Those Three Little Words: “How Are You?”

A lesson on compassion

Just now, I arrived home to find a drunk older woman falling asleep on my doorstep with a bottle of vodka in hand. I greeted her with my usual salutation (“how’s it going?”), assuming she’d grunt, scoot down a few feet, and let me enter my house before going back to sleep. Instead, she took my greeting literally and began to speak. Her mumblings often tumbled into tangents—she interrupted herself several times to tell me I was beautiful, for instance—and I had to coax her to string her thoughts together. It turns out things were not good. She had cancer and wanted to call her man Tony, but didn’t have a working phone. She asked to borrow mine.

Society teaches us to walk a fine line between being compassionate and being a fool. I wanted to lend her my cell phone, but I also worried doing so would be unwise. After all, she was very drunk, her shirt was visibly stained, and most importantly, her ramblings were so incohesive that I couldn’t be sure what was fact or fiction. My solution was to dash upstairs and return armed with quarters for her to use at a pay phone down the block. She thanked me and told me she’d pray for me before shuffling away.

I wanted to do more for her than giving her some lousy quarters, but I didn’t know how. Asking whether she had family or where she lived yielded little information. She left me standing alone on my doorstep, feeling a strange mix of gratitude and guilt. Regardless of the veracity of her tale, there was a truth to the joy in her eyes from having someone willing to listen. I was grateful that she mistook my greeting as a real question; and sorry that I hadn’t originally intended for it to be that way. With our hurried pace of living, it’s far too easy to throw around the words “how are you” without intending to stick around for the answer.

(Reposting this from a post I wrote last week on Facebook. Original post here.)