Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (30 page)

Other things you can do:

• Pick things up for them at the pharmacy, the pet store, their pot dealer.

• Drive their day of the car pool.

• Take them to doctor’s appointments or chemo, both so they have a ride and so they won’t be alone.

• Clean their house or, if you can afford it, hire a cleaning person.

• When you visit, look around for stuff that needs doing. Wash dishes, do laundry, clean their toilet. (If they’re a control freak, ask first.)

• Do what you can to offer support to their family and close caregivers. (This could mean dropping by with a bunch of pizzas or taking their kids on an afternoon outing.)

• Give them bed-appropriate entertainment: magazines, a book of sudoku, an iPad plus a movie subscription. (Maybe get a bunch of friends to go in on these.)

• Bring home-cooked meals—ideally in containers they can throw away so they don’t have to wash dishes. (Avoid “creative” casseroles. Stick to recognizable foods.)

• Bring food they like to eat (taking into account any doctor’s orders). This is no time to finally convert that carnivore to vegetarianism.

• E-mail other friends of theirs to suggest these and other substantive ways they can help.

Help a fiercely independent person feel okay about being helped.

It’s hard for some people to be open to outreach from others. Let them know that you understand that they feel that way, but suggest that part of being a friend is letting friends be a friend to you.

The nuances of cards, e-mail, and hugs: When you care enough to think twice before you send the very best.

Blogger Omnibus Driver’s mother had terminal brain cancer. Well-meaning friends would send her cheerful “get well” cards (which is kind of like writing to a paraplegic, “Hope you’re up and running soon!”). “She wasn’t freaking going to
get well
, damn it,” Omnibus wrote. “If people have to send a card, they should send a ‘thinking of you’ card instead.”

Though you might want to hug a friend upon hearing about their diagnosis, timing is everything. My journalist friend Lynda Gorov, who had breast cancer, wrote, “Don’t get me started on germ-laden hugs from strangers when your cell count is zero from chemo.” The
impulse
to hug them will surely be appreciated, but if you aren’t sure whether it’s okay, ask first.

Your friend with the disease will probably appreciate everyone’s expressions of concern, but it’s hard to fight for your life and return hundreds of e-mails. Don’t hold seriously ill people to the same social standards you would other friends. Consider using
CaringBridge.org
to build your friend a free, password-protected website complete with a patient-care journal to update family and friends and a guestbook for messages of love and support. Friends can leave a string of comments on an entry, and the sick person can respond with a single “Thank you all so much.” If your sick friend is a multitasking overachiever who might feel guilty about only responding in brief, it might be helpful let them know it’s okay to take a sabbatical from always putting the “to do” in today.

Think before you “think pink.”

A lot of people take for granted that they’re supporting a friend with breast cancer by wearing a pink ribbon or buying Yoplait with a pink lid. Sure, companies that “go pink” give some portion of the sale of each pinked-up product to help stop breast cancer. But a number of breast cancer patients see this as “pinksploitation”: using cancer to sell products. They would rather you give a more sizable donation (or even $10 or $25) to a cancer research center instead of thinking you’re buying a yogurt and making a difference. Or as Boing Boing blogger Xeni Jardin, who’s tweeted her breast cancer diagnosis and treatments, tweeted during the breast cancer marketing month of “Pinktober”:

Help make cancer feel less like identity theft.

Cancer (or any big, serious disease) can overtake a person’s identity, along with their body. The person who’s ill can start to feel like they’ve transformed from, for example, “Cathy, who happens to have cancer,” into “CANCER (with Cathy).” It doesn’t help that friends and loved ones often decide that the proper way to behave is to go around speaking in hushed tones and trying to eke out profound thoughts, which most of us don’t do well even when cancer or another awful disease isn’t on the menu. These friends mean well, but what some seriously ill people seem to appreciate—even cherish—is
the mundane
: anything that helps their day-to-day life feel like it did before the disease took over. Cathy, for example, like many other cancer patients people told me about, didn’t want to discuss life and death or her lung pump; she wanted me to hang out and gossip with her and watch
Everybody Loves Raymond
.

Funerals are no fun, least of all for the dead person.

Why not celebrate your friend while they’re alive to enjoy it? Just take care to do it not in the way
you’d
want to be celebrated but in the way they would. A bunch of us put on a roast for Cathy because for her, what would be almost as awful as having cancer would be having people’s pity. So, like her other close friends, I showed her how much I cared by standing up at the Figueroa Hotel and reading a bunch of really insulting remarks about her:

Ideologically, although Cathy identifies as Republican, her politics are really as follows: She’s right, everyone else is wrong, and unless they agree with her, they’re also stupid. But, no, you’re thinking, surely it goes deeper than that. And, to be fair, well … not really.

She loved it.

Start your own “Team Cathy.”

In the year before she died, Cathy, who was divorced and had a daughter who’d just gone off to college, told me she was afraid to be alone. I might’ve found it hard to say the right thing about cancer, but I immediately thought,
Okay, we can do “You won’t be alone”
; I just wasn’t quite sure how. I called my friend and Cathy’s, French journalist Emmanuelle Richard, who thought for a moment and then said in her cute, accented English: “I weel make a Google calendar.”

There were already a bunch of us—about fifteen of Cathy’s good friends—seeing to Cathy’s various needs. No sooner did Emmanuelle e-mail out the link and the password than we became “Team Cathy.” We’d log in to the Google calendar and sign up for days or nights to be with her, and those who could only take a few hours out of their workday would sign up to run errands or take Cathy to doctor’s appointments.

We also created a Team Cathy e-mail list. It came in handy one afternoon when her microwave microed and waved its last. I blasted out an e-mail to the list: “Cathy needs a new microwave by 4 p.m., when I need to heat her next pain pack.” TV writer Rob Long emailed: “I’m in San Jose, but I can order one on Amazon to arrive tomorrow morning.” About five others in closer proximity offered to go out and get one, but Cathy’s dad ended up picking one up at Home Depot on his way over that afternoon.

The whole Team Cathy thing was pretty amazing. I think that for Cathy, it was a daily demonstration of how much she was loved. It showed all of us that family isn’t just blood relatives and people you marry but people who treat you like family. It also dispelled the ugly notion that being divorced or single means you’ll “die alone.” If anything, Cathy died crowded, with nurses scolding all of her friends for violating the fire codes.

There are a lot of ways
to say “Screw you, you stupids. I meant every word,” but Kansas state representative Virgil Peck opted for “My statements yesterday were regrettable. Please accept my apology.”

Peck had voiced his creative suggestion for how Kansas might thin its illegal immigrant population: Just do like they do with feral hogs—go up in helicopters and shoot the fuckers.

Not surprisingly, Peck, a Republican, had the Kansas House Democratic Caucus calling for his resignation. Equally unsurprisingly, the Republican Party leadership (perhaps noticing that one in six U.S. citizens in the 2010 census were Hispanic) prodded Peck to say he was sorry.

Yeah, right. Slip of the tongue and all that. Except that in tongue-slip terms, this was a tongue that not only slipped but was possessed by demons who rode it like a pony.

In the annals of bullshittery, Peck’s apology edged ahead of one of my perennial favorites—the recorded message “Your call is very important to us…” which you hear while you’re on endless hold with, say, the cable company. We know what they’re really telling us:

Your call doesn’t mean shit to us. We know you have a choice of cable carriers … or would, if you took a huge loss selling your house and moved.

Finally, a human comes on the line. They tell you how
deeply
sorry they are about your cable outage—the exact same words they’ve read off a printed sheet to every other customer they’ve ever spoken to. That awful monotone they read in—the drone of a person with dead eyes
⁵²
—tells you exactly what they’re really thinking:

Oh,
boohoo,
your cable’s out. I’m not sorry. I don’t care. I made some crappy choices in life and ended up working the night shift at the fucking cable company.

Sure, it’s the clueless numpties running these companies who make the rep stick to the scripted bootlicking instead of talking like a person, but the lip-service apology still makes me seethe. After the first “I’m very sorry you were inconvenienced…” I tell the rep, “I know you’re supposed to say that, but please, please … don’t apologize. Can you just help me with my problem?”

I never really processed why I get so steamed by a few insincere words from a call center worker until I started answering a question I received for my advice column about a husband who refused to apologize. It turns out that the deep need we feel for an apology after we’re wronged emerged out of the evolution of human cooperation, which makes it possible for us to live together in groups. As I wrote in that column:

Humans seem to have an evolutionary adaptation to help us guard against being chumped, a sort of inner police dog to see that we aren’t all give and give to people who are all take and take. When our sense of fairness is violated, we need a sign from the violator that we aren’t idiots to trust them in the future. An apology can’t undo a wrong that’s been done, but it’s an offering that suggests that their future actions will be more partnerlike than selfishjerklike.

I went on to lay out the elements of a sincere apology:

• Admitting you were wrong.

• Expressing remorse.

• Pledging it won’t happen again.

• Making amends.

I then realized why these call center employees’ apologies made me so mad. They’re completely meaningless. The person on the phone is saying the apology words to me, but there are several reasons they actually aren’t “qualified” to apologize to me:

• They don’t know me, and they didn’t personally wrong me.

• There’s no point in convincing me that I can trust them in the future, since it’s wildly unlikely I’ll ever get the same tech support person on the phone twice.

• They might feel some sympathy that my favorite show cut out three minutes before the end—
again!
—but unless they snuck into my backyard with big wire cutters, it would be crazy if they personally felt remorseful.

Ultimately, we both know their apology has very little to do with me or the fact that my cable sucks big green goat balls and everything to do with being in a job where continuing to feed your children means always having to say you’re sorry.

HOW TO BAKE AND EAT YOUR VERY OWN CROW PIE

The apology: A reconciliation in four parts

Let’s not have any illusions about our own greatness. As Albert Ellis, the late co-founder of cognitive therapy, put it, to be human is to be “fallible, fucked up, and full of frailty.” And that’s probably on a good day.

Accept that you’re going to screw up. You’ll snap at somebody who doesn’t deserve it, drop the bowling ball on somebody’s toe, or leave their gate open, let their dog get out, and then run him over when you’re driving around trying to find him. In short, you’re human and you suck. But, starting from that premise is your best bet for sucking less. It frees you up to admit your shortcomings and apologize for your failures—which gives you some chance at repairing your relationship with your friend with the now very flat dog.

APOLOGIZING, PART I: ADMITTING YOU WERE WRONG

An apology is basically Metamucil for the Soul—a remarkably speedy evacuator of backed-up guilt. Unfortunately, many people seem to favor Chickenshit for the Soul—refusing to apologize because they see an admission of wrongdoing on their part as a sign of weakness.