Seen, Read, Heard
Accompanying someone is the art of looking in a way that allows a person to begin to see themselves again.
Sometimes a thought begins with something others have made — an evening at the theatre, a video, a book, a concert. These essays tell what came home with me.
To Hold Without Holding On
After an evening at the theatre: 'Earthside' by Noah Haidle.
Some evenings at the theatre come home with you. Some time ago I saw ‘Earthside’ by Noah Haidle – the story of a terminally ill young woman who chooses a self-determined death and shapes a farewell ceremony together with her family. The evening offers no easy answers. It shows human closeness: in the midst of fear, parting, quarrelling, humour, love, and being overwhelmed.
At its centre stands Anna. She wants to make her life and her dying her own – to be seen, not only as someone who is ill, but as a person with a history, longing, guilt, fear, love, and dignity. At the end she does not try to explain her life or to sum it up. She gives thanks. For the people. For the time they shared. As though what remains were not the story of a life, but the connectedness that grew within it.
Her seven-year-old daughter Rose keeps asking: ‘What will your last words be?’ There is something deeply human in that – the longing to give parting a meaning, not to let a beloved person simply disappear. And Rose speaks of how someone lives on after their death: in memories, gestures, voices, in the wind, in the rain. That it is not gravity that holds us together, but love. In pastoral care, people are often searching for exactly this – the certainty that someone remains, even as they go.
A central figure is Anna’s mother Dorothy, a midwife who later also accompanied the dying. She says that at the beginning and at the end of life, people often need the same things: calm, safety, closeness – someone to carry the fear with them. And it is she, of all people – she who can speak so clearly about letting go – who reaches the limit of her own way of being when it comes to her daughter. Suddenly she is no longer an accompanist, but a mother: ‘As your mother, my task is to hold on to you and protect you.’ To me there was a great truth in precisely that. There are moments when people, despite all their inner clarity, simply love, hold on, do not want to lose.
Anna’s sister tries to respect her sister’s wish – and fights desperately against it at the same time: ‘I want to let you go. But I want more time.’ That simultaneity felt very true to me. People can love and want to hold on. They can understand – and still protest. In telephone counselling we meet this ambivalence again and again: in illness, separation, dying, and other existential crises.
The other figures of the evening, too, tell of what lies beneath the visible – beneath a policeman’s hardness a son’s grief, beneath a neighbour’s trying behaviour the loneliness, beneath humour and ritual the attempt to carry fear and pain together.
And then there is Louis, the violin teacher, with his declaration of love: ‘I don’t want to hold on to you. If this is your way, I will let you go.’ Precisely because there was no claim of possession left in it, but love and freedom at once, the scene had great depth.
One thought stayed with me throughout the evening: love lets go, and still longs to hold. People want to be seen, held, and remembered – and they want to set each other free. That is almost a contradiction – and yet it is none. Perhaps exactly this tension is the heart of accompaniment: to hold someone without holding on to them.
What impressed me most: the people in this play are not only sad. They laugh, quarrel, eat together, remember, confess guilt, are afraid – and go on hoping all the same. At the farewell ceremony at the end, it was not perfection that stood at the centre, but relationship. Not the right word – but being there.
Much of it reminded me of our work. In telephone counselling it is often not about having answers or solving problems. It is about standing by people in existential moments – listening, bearing it with them, preserving dignity, and helping someone feel a little less alone. Perhaps there are few more valuable things we can do.
For Those Who Remain
After an evening at a concert.
A requiem is a mass for the dead. I sat in the concert and waited for the words that belong to one: the plea for eternal rest, the judgement, the day of wrath. Instead the choir began, very quietly, and the first words were not for the dead. They were for those who are left behind: Blessed are they that mourn.
It took me a while to understand what was happening. Brahms compiled the texts himself, and he left out what usually gives a mass for the dead its weight – the wrath, the verdict, the intercession for the souls. It leaves no answer to the question why. The music turns: away from the dead, towards those who grieve.
I know this turning from conversations. When a person has suffered a loss, the temptation lies close at hand to speak about death – to place it, to give it a meaning, to answer the why. But there is no answer to the why that holds. What holds is something else: that someone turns towards those who remain.
Perhaps that is the difference I heard that evening. Explanation speaks about something. Comfort speaks to someone. As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you, it says later in the Requiem. A mother explains nothing. She is there, and her voice is enough – often before the child even understands the words.
It is also striking what does not happen to the grief: it is not talked away. They that sow in tears – the tears are not corrected, not cut short, not overruled. They are given time, until something else can come of them. Comfort knows no haste.
Later I read that Brahms himself is said to have remarked that he could just as well have called the work a human requiem. That is exactly how it had sounded: like music that does not answer death but remains with those who have to bear it.
As the last movement faded, it was the same word as at the beginning: blessed. First it had been for those who mourn. Now, at the very end, for the dead. As though the music had known that the way leads in this direction only.
After an evening at a concert: Johannes Brahms, Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), op. 45 – texts from the Luther Bible, chosen by the composer himself.
Beside the Screen
At a congress.
An international congress in our line of work, in a city a few countries away. This year's theme: the human touch – what it is, what it can do, and whether a machine can replace it. We could not travel there. So the five of us sat in our group room, for a day and a half, in front of a screen that showed the great hall. A few of our own people were actually there. In the camera pans across the rows we looked for them. We did not find them.
The lectures came from many countries. A brain researcher told of fibres in the skin that react only to gentle touch – from the sixteenth week of life, and even at eighty. For a day and a half it was about closeness and skin and the question of whether care can be computed. Whether it can, I do not know, even after those days.
In the room itself, meanwhile, things were human. A colleague dropped by before her shift on the phones that day. Someone told of a young caller who had been referred to us, of all things, by an AI. Coffee was poured, notes weretaken, there was laughing and disagreeing. Books wandered across the table.
Only in the closing round did one of us say what had been lying before our eyes for a day and a half: that we had sat here as five and shared our thoughts – that this, after all, was the human touch. She said it in passing. Perhaps it was the most accurate sentence of that day and a half.
This is no objection to the congress. The lectures were good, and we will draw on them for a long time. But the theme itself was not to be seen on the screen. It sat beside the screen – at the table, with coffee, with a colleague on her way to her shift, with disagreement. On the stage, touch was under discussion. In the room, it happened.
At the end of the round I said thank you. Not for the lectures – they came from far away and could not hear us. For being able to do this together.
Don't Say That
After an evening at the theatre.
We were at the theatre, at a play about a family. A seventeen-year-old has stopped going to school; his parents, separated, do everything: he moves in with his father, gets a new room, a new school, a jacket for the party. The father says the sentences every father says. That is part of life. You have to overcome these things. You can do this. And again and again, like a refrain through the evening: Everything will be fine.
At one point the boy tells his mother he wants it to stop. She pulls him close and says: Don't say that. Don't ever say that. It is the tenderest moment of the play – and you watch as the boy, out of love, is forbidden the only thing he can still show of himself. Not out of coldness. Out of love. Out of a fear that feels like protection.
I sat in the dark and recognised the boy's sentences. Not from the theatre – from the nights on the phone. People say them to us there, some out loud for the first time. On the phone there is no one the sentence could destroy. Perhaps that is why some people call. The sentence is allowed to be spoken and to remain, heavy as it is.
In the programme, an expert in suicide prevention has her say. It is a misconception, she says, that asking openly about dark thoughts awakens them; the opposite is true. A distress signal, she says, is urgently searching for someone to receive it. I brought the programme home with me.
Whether the boy in the play could have been saved, I do not know. The play does not claim it either. It shows people who love each other and cannot reach each other – and how many well-meant sentences can cover what someone still wanted to show.
At the end, the father imagines what might have been: the son, grown up, hands him his first novel, with a dedication. It is the most beautiful scene of the evening, and it never happened. On the last page of the programme there are phone numbers, for young people and for parents. Ours is among them.
Noise in the House
After a reading.
I am reading an old, strange text. It is a good hundred years old and pretends to be far older: a doctor puts it into the mouth of a teacher from the second century.
It is said to have come about like this: the doctor's house was full of ghosts, and there was a great noise in it. Then he sat down and began to write. The ghosts disappeared.
Much of the text remains strange to me: fullness and emptiness, gods with dark names, light and darkness. I move through it as through a very old house, carefully, without understanding everything.
But in the middle of it I come upon a thought I seem to know: that to live is to distinguish. That something in us dies off where we cease to distinguish. The old text says it in darker and grander words. But it says it.
In conversations, it is often a single distinction that sets something in motion. What someone has done is not all that they are. A good distinction removes nothing. It turns one back into two.
Perhaps that is why the ghosts disappeared back then: someone had begun to distinguish.
Prompted by: C. G. Jung, Septem Sermones ad Mortuos; the story of its origin from his Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
These Past Few Days
After a book.
These past few days I have been climbing stairs differently. Not faster, not slower – more attentively. A book is to blame.
It comes from a man who lived in Japan for many years, and it makes a simple, uncomfortable claim: everyday life is not an in-between time that passes until the real thing begins. It is the real thing itself – if one practises it.
Practice, in this book, does not mean doing more. No new programme, no special hours. What happens anyway is enough – getting up, eating, speaking. Only no longer in between. It does not matter what one does, says the book. It matters how.
My shifts did not come to mind at first. Then I noticed: there too, much repeats itself – not the conversations, but how they begin: the same opening words. One could call that routine. Practice does not mean doing something else. Practice means doing the same thing differently.
There are many stairs ahead of me. These past few days, that suits me.
Prompted by: Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, Der Alltag als Übung (The Way of Transformation: Daily Life as Spiritual Exercise).
Those Who Do not Call
After a paper.
In a journal for pastoral care I read a paper about a school of family therapy. Much of it is new to me. One thought has followed me since.
This school sides with everyone who belongs to a family – including those who are absent from the conversation. Even with those not yet born: what is decided today will reach them too.
On the telephone, something similar applies, only more sharply. Only one can ring. Many appear. A mother, a brother, a former girlfriend – they appear in the story, and they cannot say a word back.
The paper does not give me a guilty conscience. But since then I see it when someone who is not on the telephone becomes the villain of the story. I do not have to defend them. I can only leave a door open in the picture.
The other day, after a conversation, I thought of a woman who had not rung at all.
Prompted by: Günther Emlein, Die Welt der relationalen Ethik, in: Wege zum Menschen 2/2026.
Patience, for Example
After a second paper.
There was a second paper in the journal, this time about the question of meaning. One thought from it has remained with me.
A person can give something they were never given. They can let a chain end with them – not by forgetting what was, but by passing on something other than what was passed down to them.
On the telephone, people sometimes tell me everything they were not given. And then, while they are telling me, they give it: patience with their own children. Gentleness for parents who had none themselves. They would not put it that way. But that is exactly what it is.
You can give what you were never given. From the outside, you would never know.
The journal is on my desk. I have not finished it yet.
Prompted by: Tobias Hanifl, Sinn finden im Angesicht von Leid, Schuld und Tod, in: Wege zum Menschen 2/2026.
Old Words
After a report.
A pastor writes about accompanying a man who had decided to end his life. He was present, to the very end, and weeks later at the graveside as well. His report is precise, careful and honest – with himself too.
At the graveside an old hymn was played, one the man had asked for – a hymn about human sin. Afterwards the pastor said that what was sin here, he could not judge. But besides everything that might go by that name, there was much to weep for: this death, this life, so much that never came to be.
To weep for something. To lament, yes; to regret, of course – but to weep for? The phrase has almost gone out of use. The pastor uses it without embarrassment, and as he uses it, it means no judgement and no weakness, but an ability.
Many callers apologise for their tears. Since that report, I sometimes think: this is not weakness weeping. This is someone weeping for something that was worth a great deal to them.
You can lament many things. You can weep only for what was worth something to you.
It is an old word. Perhaps I will put it back into use.
Prompted by: Florian-Sebastian Ehlert, »O Mensch, bewein dein’ Sünd groß«, in: Wege zum Menschen 1/2026.