This past weekend, my son was in a very serious auto accident. The careful engineering in the car did exactly what it was designed to do: the front end crumpled and the air bags deployed. So, the engine is a twisted mess, but the cabin was completely intact and my son walked away with only a scratch from the seat belt and a minor case of shock.
I’ve been through a lot of disasters and catastrophes in my life, auto related and otherwise. By the age of 46, I’d be willing to bet that most people have. I don’t fall apart when things go wrong anymore, even important things. Even so, I arrived at the scene of the accident and saw pieces of my car strewn in the street and ambulance lights swirling, while I searched frantically for my child. When I found him, his head hung between his legs at the foot of a tree. No matter who you are, that kind of experience will shake you.
There is no preparation for that kind of stress or tool you can buy that cushions the blow. I may never forget the sound of my young son’s voice as he burst into wracking sobs over the phone. He’s 18, and I can’t tell you the last time I heard him cry before this incident. That sound echoes in my head and turns a screw in my chest every time it repeats.
To make it all worse, our dog had died just two days before. The sweet, adoring beagle that my son had chosen out of hundreds from the shelter and who had given all the love she had in her tiny dog body, passed away at the vet’s office less than 48 hours before a minivan T-boned our sedan.
There is nothing that can ease that kind of grief. All of the other factors that might make your life more comfortable: education, income, stable home life, health, none of it makes the death of a beloved pet any easier.
I often say, in my lectures, that life is really hard for everyone. From the richest to the poorest, the most beautiful to the most unattractive, the highest IQ to the lowest, life is not easy. We will all experience situations that will try our mettle and test our strength. We will all go through loss that will distress us and betrayal that will pain us. Life is not easy. For any of us.
But one thing was different about me when I ran to the accident site, less than a mile from my home. One thing had changed since the last time I’d handled a personal disaster: I had a few thousand dollars put away in savings for the first time in my life. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to cover my insurance deductible and a rental car and anything else that might come up after the accident.
For the first time, I was financially sound, and that made a big difference in my ability to cope with the stress and the panic and the grief. I didn’t spend a single moment wondering how we would handle the costs because I knew I didn’t have to. I could focus my entire attention on my son. He also didn’t have to add a crippling guilt to his distress because he didn’t have to cope with the knowledge that his accident was going to break his mother financially.
What’s more, when my sweet dog, suffering from cancer, was finally at the point when the pain was too much, I didn’t have to hesitate for a moment. I took her to the vet where she was cared for with the utmost compassion. Putting her down cost a couple hundred dollars and there have been times in my life when I wouldn’t have had the money to spare. I might have had to add to my grief the knowledge that she was in pain because of my straitened circumstances, that I simply didn’t have enough to take care of her as I wanted.
Humans have a tendency to compete for misery. Someone talks about a death in the family and we compare it to our own. Someone complains about how hard they work and we feel the need to point out that we work hard too, maybe harder. When I was talking to someone at work about my horrible week, she said to me, “Wow, that’s almost as bad as the week I had last month. That was really horrible.”
This comes up when people talk about white privilege, too. It feels very unfair to a white, working class American who may have lost their job and house in the Great Recession, to say that they are “privileged.” And it’s totally unhelpful to say that someone else has it worse. That’s about as effective as telling a child to eat all their vegetables because “children are starving in Africa.”
I think it’s useful to start from a common baseline. Life is difficult for everyone. It is rife with suffering, pain, and hardship.
But some of us get some help in coping with life’s tribulations. A very small number of people have advantages. They don’t prevent the awful things from happening, but they make it a tiny bit easier to recover. I know this because I now have some of those advantages, and only a year ago, I did not. The disaster still happened, it still challenged me and distressed me, but it will not ruin me, as it might have in years past. I will recover, and so will my son.
No one wins a race to the bottom in suffering. No matter what you’ve gone through, there is always someone that has it worse. I wish we could all acknowledge how hard this life is for all of us. I wish, when something went wrong for someone we know, we could just say, “I’m so sorry. How can I help?” instead of immediately telling them to “be strong” or assuring them that “things will get better.”
When I finally got back home that night and got my son into a hot shower, I fell to my knees and cried. I cried because I’d been through something awful that day. I cried because, for years, my dog would have been there for me in that moment, comforting me, but she was gone. I cried because I very nearly lost my only child. But I didn’t cry because I didn’t know how I was going to pay for the accident. And so I was able to stand up, minutes later, wipe my tears and feel gratitude.
For me, that’s the difference that money makes: a speedy recovery and gratitude. Life is still hard, but I know it will be okay. That knowledge is worth all the money in the world.