Taproots

Shortly into remission from stage three cancer, I was joking with my primary care physician: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?”

“Well,” she said, surprisingly hesitant. “It makes you more empathetic.”

I placed her words into the basket of reliable advice I’d taken away from cancer treatment. We cancer thrivers and survivors hear so many pieces of unhelpful advice from acquaintances when going through treatment, from the suggestions that we need to avoid X food or beverage, make X new huge lifestyle change, try X new expensive supplement. However, every once in a while, we can tuck away something valuable.

My doctor’s words have become my motto now: “What doesn’t kill you makes you more empathetic.” I realized that it was life advice that I could live by. I share it with my students each semester. And each day I consider ways that I can live with love as my primary focus. I don’t toss out the “L” word lightly, like my friends and I used to do in middle school, signing every entry in our yearbook “Love ya!”, even for the classmates we’d never spoken a word to. And I don’t mean it in a romantic way, like I think we are programmed to do in western culture, too frightened of what others will think if we use that word with someone who is not our partner or immediate family.

But that’s just it. Maybe our family is bigger than we realize. Last summer, we were visiting with friends from Bangladesh and my friend said that we two should take all our kids and go across the street to the pool while the husbands did “manly things” (they went shopping 😅 ). “We can all use my family pass because we are all family,” she said.

It was easy for these friends to become our family because we’d known each other since college, had shared each others’ food and houses, and were raising children who already considered each other brothers and sisters. Even if the blonde woman working at the pool gave us some serious side-eye when we announced we were sisters, it didn’t matter. Family is not something you can identify based on appearance.

Your family truly is what you make it, and the entire world can be your family if you allow yourself that grace. What that means to me is considering the humanity of every person I encounter.

It is more difficult, however, to consider those not close to you as a part of your family. It is far easier to ignore someone you don’t know or to focus on yourself in an interaction.

If I’m frustrated with a student’s poor excuse for missing classes, I can still place their humanity first and consider what’s best for them in my reply: is my frustrated insistence that they can’t turn in late work what’s best for them, or is that just what’s easiest for me? Instead, I show them what resources are available and what help I can offer.

We are capable of a lot more empathy and love than we are typically willing to share, and I’m not sure why that is. Why do we keep affection bottled up when we can make everyone feel more comfortable, whether that’s diffusing tension in a class discussion or showing a friend that you truly do feel as a part of her family? In a way that’s far from romantic love, I can truly love my students, my doctors and nurses, the strangers I meet on WordPress, the employees at the local grocery store. There are many small ways to show someone that you care, that you have their best interests in heart. I am still learning this lesson, but I can feel myself boiling down the family tree to its taproots, and they’re much deeper and widespread than I ever could have imagined.