Empathy

em·pa·thy

ˈempəTHē/

noun

1. the ability to understand and share the feelings of another

A few months ago, I began compiling a “bucket list” of sorts, people I would like to meet face-to-face.  Only one of the names could be considered universally famous (former President Jimmy Carter), the rest are mostly the dynamic women who have helped me during this continuing journey of discovery, and the rededication of my life towards helping spread awareness to Domestic Violence.  Of course, at the top of the list, was Nikki Allman, my mentor, and my friend.  I was so privileged and thrilled to meet her over the weekend of October 10/11.  The others on the list (so far) are Melissa Dohme, Kristen Paruginog, Kate Ranta, Jenna Lee, Gabbe Rowland….and the list continues to grow. 

The day I met Nikki

The most common attribute they share (other than being involved with Domestic Violence Awareness) is their overwhelming sense of empathy.  They always try to understand the feelings of those they interact with, they use their own pain to help others….I’ve even witnessed them attempting to show empathy towards some of the trolls that bombard their efforts at spreading awareness with lies and hate, even though they know it will never work.

Recently, I engaged in a, for lack of a better term, “debate” with one of these trolls.  And, I am ashamed to say, he managed to drag me down to his level.  In the end, I realized he was only baiting me, and used anything I said to try to degrade and humiliate me.  He was not interested in learning or understanding.  Finally, I simply deleted anything I had posted, and blocked him from my Facebook page.  But, what struck me about him, and other so-called trolls, is his utter lack of empathy towards anyone who has suffered.  It doesn’t matter what the subject is, whether it deals with Domestic Violence or politics, or anything….they only strive to spread hate and ugliness, and they are best described as “inhuman!”  I truly believe that empathy is what makes us human, and, only through empathy can we end domestic violence.

While I was considering “empathy” as a topic for a blog post, I kept thinking of the first time I strongly felt true empathy, it’s rather a long story, and it started fifty years ago:

When I was ten years old, my mother decided that I needed to learn to play the piano.  I told her I didn’t want to learn the piano, piano lessons were for nerds.  I had no desire to play the piano and I knew it would only give the bullies who tormented me another reason to make fun of me.  Furthermore, (although I didn’t tell her this) I only saw it as a way for my mother to further humiliate me.  In spite of my protestation, she made me start taking lessons.

My first piano teacher was a younger woman who was full of enthusiasm and positivism.  I hated the lessons, I hated practicing….but she kept telling me how well I was progressing, in spite of the fact that I put no effort into any of it, I merely went through the motions.  Worst of all, I would have to perform at the end of the year in her annual recital. I was morbidly afraid of humiliating myself in front of a crowd of people.  But then I began to see the possibility that I could turn the recital to my advantage.  I knew I would fail, but if I failed badly enough, maybe Mom would let me stop taking lessons.  And so I practiced…practiced playing badly.  When I performed at the recital, it was a total disaster.  I hit just about every wrong chord, I repeated bad notes, and in the end, I quit before I finished the piece.  But my plan backfired.  My teacher, as she was wont to do, told me in her most enthusiastic voice, “that was such a good effort!”  My mother was livid.  First she turned to me and said; “you a little brat, you humiliated me!”  Then she turned her wrath upon my teacher, calling her a “fraud” and an “idiot.”  “You call that a ‘good effort?’ I could teach a dog to play piano better than that!”  Then she demanded a refund, and stormed out of the house.  Outside she told me she would find a teacher who would “force” me to learn.  That is when I met Mrs. L.

Mrs. L was a Jewish widow in her late 70s who taught piano and voice. She had immigrated to the United States at the end of World War II.  She kept her house very hot all year round, in spite of the fact that she always wore long sleeve sweaters.  She spoke with a heavy European accent, and it seemed that she was always angry….at least with me.  Wednesday afternoons became a torture for me.  She taught her lessons out of her home, a large house with a covered porch in the back…this was her “waiting room.”  The only redeeming quality (in my eyes) to my weekly ordeal was that she stocked the waiting room with copies of the kid’s magazine entitled Highlights!  I loved reading Goofus and Gallant.  I kind of identified with Gallant, the kid who did everything right (and was kind of a nerd) but I sort of envied Goofus, the kid who did everything wrong….the rebel…much like the bullies who tormented me.  But I digress.

Each week became an ordeal.  I put out minimal effort.  I rarely practiced unless my mother forced me to do so.   As I walked into the piano room, Mrs. L would start in.  “I can see by your face, you haven’t practiced.  Why don’t you practice?  Why? I tell you why, you are a lazy boy!”  She sat in an easy chair behind the piano, and held a long wooden pointer with a rubber tip.  She used this to point to the music on the page and the keys on the piano.  Often she would smack the back of my hands with it if my fingers weren’t curled properly, or if I hit a wrong note or chord.  I can still hear her shouting “ NO NO NO, VAT IS IT YOU ARE DOING?  NO NO NO!”

I hated the pieces she gave me to learn, many were such simple tunes, I felt like she was treating me like a baby….tunes like Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star.  I couldn’t understand how to read the music; it just looked like unrelated dots on the page.  Although, over time, slowly I learned to read music, but I just didn’t care.  Finally, she gave me a piece I liked (for the life of me, I can’t remember the title).  It was a fun piece…so I decided to practice.  And I practiced hard, and learned it perfectly.

The next week, for the first time, I looked forward to my lesson.  “I would show HER!” I thought.  I walked confidently into the piano room.  She saw the confidence and commented “so, maybe you practiced…we shall see!”  I played the piece through, without a mistake.  And I waited for the compliment.  “NO NO NO, You play the notes….NOT the MUSIK…there is no beauty in this, just noise, you have no feeling for the MUSIK.  How do you think I learn Mozart, Beethovan, Chopin????  Huh?  By being lazy…..NO NO NO…I VERKED HARD…you don’t care about the MUSIK!!  YOU MUST CARE ABOUT THE MUSIK, YOU MUST CARE ABOUT THE BEAUTY.  YOU DO NOT HAVE THE BEAUTY IN YOU!”  I didn’t understand what she meant, I had worked hard, I learned the piece!  After that, I figured it didn’t matter what I did, I couldn’t win with this woman.  I began to hate her.

I begged my mother to quit….she said “NO! you can’t quit…you’re a failure in school, you can’t play sports, all you do is read books….maybe she will get SOMETHING good out of you!”  Practice was torture, but I found a solution.  I was able to do scales without thinking.  As long as my mother heard something, she left me alone.  While I endlessly played scales, I had a book open on the music stand, and I read while I practiced. The ordeal continued until the summer I turned 13.  Mrs. L took ill, and was unable to continue teaching for the time being.  I rejoiced in the respite.

By then I had found a kindred soul in my school.  Sister Mary Myles loved history like me.  She saw something in me, she took me under her wing….and she liked my voice.  Puberty hit me at age 12, and by the time I entered 8^th grade, I had developed a deep baritone voice.  Sister Myles encouraged me to join the choir, of which she was the Choir Mistress.  We boasted of the only 4 part harmony acapella choir in the state….of which I comprised the entire bass section. Sister Myles was Irish, and she jokingly boasted of her Irish temper.  Most of the time she was fairly even tempered, but on occasion she would lose patience with her pupils and fly off the handle.  (She often broke yardsticks in exasperation.) Then one day Sister Myles turned her wrath upon me.

At the time, I had become interested in the history of World War II, my father being a veteran of that war.  My favorite hangout was the Public Library, which was a half block from my school.  One day, during lunch period, I found the book to end all books.  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer….over 1,200 pages long.  I joyfully checked it out, and took it back to school with me.  I tried to put it inside my desk, but it was far too big.  So I set it on the corner of my desk.  As it happened, the first class after lunch was History, taught by Sister Myles.  When she walked in, the first thing she saw was a HUGE swastika (on the dust cover of the book) sitting on my desk.  She turned beet red, I thought she was going to have a stroke.  She strode to the back of the classroom (where I was seated) screaming “HOW DARE YOU DISPLAY THAT EVIL SYMBOL IN MY CLASSROOM???”   I was afraid she would strike me.  In a panic, I held up the book, and said “Sister, Sister, it’s a book, a history book….I didn’t draw it!!”  She grabbed the book from my hand, looked at the title page, and then handed it back.  She then returned to the podium and commenced an impassioned 45 minute lecture on the evils of the Nazi regime, and the horrors of the Holocaust.  I thoroughly enjoyed the lecture….my classmates were quite annoyed that I had caused an extra history lesson.  Sister Myles later apologized to me for shouting, but that she had known of many Nuns and Priests who had died along with the Jews in the Holocaust.  I dove into the book, I read the entire volume in less than two weeks, and I discussed what I read at length with Sister Myles.  It was difficult for me to understand the atrocities committed by the Nazi’s.  How could anyone be so cruel?  It saddened me that so many innocent lives were lost.

Soon after that, my mother informed me that Mrs. L had sufficiently recovered, and she could resume teaching piano, and that my first lesson would be the next Wednesday.  The respite was over.  Then she handed me a check to take to her to pay for the lessons.  Usually I took the payments with me on the first Wednesday of the month when I went to my lesson, but for some reason Mom wanted me to take it to her early, it was a Saturday afternoon.

I went to her house, and tried, as usual, to enter through the back porch.  The door was locked, I knocked but received no response.  I started to return home, but decided to try the front door, otherwise Mom would yell at me and send me back.  I rang the doorbell,  Mrs. L answered, and I was somewhat shocked at her appearance.  She was much thinner and paler, but what struck me most was that she was not wearing a sweater.  Her arms were bare, I had never seen her without a sweater.  She asked me “Vat do you vant?”  I told her my mother sent me with a check.  When she reached for the check, I could not help but notice the numbers tattooed on her arm.  I knew exactly what they meant.  I couldn’t release the check,  I stared dumfounded at her arm.  We engaged in a light tug-of-war, and I looked at her face.  She had tears in her eyes, and she glanced at the tattoo.  Then she uttered a single word:

“Auschwitz.”

Then she pulled the check from my grasp and closed the door.

I walked home with a huge lump in my throat.  I could not stop the tears.  And I was overwhelmed with guilt.  What had she seen?  What had she endured?  How did she survive the most infamous of the death camps?  Here I had considered her piano lessons torture, but she had lived though the real thing.  I never gave any effort, I didn’t care about her lessons, I had disrespected the one thing that she loved.  I wondered how many of her former students she watched walk into the gas chambers….students who did try, students who did practice, students who “had the beauty” in them.  When I arrived home, my mother was at the back door.  She demanded “why are you crying now? What?  Did she yell at you again?  Maybe you will learn to practice this time and she won’t yell at you so much…go to your room!”

I went downstairs and sat at the piano.  I couldn’t touch it…I tried to imagine the beautiful music that Mrs. L had played in her youth.   I remember reading about the bitter cold in the camps, and wondered if that was why she kept her house so warm.  I wondered how she survived.  I wondered how much of her anger came from her memories.  I wondered how I could ease her pain.  I would never love the piano, but I had found a love of music…I felt the need to let her know of my new found passion. I vowed to tell her how I felt.  Something, anything, to make up for being such a thorn in her side.

The next week, I went to her house for my lesson.  When I walked in, I could see she was uneasy about the fact that I knew her secret.  I asked her if we could talk before commencing the lesson.  She said “I will not talk about that time.”  I told her I didn’t expect her to do so…but that I wanted to apologize for never giving her my best effort, for not being able to see the beauty of the piano, but that I just didn’t think the piano was for me.  Then I told her I did love music, I loved to listen to it, and that I had begun singing in the choir, and I asked her if it was possible for her to help me with my voice.  She said “let me hear you sing.” 

I sang The Impossible Dream from the musical The Man of La Mancha.  As I sang, a smile crept over her face.  She closed her eyes, and kept time with her fingers.  When I finished she exclaimed “YES…THERE is the MUSIK,  THERE is the BEAUTY….you have found YOUR  instrument…YES YES YES, I can help you!  You need to learn to breath, you need to learn much.  Do you know anything classical?”  I told her I was learning  Ave Maria,  by Franz Schubert, to sing at Midnight Mass at Christmas.  She said “yes, I have this”…and she pulled out the sheet music and began to play.  I could hear the passion in her playing, and for the first time, I saw joy on her face.

For the next two hours we worked together.  She taught me how to breath, how to sing from the diaphragm, how to properly hold a note. She taught me how to read the nuances of the score, where the composer had shown how he wanted the soloist to sing the music. All the while she kept saying “I knew the musik vas in you, I knew the musik vas in you!”  At the end, she said “NOW you understand the beauty, NOW you have the beauty in you….NOW you can practice with joy!”  Somehow, for nearly three years, she recognized there was something musical in me, I don’t know how she knew, but somehow she did.  I believe that she had seen so much ugliness in the world that she wanted to instill beauty where she could, in any way she could.  It was the first time that anyone had ever told me that there was any “beauty” in me!

I did not dare say anything to my mother, she had sent me there to learn the piano, not how to “warble” (as she called my singing).  The next day I talked to Sister Myles about my lesson (but I did not mention the tattoo, knowing Mrs. L considered that a private matter, which is the same reason I only refer to her here as "Mrs. L").  Sister told me she had heard of Mrs. L, that before the war she was an accomplished concert pianist and music teacher in Europe, but that she had never performed after moving to the United States after the war, she thought perhaps it was because of her age.  (Years later, after I saw Playing for Time, a film about musicians who were forced to play at Auschwitz, I wondered if Mrs. L had survived in that manner, which would perhaps explain why she would not perform.)  

A couple days later, my mother informed me that Mrs. L had suffered a relapse, and could no longer teach.  I was devastated. Within a week my mother learned that Mrs. L had suffered a massive stroke, and had passed away.  When my mother told me, I started to cry.  She said “what is wrong with you, I thought you hated that woman….be happy you don’t have to take any more lessons. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, (Mom’s favorite curse)… you cry like a little girl…get out of my sight!”  There was no way that I could explain my feelings to my mother.  Only Sister Myles understood….only she held me while I cried, only she understood my grief!  My mother wouldn’t let me go to the funeral because “Catholics don’t go to synagogues.”

That Christmas I sang Ave Maria at midnight Mass.  I sang it with passion. Only Sister Myles knew why I sang it with tears flowing down my face.  Sadly, within a year Sister Myles would lose her life in a tragic automobile accident.  To this day, I cannot listen to Ave Maria without tears in my eyes, and the memory of the two women who opened my eyes and soul to the beauty of music.  Unfortunately I did not develop my talent.  Without the encouragement of Sister Myles or Mrs. L, I didn’t have the confidence to continue on my own.  That, and 40 years of smoking, destroyed any voice I once had.  But I still have the beauty of music in me!

I will never forget the first time I truly felt empathy, and understood that only by standing in the shoes of another, can one try to understand their pain.  I was consoled only by the fact that, through empathy, I was able to show Mrs. L that, somehow, she had taught me about the beauty in music she so loved.  After that, empathy became engrained in my soul.  That is why I became a Hospital Corpsman, I could not imagine inflicting pain on anyone, even in war.  Empathy is partially why I never retaliated against my abuser, because I would never inflict pain on any one for any reason. And empathy is why I have become an advocate against Domestic Violence.  When I first read Melissa Dohme’s story, it touched my soul.  And when I learned of Tabitha’s tragic end, empathy demanded that I do something to help others affected by Domestic Violence.  Apathy is the opposite of empathy, if we do nothing, nothing will change.  Only through empathy can our society understand how destructive domestic violence, or any violence, is for all of us.

 There is beauty in empathy…and in my mind’s eye; I can see Mrs. L saying to each and every one of the wonderful women on my “bucket list”  

                                     “YES, you have the beauty in you!”

נוח על משכבך

(Rest in Peace)