W. was an 18-year-old high school graduate the summer he volunteered 40 hours a week with our hospice program. I had forgotten about W. until he came back to the office for a visit, now a college graduate, and thanked me for offering him a summer that changed his life. I thought of him as I read Dr. Pinsky’s (Dr. Drew) and Dr. S. Mark Young’s book The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism is Seducing America this weekend.
When W. first came that summer I was a bit perplexed as to how to fill up 40 hours a week of volunteer work. At first it sounds great, but imagine an 18-year-old boy shadowing you at your job for three months: the depths of just how boring your life really is becomes painfully apparent very quickly. He hosted the weekly grief support group (he was a hit with the older ladies) and attended team and was trained to make visits to our patients residing in a nursing home. For a while he visited Ms. F. several times a week. She was, as our team would say, “not fully oriented to space and time.” However, she could carry on a conversation with you, it would just entail people and things that were not necessarily visible to you. She didn’t always trust people so W. was up for a challenge. The nursing aides taught him how to assist her at meals so he would visit her and keep her company at lunchtime.
For a small window of time Ms. F. had a bicycle, only visible to her. W. came one day to take her to lunch and she was very worried about leaving her bike unattended. Someone might steal it. W. was feeling a little impatient since lunch runs on a tight schedule so he quickly assured her that it would be just fine parked in her room.
They returned from lunch a little while later and sure enough, the bike was gone. Ms. F. began to scream and cry, distraught that someone had taken her bike. “Someone stole my bike!!! Where is my bike!?!?” W. felt terrible and at first panicked. He had never heard Ms. F. so upset and they were starting to attract attention. He thought, “I’m just going to leave and call Amy and have her come fix it.” But he realized that this solution would take too long and he needed to do something. He followed the first rule of all improvisational theater: say yes. He went with it.
“Wait, Ms. F., I saw your bike. I know where it is. Let me go get it,” W. said calmly.
Ms. F. quieted and stared at amazement at W. as he walked down the hall, pretended to get a bike leaning against the wall, mount it, ride down the hall to her room, dismount and roll the bike into her room.
“Here it is!” he smiled.
W. says that the smile on her face just beamed in deep relief as she said, “thank you!”
W. admitted to me as he recounted this story, “I never thought I could feel so good returning someone’s imaginary bike.”
During that summer, W. broke his leg so he spent at least a month of his time with us on crutches with a brightly colored cast on his leg. I was 14 months pregnant (gave birth August 19th) so we made quite the pair. Around the first week of August we organized a group of teenagers to come to Mr. John’s house to clear brush. Mr. John’s mother was a hospice patient, he the caregiver, and over that summer Mr. John became our patient as well. One of his last wishes was to clear a back acre of land so that he land would be clear for his nephew to sell after his death. This story includes teenagers with machetes and a busted a gas line, but the part I remember best was the point when Mr. John joined W. and I to shoot the breeze since none of us were fit to wield a machete. He wobbled up to us with his walker and said, “Hey, we’d make a great joke: a pregnant lady, a cripple, and a dying man walk into a bar…” As we drove back to the office that day, W. commented, “I had no idea dying people would be just like me.”
Towards the end of that summer, W. came into my office after a hospice team meeting, sat down across from me and plopped the team sheet down on the desk—the team sheet lists all the patients we are currently serving. He said, “When I start college this fall, most of these people will be dead.”
I sat silently with him waiting to see where he would go with this true and heavy observation. He spoke with quiet confidence, “I gotta pull it together…”
I smiled and started laughing.
He replied in shock, “What!?”
I said, “Duh.”
Reading Dr. Drew’s recent study on celebrity narcissism and its unintended effects on society as a whole, I kept bumping up against the word EMPATHY. He stresses that a key element to narcissistic behavior is “chronic empathic failure.” (97) He defines empathy as:
“the ability or willingness to recognize, perceive, and relate to the emotions of another person, to experience the world from another’s point of view…empathy develops over time, reinforced constantly by positive experiences of emotional attunement with others…” (103-4)
In a world of pseudo selves on Facebook, My Space, Twitter and the opportunities of “reality” TV or YouTube to make individuals famous for being famous, he opines that “this generation may have a harder time forming relationships. They may favor self-promotion over helping others. And their attitudes, beliefs and constant need for attention may make them difficult, if not impossible, to be around.” (201)
This reality has huge implications, all seemingly negative, as we will soon face an age where our need for empathic and self-sacrificing elder caregivers will be unprecedented. Today’s USA Today calls for cities and states to get ready for a time when 1 in 5 Americans will be over 60. But a huge part of getting ready to be a nation of caregivers will entail being honest with ourselves about our common narcissistic tendencies.
As any good self-help guru, Dr. Drew does offer some suggestions of techniques to use in controlling our narcissistic tendencies and in overcoming baser impulses like envy or aggression in our responses to others.
1)Â Â Â Â Â Strive to increase self-insight and embrace the concept of something greater.
2)Â Â Â Â Â Practice rigorous honesty.
3)Â Â Â Â Â Keep things simple and live up to commitments.
4)Â Â Â Â Â Spend time with a broad range of people.
5)Â Â Â Â Â Share your feelings.
6)Â Â Â Â Â Learn to appreciate the feelings of others.
7)Â Â Â Â Â Be of service. (240-7)
And so I come back to W. Dr. Drew writes at length of how teenagers are naturally narcissistic due to their age and stage of brain development. They learn to mirror the behavior and attitudes of those around them, be those of celebrities or those of real people who are genuinely engaging with the world, surrounding themselves with a wide range of people, learning to empathize, and being of service.
To be the nation of caregivers our elders will soon demand, we will need to collectively put our narcissism in check.
