How Can We Help?

When I first shared the news with close family and friends, I should not have been surprised by the messages asking how they could help. I’ve been there before, when my father passed away from COVID six years ago.

It is raw humanity, the desire to help. It is unalloyed goodness, something so pure and primal. Though selfishness seems to be in the forefront more often than not, especially when we look at the news, there are these moments that remind me at least that there are these deep, wonderful parts of us. 

Somewhere in this desire to help is a desire to feed. Maybe thousands of years ago, we huddled together in hopes of survival. This was after the evening fire had reduced to bright orange embers and the earlier meal long-forgotten. Maybe a baby wailed because it was cold or uncomfortable. Her mother perhaps rustled around and found a piece of fruit the group had missed and gave it to her child. Maybe it filled a void, maybe it drew out a smile, one with just two teeth. Maybe in situations like that, we came to equate feeding with helping. 

Food is love, and before I could blink, our fridge was full of food. 

Food fills stomachs which forget to eat, or don’t see any purpose in eating. What is eating to a body constantly on the move, constantly thinking and planning, feet moving rapidly down linoleum-tiled halls, ears deciphering medical jargon, translating for those far away from the exam rooms. Food fills a void.

But the void is vast and gaping. It is howling, clawing for the last bits of your core. Food keeps it quiet, for a time, but what it needs can require different solutions for different people. 

Sometimes the sorrow and fear seem to rise like a tsunami from the bottomless maw, what helps then? What about those minor things, the calls that need to be made, the appliance which needs to be fixed, things that keep getting booted out of one’s head because it is too tumultuous and too frazzled to hold on to anything mundane. When those tasks pile up, what does help look like then?

I think about the screeching halt of lives interrupted, both as a physician and a caregiver. Driving? On hold. Work? Depending on what one does, possibly on hold as well. Even looking at epilepsy as an isolated diagnosis, it has the potential to upend a life that was carefully built, one that might have been running smoothly. It could also tip one’s path off a cliff, a path which may have already been veering too close to the edge. For a person in an urban area with a robust public transportation system, it may not have as large an impact, but further out into the suburbs and beyond? The picture is wildly different for so many. Those long roads seem suddenly longer, less accessible without a car or other way to get around. Help could look so many different ways, but for many, the resources and respite they seek only exists in wishes and dreams.

Now consider a diagnosis like epilepsy existing alongside other conditions, such as poorly-controlled diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lupus, stroke, or cancer. What does help look like in those cases? 

I think about being asked “how can we help?” There is such compassion behind the question. To be privy to such compassion is a boon in and of itself. 

Food helps.

Presence helps.

Love helps.

For all the rest? I’ll have to get back to you.