Foot Rub for the Soul; Fire Escape for the Weight of Living

Many recent mornings, I have found myself drawn to Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast. Tippett, journalist and creator of the On Being Project, explores “the intersection of spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, community, poetry, and the arts.”

Several weeks ago, I listened to a re-broadcast of Tippet’s interview with three people who have lived through depression:

• Andrew Solomon, a journalist and the author of books on my to-read list—The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression and Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
• Anita Barrows, a psychologist, poet, and translator
• Parker Palmer, a teacher, author, and activist

The full episode (entitled "The Soul in Depression") is beautiful, a lovingly woven-together piece including personal stories, poetry, and even a few laughs.

What stood out to me was a story told by Palmer—and it stood out to Tippett, too, as she did a follow-up piece with Palmer to dig deeper into his ideas and experience.

Palmer describes the friend who helped him the most during his experience of depression:

There was this one friend who came to me, after asking permission to do so, every afternoon about 4 o’clock, sat me down in a chair in the living room, took off my shoes and socks, and massaged my feet. He hardly ever said anything... And yet, out of his intuitive sense, from time to time would say a very brief word like, “I can feel your struggle today,” or, farther down the road, “I feel that you’re a little stronger at this moment, and I’m glad for that.” But beyond that, he would say hardly anything. He would give no advice. He would simply report, from time to time, what he was intuiting about my condition. Somehow he found the one place in my body, namely the soles of my feet, where I could experience some sort of connection to another human being. And the act of massaging just—in a way that I really don’t have words for—kept me connected with the human race.

What he mainly did for me, of course, was to be willing to be present to me in my suffering. He just hung in with me in this very quiet, very simple, very tactile way. And I’ve never really been able to find the words to fully express my gratitude for that, but I know it made a huge difference. And it became, for me, a metaphor of the kind of community we need to extend to people who are suffering in this way, which is a community that is neither invasive of the mystery nor evasive of the suffering, but is willing to hold people in a space, a sacred space of relationship, where somehow this person who is on the dark side of the moon can get a little confidence that they can come around to the other side.

On the morning that I sent my beloved children to their school building for the first time in an entire year, I listened to this profound, prescient interview Tippett did with the writer Ocean Vuong last year, just before everything changed. Vuong is a professor at my alma mater UMass; as I get older, I frequently wish I could return to UMass and be 20 again, and after listening to Vuong and Tippett, I wish it in my bones, just to be able to learn with this powerhouse of a soul.

At the end of the interview, which I’d recommend listening to in full, Vuong speaks of his uncle’s death by suicide and what it opened up for him in understanding how we do—and do not—communicate with each other in our darkest hours of need.

It was such a blow. Anyone who has lost anybody to suicide—I lost my uncle; I lost a few friends—the great mystery and the great violence of taking oneself out of the picture, I’ve been grappling with that for so long. And I think one of the things that led us to that is that you start to feel that you are always out of the picture—this loneliness that language does not allow us to access. The way we say hello to each other—“Hi, how are you?” “Oh, good, good, good, good, good.” So the “how are you” is now defunct. It doesn’t access, it fills. It’s fluff.

And so what happens to our language, this great, advanced technology that we’ve had, when it starts to fail at its function and it starts to obscure, rather than open? And I think the crisis that my uncle went through, and a lot of my friends, was a crisis of communication—that they couldn’t say, “I’m hurt.”

And looking at—I remember, when I heard of his suicide, I was a student at Brooklyn College in New York. And I went for the longest walk. And I kept seeing these fire escapes. And I said, what happens if we had that? What is the linguistic existence of a fire escape, that we can give ourselves permission to say, “Are you really OK? I know we’re talking, but you want to step out on the fire escape, and you can tell me the truth?”

And I think we’ve built shame into vulnerability, and we’ve sealed it off in our culture—“Not at the table. Not at the dinner table. Don’t say this here. Don’t say that there. Don’t talk about this. This is not cocktail conversation,” what have you. We police access to ourselves. And the great loss is that we can move through our whole lives, picking up phones and talking to our most beloveds, and yet still not know who they are. Our “how are you” has failed us. And we have to find something else.

Tyler Calder, Director of Content for the online community Girls' Night In, says, “What happens when we don’t physically see our friends is that our friends slowly stop feeling seen”; it’s even more important to find ways to be present for people going through challenging times. And, in our second year of a global pandemic, who isn’t going through challenging times?

In March 2021, when those we love may not feel seen, heard, witnessed, how can we offer a foot rub for the soul, a fire escape for the weight of living?

Connect, be present, in any way possible.

• Send food or a gift certificate for food.
• Pick up the phone.
• Set up a walking date.
• Watch a movie together, but apart.
• Send a poem.
• Send flowers.
• Send a picture of flowers (you get the idea).

In There Is No Good Card For This: What to Say and Do When Life is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love (perhaps the most relevant book for all of us right now…), Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell created an Empathy Menu, and number one on that menu is “The Listener.” So, if it feels hard to coordinate sending something, you already have too many text conversations to manage, and/or you don’t have financial resources to spare, just listen. Just be there. In whatever way possible.

As we stand on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, March 2021, a year later, I want to close with Vuong’s beautiful words: “That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night—we can live. And we will.”

Depression Essential Reads

Healthy Aging: The Crucial Role of Mental Health

Skin of the Toad: The Next Treatment for Depression?

Copyright 2021 Elana Premack Sandler, All Rights Reserved