My friend called me, distraught; she had heard the news of the death of a beloved celebrity. “I feel like I’ve lost a family friend,” she said. I listened as she mourned, but I made few comments. I once stood in misery on a dock in Florida as that same friend cried for the loss of another important part of her life. I reached for her — perhaps too late — and she turned away from me, sobbing over the railing of a bridge and into the surf below it. I thought then, and have often since, that I lack the skill to comfort those in pain. But I believe that I do listen well, and I have learned that silence is sometimes the best tool for solace. And then, when I feel that the time is right, I quietly offer this gift: “I’ll dance for you.”
I’d like to think that at some point in my life, I might have displayed some small skill at dancing. My nieces in Maryland will assert that that time has long passed, but I remember my tortured teenaged years, and the breakthrough moment when I could execute “The Philly Dog.” I was ecstatic when, in the summer of 1960, “The Twist” hit the scene: everyone, including me, could “Twist.” But now, in my seventh decade, my dancing is decidedly more amusing than accomplished. (Unless it is the “Cupid Shuffle:” I can rock that.)
I love a quirky little movie called “Blue Valentine.” In it, Ryan Gosling asks his new friend to dance as he plays a mandolin and sings in a goofy voice. Michelle Williams does a tap dance in the entrance to a small store; behind her, a heart hangs in the shop’s window. Gosling’s character asks her to “dance slow” as he winds up the song, “You Always Hurt The One You Love.” That new-burning love flames out, as love often does, but there was left still, the dance.
When I offer up the dance, it is not done lightly. I can empathize and sympathize, but it is the consoling that I find difficult, the soothing little murmurs, and the comforting bromides. I am not dismissing your pain; I am not making light of your misery or loss, when I offer up the dance. When you hear that from me, it is because I am desperate to help you smile again, if only for one small time, and the dance is the limited way available to me. Words come easily to me, but the language of comfort locks up my senses and catches in my throat.
I learned from some source — it might have been my mother — that my abusive and drunken father forbade her to hold me. She nursed me, but until she died, she was unable to hug me, or to accept with grace the hugs I extended to her. I give this information as background; I am different from, and similar to both of my parents, but I am also a product of the sum of my life. I have discarded as much as I have kept of the lessons of this life, and I have kept the gifts of quiet conversation and silence.
Helpless before the flood of raw emotion, “I’ll dance for you” is often the only raft I have. And it is the most I can give, until another friend comes to me, crying in wordless pain, and flows into my arms, where I hold her with one arm around her shoulders and one hand in her hair, until she is still, and my dance is done.