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.
The Main Thing
After a video.
A video, a man in his early forties, defined all year round. He talks about his diet, his training, his clear line – in the language this genre speaks: delivering, performing, pushing through, keeping at it. He has become, he says, a better version of himself. You could click away after a minute: another man showing his body and explaining his rules.
But two moments do not fit the genre. The first: as a child, he says, and for a long time as an adult, he often had the feeling, inside, that something was wrong with him. The second: his six-pack, he says, is only the side effect of a much larger problem he has solved. He says it in passing, between training plan and shopping list. I rewound.
From then on I was watching a different video. His story is not the muscles, and not the rules. His story is a boy who thought something was wrong with him – and who one day, for the first time, experienced that he does not have to feel at the mercy of things, that there is something he can do. Everything else, the whole strict order, is his response to that one old feeling. What looks from the outside like hardness against himself may, from the inside, be the opposite: a first peace with himself.
Whether his response will last, I do not know; neither does the video. I am after something else. In people we almost always see only the side effects – the visible order, the routines, the strict or easy-going line – and we judge them by these. The main thing – the thing all of this responds to – is something hardly anyone gets to see. At most it stands in a subordinate clause, in passing, between training plan and shopping list, not expecting to be noticed.
Since then, with people whose rules are foreign to me, I try to look a moment longer. Not to understand the rules. But to keep in mind the question to which they may be the response.
In Another Form
After a children's story.
A distant relative writes stories for his grandchild. The hero is a woodpecker. Since spring the stories have been arriving at intervals, and I read them gladly: the woodpecker builds, broods, defends a nest not his own, hosts the family gatherings. In the newest story he sets out on a great journey. Across a stretch of water whose far shore cannot be seen. To waterfalls he knew only from tales. Across wide plains, to a wall of rock that only a single bird can cross, to a glacier, to the end of the world. There stands a wall of fog. Whoever dared to fly through it never came back. The woodpecker and his friend consider whether to try. They have seen much; the families are provided for. Then they decide against it and fly home. Beneath the story, as beneath them all, stands a line: Based on a true story.
A few weeks earlier, a thin booklet had arrived in my letterbox. A chapter from his autobiography, printed as a small paperback – for the people who helped him through that time. It tells of an illness that, years ago, very nearly cost him his life. Weeks in intensive care, his body full of tubes, his arms restrained. And it tells what he lived through from within during those weeks: an abduction. A ship that carried him, bound, along rivers and across the ocean, to the other end of the world, to the region of his childhood. He could not move, could not speak, and his wife tried again and again to get him off that ship. In between, set differently on the page, the family's notes from those same days: the calls to the hospital at five in the morning. Heaven had not wanted him, he writes at the end, nor had hell. And so he is here once more.
With the booklet at my back, I read the travel story again. And I found myself reading the same journey. The same water, the same direction, the same region of childhood. Only this time he does not make it lying on his back, strapped to a bed he cannot leave. The woodpecker flies. He rests when he is tired, he gathers strength before the great water, he chooses his own tree for the night. And before the wall of fog, behind which no one comes back, he has what the man did not have that autumn: a choice. He turns back.
Once he wrote to me that he is not a believer. But he believes that after his death his spirit will live on in a woodpecker – he likes working with wood. At the time I took it for a beautiful sentence. By now I read it differently. The woodpecker is already here. He is already building, already travelling, already coming home. Whether he means it that way, I do not know. Perhaps the sentence is not a statement about what comes after at all, but simply describes what has long been happening: a man telling his life once again, in a form that can fly.
I know this from conversations: some things cannot be said in the first person. Then someone tells of an acquaintance, of an animal, of a figure – and comes closer to their own story than in any report. These figures need no unmasking. In them, what was not possible then can be made good: resting. Turning back. Coming home.
He copies the stories out by hand into a picture book and paints the pictures himself. For a grandchild who cannot yet read. Beneath each story stands the same line: Based on a true story.
Uncut
After a video shoot.
Our choir had been chosen for a project: a small team travels the country recording videos with choirs. On an evening in July, our church was full of tripods, cables and cameras. The sound engineer explained how the day would go: little time, three pieces, and for the last one candles would be needed, because by then the light from outside would be fading.
Then he said something I had not heard put that way before: there would be no cutting. Each piece would be sung whole, from beginning to end, and if a take was good, it was good as a whole. No one would piece together the best passage from one take and the ending from another afterwards. Two to four takes, no more – after that, the strength would be gone.
In one of the takes, the man beside me had to cough. He turned away, dropped out for a few bars, and mentioned it himself afterwards: it would be visible in the wide shots. The sound engineer waved it off: that was the least of the problems. Whether he meant that it would hardly show, or that it belonged there, I do not know. Either way, the cough remains. It is now part of the piece.
Later I wondered why that brief exchange had left me so relieved. A whole take counts, with everything that happens in it. The alternative would be a rendition that never existed: assembled from nothing but best moments, flawless and never sung by anyone.
Conversations, too, are uncut. What is said is said; the awkward part cannot be taken out afterwards, and the part that worked cannot be rescued into another conversation. Perhaps that is not a flaw.
For the last piece the candles were burning, and outside it was getting dark. After the final chord, no one moved for another breath, longer than in a concert – the cameras were still running. Afterwards, each of us could take a candle home. Somewhere in one of the recordings that remain, the man beside me turns away and coughs.
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).