A bit of a change of pace here from Brian Mann, a member of, and active in, the Peachtree Church in Atlanta, Georgia.
I’ve been thinking about why we sometimes grieve people we never knew personally.
Dolly Parton. Jimmy Carter. Fred Rogers.
When we lose people like this, the grief can feel strangely personal. It might seem odd, because most of us never sat across a table from them. They didn’t know our names.
And yet somehow, we felt like we knew something about them, because they each embodied remarkably similar qualities.
They were magnetic without seeming to need attention, secure enough in themselves to be humble, serious about the problems of ordinary people without becoming cynical about the world.
They each had the rare ability to make you feel that there was enough to go around: enough dignity, kindness, grace, enough room at the table.
Fred Rogers could look into a television camera and somehow convince a child that what they felt mattered.
Jimmy Carter could leave the presidency and spend the next four decades demonstrating that significance and status were not the same thing.
Dolly Parton could be larger than life and still make the person standing in front of her feel like the important one.
They didn’t use their presence to make themselves bigger. They used it to make other people feel more human. Their attention communicated something very liberating: I see you. You belong here.
I was born in the mid-70’s and these three were all icons of my childhood era. They’ve been called The Mount Rushmore of Empathy.
Maybe that’s why losing them feels like more than losing a famous person. We’re grieving what they represented to us: a particular vision of what a human being can be. In short, a wounded healer.
And maybe the best way to grieve someone like that is not simply to miss them, but to become more like what we loved in them.
Dolly Parton. Jimmy Carter. Fred Rogers.
When we lose people like this, the grief can feel strangely personal. It might seem odd, because most of us never sat across a table from them. They didn’t know our names.
And yet somehow, we felt like we knew something about them, because they each embodied remarkably similar qualities.
They were magnetic without seeming to need attention, secure enough in themselves to be humble, serious about the problems of ordinary people without becoming cynical about the world.
They each had the rare ability to make you feel that there was enough to go around: enough dignity, kindness, grace, enough room at the table.
Fred Rogers could look into a television camera and somehow convince a child that what they felt mattered.
Jimmy Carter could leave the presidency and spend the next four decades demonstrating that significance and status were not the same thing.
Dolly Parton could be larger than life and still make the person standing in front of her feel like the important one.
They didn’t use their presence to make themselves bigger. They used it to make other people feel more human. Their attention communicated something very liberating: I see you. You belong here.
I was born in the mid-70’s and these three were all icons of my childhood era. They’ve been called The Mount Rushmore of Empathy.
Maybe that’s why losing them feels like more than losing a famous person. We’re grieving what they represented to us: a particular vision of what a human being can be. In short, a wounded healer.
And maybe the best way to grieve someone like that is not simply to miss them, but to become more like what we loved in them.
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