[ Sympathy / Empathy ]

I’ve experienced the shift from sympathy to empathy. We experience sympathy when we imagine the feelings and experience of someone else. There is an arm’s length with this, because, by its nature, when we’re sympathising, we haven’t been through it ourselves.

I’ve grown in the last few weeks, and my heart has now expanded to have deep empathy for those experiencing dementia in the family. And also, on discovering how much one in the partnership covers for the other, how bad it was/is. My aunt, I now know, had a tough life in the last few years; RIP Patricia B.