sol·i·dar·i·ty /ˌsäləˈde(ə)ritē/

I've been thinking a lot about this theme of solidarity. It's a word I've heard probably five times since I've been here and I doubt that I've heard the last of it. Mostly when I hear the word it is in the context of that which is lacking. I hope I can get a better grasp on the situation so that I can write more on it. 

If memory serves me well, Madame Marechal mentioned it first. She had fallen in her appartement building and was crying for help. For hours. No one came to help her (though I wonder if in fact anyone actually heard her). If it wasn't for her femme de ménage, she might have died from such a fall. 

In telling me the story, her eyes welled up. Not quite out of sorrow, no. Though this is is a woman who had a difficult childhood and has seen her share of sorrows, real or imagined.  

Most of the people we visit seem to have similar pain in looking too far back. And yet they are forever looking back. It makes me wonder about our tendency to hold onto the difficulties in our past, to immortalize and martyrize, to define ourselves by the scars we carry so that we can also boast of the strength that now animates our limbs. Can there be any joy in strength if it was not won with some difficulty? Is this the price we pay for opposition, that we risk losing ourselves to those scars? People all bear their scars differently: some quietly, some defiantly, and others with a vendetta that turns upon itself. Some manage to be matter of fact. In the narration they cast of their lives, those scars are facts, events: proof that they have lived. Not axes on which their whole lives turn.

Madame M. was unloved by her father and resents her mother's lack of backbone, which undoubtedly explains her very dominant personality . Madame C. was abandoned from what I understand, to be later taken in by a family who beat her, the father especially. When we talk to her, there is almost nothing that interests her now or that interested her ever. Nothing to distract her from that cankerous past. Monsieur B's father disowned him when he wanted to leave for Paris to be an actor. When he got a divorce, he gave his wife everything but she took more. And his only daughter has never forgiven him. Madame F doesn't want to talk about her life. She can't walk anymore and is, in her own words, waiting to die. She has been waiting a long time. Madame CB is 102 and is loosing her sight. She is the most spritely of them all, always glowing. But she can't help to hide the disappointment she feels that after everyone she took care of, visited with, or was just aware of, it is astonishing to her how forgotten she is and how she must deal with things on her own. 

Still, I think it is telling that some, even most of these people here, prefer looking to their tragic pasts rather than in the present and even less to the future. Is aging really so horrible that people would prefer to reliving, again and again, the wrongs that have been done them as a way to distract themselves from the reality of their current situation? Why not relive the positive? The beautiful? Why are they the moments that are harder, that take more work, to hold onto. Ironically, I feel as though sometimes the latter brings more pain. Because all those wonderful memories are tied up in people, places, moments that are irrevocably gone.


But, I digress. I want to paint for you what I mean, what the French mean by 'solidarity'. Back to Madame M. This is a woman wins people over, herself included, with a fiery sense of humor. She is opinionated and anything but mild. Like me, tears come when emotions are high: any emotion. But as she was talking to me, these were tears of frustration and something stronger. Because she is a raw ball of passion, her hands were clenched as she said to me, her face tightened by desperation nearing rage, that solidarity in France is dead. 

She has too many examples, though she names a few.  The things that solidarity is not: being ignorant about who your neighbors are, not looking  after others or picking up after yourself, not letting the elderly have the seats on the buses or metro, not caring to get to know them, walking around with headphones on, making a person ask for help, which is perhaps only slightly less worse than ignoring that cry for help because it is someone else's problem.

I suppose it could be my ignorance or it could be a result of having been raised in the church, but this pain of aging, and especially the crushing solitude, is a foreign concept to me. I don't want to undermine the reality of this pain in trying to figure out to what extent this portrait of aging is accurate but unappreciated and unknown by those too young to live it and to what extent it is a cultural phenomenon. I can't help but think that the death of solidarity came with the death of general religious belief in Europe. Because the people I work with from Africa of muslin background or other, they still have that solidarity, though perhaps not to the extent they experience it back in their homeland. Not to mention that the fear of death is partnered with a peace in the hope of an afterlife.

If I could put their plight succinctly, this lack of solidarity is most likely due to a lack of family, and a need for community-the kind that you don't age out of. 

I think that probably of all the takeaways from this time abroad, this awareness will be the biggest for me. We are all part of families and we can all take an active or passive role within that family. The same thing goes for communities.  Sometimes I think I take for granted having people around me that I can "need from" and people that need me. I just hope I learn to hear the silent pleas for help of those around me, or, even better, to learn to give before the asking words have even been spoken.