Fibromalgeria

In my early days of legal practice, long before I had figured out anything, I was consulted by a client who wanted to sue nearly everybody in the world for suffering fibromalgeria. I’ll call her Abigail.

Now, Abigail was a rather sympathetic soul, and my heart went out to her. She might have been pretty once upon a time, but that was a long time ago. She could have shed half her body weight, and still could have lost more. She lived alone, not even with a cat, in a dark basement, eking out a meagre life on public assistance. And she hurt. A lot. All the time. She was bitter, she was angry, and she wanted to get justice.

Someone had told her about fibromyalgia, but she had heard fibromalgeria. As I listened, I understood her symptoms sounded much like those of fibromyalgia, which is something even doctors don’t quite understand. It’s a name they give to reported pain in the fibrous tissue of the body, a Latin term for “yeah, I hear you, you’re hurting, and I really don’t know why”. In some ways, it dignifies a complainer without getting a solution. Maybe some more opioids will help?

I had to tell her that in the absence of a clear and definable medical condition and some evidence as to who had brought this to be, we couldn’t even begin to consider a legal action against, well, against, whom? Given that I had a family to feed, I could not be her Don Quixote. She stormed out, adding me to the list of her persecutors.

I’ve often thought of her and her woes. Woes which were real enough to her, but woes about which I could do nothing. Her doctor could do nothing, nor could her priest nor her best intentioned friends. Nor could any of the various churches she frequented in codependent relationships. And so Abigail suffered, mad at the world, until the day they found her lifeless but still angry body in her dank below ground tenement, surrounded by her treasures, things found on the street and newspaper clippings about wrongdoings by doctors, lawyers, and other arrogant professionals who cared nothing for her plight.

There are millions of Abigails in our Western worlds, “misfits” in the truest sense of the word. They have no marketable skills, not even the self-discipline to get up early and show up to wash dishes. Sometimes just by dint of bad genetic luck and sometimes by dint of an accumulation of bad habits acquired by way of bad bargains to try to escape, they live angry lives in the dark corners. Every few years they come out to vote for some rascal who trades in anger and promises to make the sun shine on them.

There are a hundred ways to deal with the Abigails of the world.

One school of thought is that we shouldn’t extend them a hand because they’re just lazy parasites who will come back for more and show no gratitude. Which sounds logical enough until you actually take time to know an Abigail or two, and understand that their days of self-help are long gone, if they ever existed. A child born with fetal alcohol syndrome, for example, is born with a brain which can never understand cause and effect, and who will therefore forever make one bad choice after another, wishing things were different, but simply not having the personal equipment to make good things happen.

Of the hundred ways to deal with the Abigails of the world, the number of fully effective ways is exactly zero. There is no panacea to deal with millions of highly unique stories. But that doesn’t make their human plight go away, short of the right-wing dream of disappearing them en masse. Most of us, most of the time, settle for publicly funding The Mission and the Shepherds of Good Hope to house them out of sight of the good citizens of our city.

Each of us have Abigails in our lives, especially if we open our eyes to see them. They may be “street people”, they may schlep into our law offices, they may wander into our corner stores. We want them to go away because they have few, if any, social graces. We’re busy, can’t you see?

When we extend “grace” to them, more often than not we receive no thanks or apparent gratitude, and even when we do, it seems perfunctory and practiced. They have not learned our nuanced social dance, mostly because it’s not part of the world in which they live. And so next time, we just walk by and look the other way.

But the funny thing about extending a hand or a kindness or some courtesy to the Abigails of the world, whether or not it’s reciprocated with gratitude, is that the real beneficiary turns out to be, not them, but ourselves. As we enter their grey world, we are reminded of the richness and opportunity of our own. As we participate for a moment in their loneliness and bleakness, we are suddenly aware of the warmth and fellowship and abundance of our own existences. It turns out that as we think we are blessing Abigail with a token of our abundance, it’s ourselves who are blessed.

When Jesus said, “Inasmuch as ye have done this for the least of my brethren, ye have done it unto me”, he wasn’t mouthing some theological mystery, but was telling us quite plainly that in our generosity to those less fortunate we are serving the divine, and in the presence of the divine, we are blessed. Simple as that.

In my study of highly successful professionals, an aspect of their lives that is obvious time and again is their selflessness and generosity. Whether it’s cause, or effect, both, or neither, I haven’t yet sorted out, but it is there in any event. But it does seem to be clear that those who are generous with their time and resources and their thoughts seem to lead lives of success and happiness. Cause or effect, who cares?