Why Do We Weep for Strangers?

A public person dies and we mourn even though we did not know that person personally.

We feel like we did because we knew them from a far, knew their work, and even benefited from their work.

Many people, strangers even on the public stage, die in a public or publicized way, and we mourn. We do not mourn because we knew them. We mourn because we are made aware.

An animal dies and we mourn, because we are compassionate at heart and a creature's suffering somehow touches our own suffering.

We are reminded that we have not lost the capacity to feel pain and joy, love and sweetness, laughter and tears.

Millions die daily and we feel nothing, not because we do not care, but because the awareness is not thrust upon us. Could we survive such a constant barrage of heartache?

Then, when we suffer, we scramble for perspective and lose ourselves in the chores of survival ... because we have the will to live.

Perhaps it is all confusing, but it is not an unhealthy confusion. Nor is our caring about those we make symbols of our own pain and our connected state a bad thing. Nor is it superficial. Nor is it a manipulated state of affairs.

It is our humanity at its most sensitive best.

It is who we are when confronted by a face and a name.

We need to care and the world needs for us to care.

When Jesus SAW the crowds, he had compassion on them.

Seeing evokes compassion, even for the Son of God.

John Donne was no stranger to pain and he wrestled with his own mixed emotions about death. Consequently, he left us with a body  of literature to help us cope as he coped. Not the least of all is this:

For Whom the Bell Tolls
by John Donne

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

This poem is in the public domain.