Devastation strikes

“When you forget about the thousands and think about the individuals, then you can imagine the pain”

Speaker’s Corner
Denise Horan

WHEN I was in college, I awoke one night to the sound of a man’s voice shouting downstairs, in the house I shared with five other girls. Presuming he had broken in and was about to murder us all, I jumped out of bed and ran to the window of my first-floor bedroom with the intention of jumping out.
Luckily, before I embarked on my solo flight, I worked out that the ‘intruder’ was, in fact, merely a drunken passer-by who had mistaken our house for one in which there was a party taking place.
One of my housemates decided to get up and shout back at him through the letterbox, leading to my belief that a massacre was imminent.
I laugh now at my daftness, but I can also still vividly recall the feeling of real terror that engulfed me – so completely that I didn’t even think to wake my room-mate – for those few moments. One minute I was sleeping soundly, the next I was jolted into a state of high alert, with heart thumping and pulse racing. Overcome with fear.
Those moments came back to me last week when I was watching TV coverage of the aftermath of the earthquake that ripped through the Sichuan province in China and the devastation that the cyclone left in its wake in Burma.
In a heartbeat, an ordinary day turned into an unimaginable nightmare for thousands of people, a nightmare through which many of them will be living for the rest of their lives.
I thought about the moments before the devastation struck, those few ominous seconds when everyone knew that life was about to change forever. When thoughts turned to the whereabouts of loved ones and prayers were whispered for their safe delivery when the terrible event was over.
Horrors like those in Sichuan and Burma are on a scale so massive that we cannot really comprehend their magnitude or the enormity of the grief they bring. When we see the TV pictures, our hearts break for a few fleeting moments. Then the pictures move to something else, as do our thoughts, and life goes on.
But when you forget about the scale, forget about the thousands and think just about the individuals, then you can imagine the pain. You can substitute yourself for a Chinese mother whose only child is buried beneath the rubble of the school she skipped happily away to just a few hours earlier. You can place yourself in the shoes of a frightened teenager who survived the collapse of a building, but is haunted by the sounds of dying friends screaming from beneath the wreckage, their voices growing fainter until eventually there is no sound at all.
On the RTÉ news one of the evenings last week, it was reported that the amount of money pledged to Burma from Ireland was just one-tenth of that which was pledged to the victims of the St Stephen’s Day tsunami in 2005 in the same period of time. Why?
Is the downturn in the economy making us so tight with our money that we have decided to dispense with charity altogether? Or is it that, unlike in the case of the tsunami or the case of 9/11, we forget more easily about China and Burma because we cannot identify so readily with the people afflicted?
Ireland was touched directly by the tsunami and by 9/11, as members of our own were among the victims; in the case of Burma and China we were not so directly affected.
It is impossible to be moved by every awful happening in this world, and from a mental health point of view, it is wholly undesirable. But every now and then, it is no harm to tune in to those dark emotions that connect us all as human beings: fear, heartbreak, despair. Whether it be through an earthquake or a heart attack, fate’s hand will some day bring them our way.
If we have tried to understand another’s grief, maybe we will be better prepared for our own.