What was it about Wynne? Well, the sex was spectacular, possibly because they both had death clawing at their backs. And Wynne had no designs on marrying her or making babies. And yet, she was there, like no one had ever been there. Granted, Wynne could die any day, now. She had made that much clear. But, then again, so could Nadia, as much as she wasn’t interested in entertaining that thought.

When feeling resentful of Wynne’s cavalier attitude about life, it had to be remembered that, as Wynne, herself, said regularly, the girl was this screwed up before they met (if you could call it that--"screwed up"). And having a girlfriend who occasionally appeared (though Nadia would deny it) to be careening perilously towards death did not give her great cause to remain alive. Nadia knew it wasn’t fair of her to judge Wynne for a way of being that existed long before they ever touched or tasted each other. Nadia knew from the outset that the girl was suicidal, just as Wynne knew that Nadia had the attention span of your random average flea. Apparently, each of them decided not to care. Each had her reasons. Even Nadia.

Because there was something else about Wynne. Something that negated her poor score on the written pre-evaluation. Something that Nadia’s broken-down heart caught on and clung to and believed in and breathed in.

What was the thing about Wynne?

She cared. At a level Nadia could never have conceived of or believed in. Nadia had never been so held in someone’s heart without gasping at their claws tearing into her free-wheeling spirit. Wynne cared. Not just about Nadia, but about the whole world. She held the whole world as gently as she held Nadia in her arms. With open hands. With open heart. With wings unfurled. With compassion. With empathy. With unendurable pain.

Wynne cared so much about everyone and everything that she couldn’t bear to go on living carrying all the horror and grief around with her all the time.

Children crying on the train; egg-laying chickens ten or twenty to a tiny wire cage, their beaks chopped off so they won’t peck each other to death; little girls and boys with bloody underpants; the homeless shuffling by; a glut of funding for the prisons and the military; empty pockets for education; one quarter of the young black male american population in jails; another bomb dropping, and then another and then another; the Palestinians, the Afghans, the Iraqis; the so-called President attacking more countries the names of whose inhabitants he cannot pronounce; the NRA; the grandmother barred from every medical school in the country because straight A’s in college or not, nobody would accept a black woman into medical schools in those days; pigs screaming; the best friend’s father disappearing after the divorce when she was twelve and never showing up again; and we’re losing the rainforests, we’re losing the trees—how many do we have to kill before we just can’t breathe?; deer and raccoons and possum and dogs and rabbits and squirrels and birds made into mangy corpses on the side of the road; cell-phone towers poisoning the inhabitants of poor neighborhoods; nuclear warheads; breast cancer; AIDS; sanctions; the IMF; Exxon (and another oil spill and another and another); and the tuna fish (and every other animal under the sun) going extinct (and nobody even knows or cares—in this country we only care about animals that look like teddy bears); women still being stoned to death; women still having their clits cut, their cunts stitched shut; and the pope (who makes neither love nor babies) decrees birth control illegal, decrees abortion murder; starvation in Somalia, Ethiopia, the favelas, the West Bank, New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Your Town, USA; trans-fatty acids; landfills; landmines; queer teenage suicide as always on the rise; and nobody hears the children, anyway (we just slap them and silence them and bludgeon them with our terror, our discontent, and panic); every male hand that ever touched a woman in anger or in unwanted lust; and who did she know who had not suffered from abuse, sexual, physical, emotional, psychological?; one in three women raped (not counting the ones who never speak about it, not counting the ones who cannot ever speak at all); and white people killing (or starving) brown people and brown people killing each other (in desperation, in rage which cannot be assuaged or answered, in hunger, in fear); elder abuse; the unassailable cost of health care; and every president is just another coin in some big white rich grandaddy’s purse, and nothing ever gets better, really, that doesn’t make things worse. There was no place safe for her. No place where she wouldn’t hear the screaming when she went to sleep. She was afraid to live in a world with the United States in it. And there was nothing she could do to make the United States fall or fold over on its fat rich white self.

Misery everywhere she looked and even when she looked nowhere at all. She couldn’t shut it out. She could not turn it off. The empathy. The sensitivity. The openheartedness.

She remembered the first time it really hit:

I’m on the plane back to San Francisco from New York and there’s this infant crying and crying, squalling with the utmost passion and determination. She is inconsolable. No amount of rocking or holding or petting or murmuring sweet words or shushing or offering her food or milk or playthings will stem the tsunami of grief spilling out her open mouth and her squinched-shut eyes.

Noticing that I am beginning to have the uncharacteristic response of annoyance, of all things, I first try to ignore the screaming child. That not working, I then try closing my eyes and sending her waves of peace and love, opening my heart to this child in the hopes that she might find some of what she needs there. The baby quiets for a moment and I sit still, open, hopeful.

She charges in again. And takes me with her, it seems like. I am suddenly choking on this torrent of raw turmoil and grief. I sit there in my seat picking up the despair of a child I have not seen, but only heard, and weeping with a grief I could not name or plug up. All I knew was that it was vast—infinite—and somehow universal, as if the child had only just discovered the horrors of the world, all at once, and then in shock and panic and fear and anguish, cast it’s psychic hooks about, desperate to communicate the experience to anyone with an open channel. And I was handy, my heart fully unzipped.

It never latched shut again. Her heart.

She cared about everyone and everything. She helped people wherever she could and hid whenever she couldn’t. She couldn’t take it sometimes, the agony everywhere, the suffering. But she tried. She held hands with the dying, she lay down with the homeless, she brought food, she brought comfort, she brought her hands and her heart and her body, she offered herself up. She offered her resources. She ran, when she could not stand it, sweated the poison out of her lungs, could not run fast enough, and the air itself was toxic anyway. She would lay down at the end of the trail, sometimes, cradling herself against some generous rock and weep. She might have been Jesus had she a stronger constitution. Had she any faith at all.

But she hadn’t. Not enough to save her, anyway.

* * *