“Is your family still safe in Beirut?” I asked the familiar face I bumped into at a coffee shop. I was on a short break after almost writing on the office windows with a permanent marker, feeling like a little kid rather than a mind-mapper.
The familiar face is married to an Omani but still has roots and relatives in Lebanon.
“My family was forced to leave their homes and is now staying at a rental place in the mountains,” she sighed, peering at me over her glasses.
“Alhamdulillah, they are together but feel stressed.”
I empathised. They just want to go home and feel safe.
Many places in Lebanon seem to have seen both the best and the worst of times over decades, marked on many walls by bullet holes and framed photographs.
In these same mountains above Beirut that now serve as shelters, my mother once took part in ballet-style productions and had dinner with the likes of Sean Connery. This was in the sixties, when the city was known as the Paris of the East.
I have a colleague who, as a young boy in Beirut in 1975, fled with his family to London because of the start of the civil war, which for many still marks the beginning of Lebanon’s history of upheaval.
“They are at home thanks to risk assessment skills,” he recently said of some of his relatives who are currently in Beirut. When to stay, when to flee, that is their question.
“Some Lebanese have it far worse than my family,” the familiar face at the coffee shop continued. “They sleep in makeshift shelters or on benches along the Corniche because they cannot find an affordable place to rent.”
We often seem to ‘compare’ our stress against what others are going through. We feel for all displaced people, especially those who had to look for lost loved ones in the rubble. But the stress of her family is real, too, even though they were ‘privileged’ enough to find shelter.
“Comparative suffering,” the American author Brené Brown calls it. Feeling ashamed of how we feel about things that happen to us because they do not seem ‘serious enough’ on the imagined suffering scale from 1 to 10.
“How can I complain when others have it worse?” Brown suggests that we should honour our own pain because it does not diminish anyone else’s and can make us more empathetic.
Sure, sometimes you need to distinguish discomfort from real suffering. “Say peckish, NOT hungry,” insisted my grandmother, Hiske, who lived through two World Wars, while preparing her famous pea dish in her small house in Amsterdam.
I now mention Gaza and Sudan when children refuse to eat their broccoli and cry reading about an Afghan father ‘selling’ his daughter to feed his other children.
Privileged peckish we are in comparison.
But what about sadness?
It has been a year since my father passed on in what had been his home for more than 50 years. He was 85 years old, which some might call a privileged age. Perhaps even a tender end, as we were able to care for him when he became ill.
In fact, only when the sister of a volunteer doctor in Gaza told me she could not imagine what I was going through did I begin to let go of some of the guilt I felt about being so overwhelmingly sad about my dad.
But I deserved to honour my pain. Despite the love and even joyous moments, my dad still faced a brutal killer. Despite his age, I still lost my father.
It also breaks my heart that I can no longer return to my parental home. A privileged problem, as I was uprooted, not displaced by a brutal force. Plus, as an immigrant, I feel a strong sense of belonging in Oman.
But I still have the right to feel a little lost. My identity is partly rooted in the street in the Netherlands, where I grew up with my family, and where it always felt safe and warm to return to.
I text my aunt in Amsterdam to mark the one-year anniversary of my father’s passing. She sends me a heart emoji and tells me that they are about to put the cat Tiger to sleep.
I feel sad for Tiger. Sadness is not a competition, and honouring your own pain can make you more compassionate.
Bregje van Baaren
The writer is a freelance contributor
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