That’s what she said. “It was worse than that. Much, much worse.” I had just nodded my head yes when she asked me if I’d seen “The Killing Fields” – about the genocide in Cambodia carried out by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s.
For a moment, I could not catch my senses. I just stared at the tiny, elegant, eloquent lady in the seat beside mine. Funny how life hands you lessons if you watch for them. I’d boarded the plane miffed because I couldn’t find just the right condo to rent and I’m moving at the end of the month and it was already April 7th and…. Suddenly my “problem” shrunk to a more realistic size: tiny.
She told me she’d been working for the embassy in her country when bombs began going off almost daily. The leadership went “on vacation” but everyone knew they’d fled. She asked for permission to transfer to the Bangkok office, moving to a safer, nearby country with her two young daughters. Weeks later when permission finally came late at night, she had only a few hours to prepare. Her husband, a successful local businessman, chose to stay behind.
She never saw him again.
She told me how she raised the two girls, first in Bangkok and then in San Francisco. How nice Americans had helped them out. How she’d gotten a job. Suddenly, we were landing.
I feel humbled when I hear such great tragedies. It grounds me and reminds me that everyone suffers and that there’s no way to quantify pain. I observe that everyone does the best they can to cope, using whatever resources they can scrounge up – emotional or practical. It reminds me, too, to be kinder to everyone I meet, not knowing what secret pain they might be covering up with that polite, faint smile.