pad. Waiting for my tea, I noticed the way he propped one arm on the table and dropped his head, wearily, into the palm of his hand. The other hand was busy writing, moving numbers from one column to another, obviously trying to balance something.

Taking the warm paper cup that held my steaming tea, I walked toward the door. But before I went out onto the street I looked back over my shoulder just in time to see the man toss the pencil onto the table and push the paper away.

Whatever it was he was working on, he couldn’t make it all add up.

The images of the man and the woman stayed with me all week. I thought about her tears. I thought about the way he had scratched numbers anxiously on the yellow pad.

I just happened to see both the man and the woman in unguarded moments, when their unhappiness was exposed and visible to the naked eye.

But think how much we never see.

At any given moment people everywhere – the stranger in the car next to ours or the person standing silently in the elevator; co-workers in cubicles down the hall or even the beloved face on the other side of the bed – are struggling. And we don’t recognize it.

One may be silently suffocating under the chest-crushing weight of a dying marriage. Another’s thoughts churn and tumble over a child who is losing her way.

Still others worry about jobs or are lost in the miasma of depression.

But each day, broken or not, they get up and step into the world. They go to work, or to school. They feed the babies, buy the groceries and do the laundry.

They do what is expected of them and show no sign of what is going on inside. They keep their secrets, and unless we look up just as the light shines on a crack in the facade, when emotions rise to the surface like the tears that fell from the woman’s eyes, or the frustration in the man’s movements, we’re unaware.

I don’t know which is worse – seeing and not being able to help, or being blind to pain when it is right in front of us.

But I do know – just as if I had looked at the sun and been branded by it – when I close my eyes the man and the woman are still there.