Autobiography of a Face

By Lucy Grealy

Though I knew I’d lost weight and was a bit pale, I never considered myself all that sick. I thought of myself as separate from them because of what I’d gone through, but it didn’t occur to me until then that people might actually pity me. The idea appalled me. ~Lucy Grealy

In Autobiography of a Face , Lucy Grealy chronicles her experience with a rare cancer in her jaw which changed and ultimately defined the trajectory of her life. She begins with an innocent schoolyard collision with a fourth grade classmate which led to uncovering the threatening tumor which would eventually reshape her face.

My only experience with significant childhood illness was a bout of pneumonia when I was eleven that put me in the hospital for week. This story invited me to reflect on that experience and realize how rare it is to hear from a child the fleeting collection of details which make up their experience during prolonged suffering. It’s so painful for adults too see children suffer that too often we turn away. So I was struck with the wisdom in Grealy’s story and the gentle forthrightness with which she, as an adult, invites us into her childhood crisis.

I was especially struck by how, early in her life, she recognized the expression of pity as it came from others. And she recognized her abhorrence of the experience. Pity is such a disempowering emotion. And feeling pity from others just opens one to the temptation toward self-pity.

The first time I recognized the experience of pity directed toward me was after Roy died. It was tricky to identify it, to distinguish it from compassion. I just felt it and new it wasn’t something I welcomed.

Here’s how the dictionary defines pity: sympathetic or kindly sorrow evoked by the suffering, distress, or misfortune of another, often leading one to give relief or aid or to show mercy.

Is pity the same thing as compassion? Here’s how the dictionary defines compassion: a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.

It sounds the same in theory. But it felt really different to me in practice. In practice pity has an extremely strong sense of separation and power dynamic. Pity is the unscathed, the unscarred, looking down at the suffering from a place of power, and exercising their superiority in a way that appears generous. Pity is a knee jerk response to fear. The fear evoked when another’s suffering touches on our own vulnerability. Pity is a way of ignoring the very real possibility that this could also happen to me. Pity thwarts the vulnerability of the viewer and places it on the suffering with a strong denial of their dignity and personal power. Pity does not comfort. Pity stands apart.

Compassion, on the other hand, is the act of bringing the experience of my own suffering into my experience of the suffering of others. Compassion comforts in shared experience. It is being with. Pity is “doing for.” Compassion is doing alongside. When Roy died I needed comfort, gentleness and support. Friends and family offered it in spades. I didn’t want to be pitied, though. I wanted to experience the empowerment of shared experience in compassion.

I remember clearly the day when a friend who had lost her husband ten years earlier came to my house, saw a stack of mail scattered on the table, pulled out her phone, asked for my credit card, and took each bill, one by one and paid it. I began the walk down the “self-pity” aisle, claiming how I used to be able to do that task with my eyes shut … what’s happened to me. She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. “I know, I know, and you’ll be doing it again soon.”

That was empowering compassion. She sent the message “I know there are times when we can’t be in our normal place of self-sufficiency, and I’m going to help you get back there.”

My story isn’t nearly as pervasive and chronic as Lucy Grealy’s was. But her reflections on living through cancer, disfigurement, 30 surgeries and more hospitalizations, gave me a strong sense of the internal strength she developed in her life. It was not heroic. It was complicated. She did much on her own which she shouldn’t have had to. In writing her story, she reminded me that as children, whatever is going on in our family feels like it’s our fault. But her struggle, so generously shared, evoked echoes of my own childhood experience and the ways I navigated that uncharted adult world to find my way. As I connected with Grealy’s story I was able to feel a shared experience of suffering, empathy for her, and for my young self.