From the time I was a child, I was drawn to—attuned to—the sadness of others—not in the sense that I enjoyed their sadness or wanted to be sad myself, but in that I empathized with them and wanted to help alleviate their sadness. I’m not talking about a 13-year-old who works as a hospital volunteer to help sick people (although I did that, too). I’m talking about a 6 or 7-year-old who empathized with the pain of a 70-year-old Holocaust survivor—though I had no idea what the Holocaust was or what "survivor" met—or an 80-year-old widower. I empathized so much that I took on some of the pain myself and felt added sorrow because I could not take theirs away.
My compassion for these people—neighbors, mostly—did not keep me from having fun. Like my friends, I played with dolls, rode my bike, skated, played tag and hopscotch, skinned my knees, and sometimes misbehaved. But while I played, or skated, or rode my bike, I might notice that Sarah or Minnie or Bessie or Mrs. Liebowitz were outside sitting on their steps or their benches or beach chairs, and I’d go over to talk to them. In the wintertime, I’d sometimes knock on Dorothy’s door to see if she wanted me to get her milk from Danny’s Grocery, or her carton of Camels. Or I’d go have tea with Mrs. Liebowitz and listen to her talk about her long-dead husband. I suppose I realized early on that playing, like life itself, was temporary. I didn’t know that for sure, of course—I merely suspected it. And I spent the ensuing years of my childhood wondering if my suspicions were true.
I remember my Dad taking me to the Ringing Brothers/Barnum & Bailey Circus when I was about eight, and feeling a sense of malaise afterward. As we were heading out of the venue—we lived within walking distance of the Spectrum, where it took place—I held onto my Father’s hand, looking behind me the whole time we were walking, not at the vendors selling cotton candy and souvenirs, but at the clowns heading to their trailers sans smiles and the elephants being corralled as handlers yelled at them impatiently. I didn’t tell my Father how I felt, because I knew he wanted me to love the circus. But I told my Mom, who told me that all the other kids at the circus were laughing and having fun—not worried about whether the clowns missed their parents or if the elephants were sad because they had to stand up in trailers. “I never heard of it!” she’d say, exasperated but smiling, when I asked a loaded question. “Go play! Have some fun!” She’d always tell me I was a good girl with a good heart, and that would appease me for the moment—but I never stopped wondering about the clowns and the elephants, and the fact that my questions weren’t answered told me that those clowns did miss their parents and the elephants were sad.
After many years of loss and introspection, I came to realize that I wasn’t born with a melancholic temperament—or a Four on the Enneagram, as I have confirmed conclusively—but I certainly was born into melancholy. The reason that I cried for Mrs. Liebowitz, and the clowns and the elephants had nothing to do with my being a “wet blanket” or a “sad sack.” It had to do with Gregory.
With Gregory, Christmas '78, five months
before he died.
It was when I was born that Gregory, my oldest brother and, from when I was a baby, the light of my life, began getting “into trouble,” as they called it in vague and hushed tones back then. Gregory was 12 ½ when I was born, and it was that year that he started cutting school. It was that year that the whispering and spelling began. Then it was “t-r-u-a-n-c-y” and “d-e-t-e-n-t-i-o-n c-e-n-t-e-r.” I learned to spell early so that by the time things like “h-e-r-o-i-n” and “m-e-t-h-a-d-o-n-e” were being spelled, I was way ahead of the game. I didn’t know what those things were, exactly, but I knew they made my Mother cry and hold her heart and my Father turn somber and old before his time. To shield myself, I developed a very keen sense for knowing and not knowing at the same time. It was called denial.
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