Empathy

Last Tuesday, the kind of cold that seeps into your bones before dawn, I watched Marge from next door wrestle her snowblower. She’d been shoveling for an hour already, shoulders hunched, breath pluming. I’d been wrestling my own grief – a quiet, persistent ache since my last patient passed – and the urge to do something, to fix it, was strong. My old hospice reflex: move in, offer help, make the pain less.

But this time, I didn’t grab my shovel. I didn’t call out. I just stood at my window, watching the way her hands gripped the handle, the way her head dipped with each effort. I didn’t try to make it better. I just saw her. The exhaustion. The quiet determination. The sheer, ordinary weight of it.

Then, as she paused to wipe her brow, I raised my hand in a small, slow wave. Not a question, not a solution. Just a silent acknowledgment: I see you’re here, struggling. I see you.

She stopped. Looked up. A tiny, almost imperceptible nod. Then she kept shoveling, but her shoulders seemed a fraction less tight.

It was nothing. A wave. A moment of not rushing. But it felt like a victory. Not because I’d helped her clear the path, but because I’d finally stopped trying to fix the path for her. I’d simply sat with her struggle, right there in the cold, without needing to move it.

What it proved, quietly, is this: empathy isn’t about the grand gesture. It’s not about the solution. It’s about the courage to stand in the cold with someone else’s burden, without flinching, without offering to carry it for them. It’s saying, It’s okay to not be okay, and then just… being there. Right there. In the ordinary, hard, shoveling cold.

Sometimes, the smallest act of seeing is the most profound gift we can offer.

— Kyle Smith, sitting with what's hard