“We are just happy that you are here”

“we are just happy that you are here”, she said.

I was recently in the presence of pain. Not just any plain old pain. But visceral pain. And indeed, far more. It was pain mixed with a very unhealthy dose of suffering. In the best of circumstances, when pain mixes with suffering – the experience of it can be debilitating. However, when this happens to someone who is at the deep end of the poverty spectrum - the impact is way more than the physical pain because it is inextricably connected to the sense of control and dignity.

It was in the presence of this suffering that I stood, shuffling awkwardly; feeling the unbearable burden of my ineptitude to do anything meaningful in those circumstances. I fumbled to find the right words.

And that is when she said: “we are just happy that you are here”.

There can be different responses to pain.

Often – and perhaps increasingly so over the last few decades – the paradigm of treatment has been about the disease. Not the person. It has been about reducing the person to a collection of organs. Organs that need fixing. Not the suffering which needs to be seen. Not the person who needs the healing. The need to be seen and heard – not as a collection of organs - screams out at us. But we choose not to hear. Because to hear may be inconvenient.

Even when the physical pain is fixed, there is often a deeper wound – a spiritual or an existential or an emotional or a mental wound – that needs understanding, compassion, love and healing. The desire, the expectation, the cry to be seen as a ‘person’ is often far more than the need for alleviation from physical pain.

In these situations, mere physical presence can be the response to suffering. The confidence that this can engender. The hope that this can spark. The resilience that this presence can inspire.

In these situations, we can all be healers. This physical presence too is a very legitimate response to suffering. You can have all the medicines in the world. You can have the most advanced and sophisticated healthcare enterprise and apparatus. But nothing can replace human presence.

A person becomes a person because they are connected to their culture and their context. That forms their identity. Context matters. This understanding can and should completely change the paradigm of care and treatment. A paradigm that brings back the sense of humanity, dignity and hope.

In May 2021, during the worst of the pandemic when we were in the midst of some mind-numbing relief work, I met a gentleman serving drinking water from a large open tub. He was quite elderly and was ferrying his tubs in an open mechanised cart from colony to colony, serving water to anyone who needed it; but more specifically catering to those shanties where it was needed the most. He was doing it alone. He had been alone in this endeavour over several weeks. He had started the day after the lockdown and hadn’t missed a day since. I asked him what had kept him going. I hadn’t known what answer to expect, but what I was really looking for was something to help me keep going in the midst of the tragedy that was unfolding. I was looking for my straws to clutch at. He didn’t disappoint. He said to me “because we have to help each other to get through this; I am an old man; I probably don’t have many more years left; but I won’t let this be the end of their lives; it may well be the start of a different one for them, and if I can help it, I want to play some small part in that chapter”.

I got my straw to clutch at then.

The same way I got my straw to clutch at now. “We are just happy that you are here”.

I was asked recently [not very kindly, if I may add] what a “corporate crossover” like myself was doing in the midst of public healthcare systems.

We as a society, as a community, as a people have a collective responsibility to care. To reframe ‘suffering’. To redefine ‘treatment’. To reignite ‘dignity’. To be present in the face of hopelessness.

Reframing Suffering. Redefining Treatment. Reigniting Dignity

“I don’t know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it.” — Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram