Fact Counseling and Opposite Adages
There’s a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode to teach the first point in the title of this essay to anyone you think should know. It’s Season 5, Episode 11, “Hero Worship.” The message is sufficiently simple that even a surviving parent could understand it: When a minor child loses a parent, the child often requires a clear, firm explanation that they were in no way to blame. The child often won’t tell you that they blame themselves in some way, even if they do. That there is no Earthly way they could be to blame might not matter. The child could blame themselves anyway.
Blaming oneself for a horrible occurrence makes some sense to me. If one is responsible for catastrophe, one can prevent its recurrence by perfecting oneself, including one’s foresight and ability to take precautions. One can simply stop making mistakes. The logic is straightforward and wrong.
If you have responsibility for a child who has lost a parent, please consult an expert. I can tell you what’s obvious to me, but my understanding is based on my limited experience and reading.
One thing to be avoided by people in the life of a minor child who has lost a parent is lying about the cause of death of the parent in a way that suggests the child might be to blame. I feel confident in asserting this.
My grandmother told people who asked how my mother died that my mother and I had been running up the stairs. In fact, I recently met people who had heard this story and was happy to correct them.
When I was a child and completely dependent on a liar, who evidently lied to help herself cope with Mom’s disability and eventual death, I needed to find a way to ignore what was happening. I stopped defending myself in many matters for decades, which I expect stoked additional suspicion. I was above needing the good opinion of others.
I also did my best to make the lie seem partially true. If I don’t pay close attention, I tend to edit the world instinctively so that it will make more sense to me. Over the years, my memory of the events faded a bit, and I got the idea that the lie was an exaggeration or misunderstanding. Maybe it was a delusion more than a lie in the first place.
I know that it was false because I have my mother’s death certificate, which I obtained in my early thirties. The cause of death does not refer to any kind of accident, and neither the doctor who performed the autopsy nor the coroner who was to have reviewed the results filled in any of the seven boxes related to accident. No fall was involved in Mom’s death, if that was the implication of saying that we had been running up the stairs.
Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that Mom could not run at that point in her life. She did frequently fall and injure herself. She spent weeks at a time in the hospital. I have copies of letters from my mom’s neurologist to her family doctor, as well as a letter in her hand, describing these things.
Mom’s death occurred due to an undiagnosed neurological disorder. That is what the death certificate says. It could certainly be wrong, but I did not need to spend decades worried that I bore some kind of responsibility for my mother’s death, the best and official understanding of the cause of which involves me not at all.
The reader may be confused. I knew as a child that Grandma was lying, but things get twisted in memory. Furthermore, it’s a natural tendency in some people, particularly children, to blame themselves for a loved one’s death.
It has taken me the better part of two decades, while in therapy and with my mother’s death certificate in hand, to understand fully its lack of ambiguity in the matter of my culpability. I think that no one but my grandmother contributed to my difficulty in a blameworthy way, assuming that she was competent and therefore that blame could attach, but like my grandmother and me, at least one relative to whom I described the death certificate was unable to face its unequivocal revelation of Mom’s cause of death. Their response was not helpful. They, my grandmother, and I all had postgraduate degrees. This is not a matter of a general inability to evaluate information, even if the details lay outside our fields of study.
Maybe it cost a bit of my well-being to prevent myself from understanding that death certificate fully in City Hall immediately after I obtained it, a couple of years before Grandma died.
Fact counseling twenty-three years earlier might have helped. When a parent or sibling of a minor child dies, let’s require under law that the people responsible for the child’s well-being and the child meet with a medical professional who will explain the cause of death. Let that medical professional check back with the child periodically to make sure that new questions have not arisen.
Psychological and spiritual counseling can be very helpful, but unless my proposal has already been enacted, there is a glaring omission in the failure to provide fact counseling. In the “Hero Worship” episode, Counselor Troi’s help is crucial, but so is the intervention of Data and Captain Picard, relevant technical experts, in explaining the child’s misconception about his role, or lack thereof, in his parents’ deaths.
In the movie Contact, Ellie as a child is told by a clergyman that her father’s death was God’s will. She responds that she should have kept an extra bottle of her father’s medicine in the downstairs bathroom, so that a pill could have been administered in time to save him. There are things the clergyman could have thought to say in response, but ideally, a fact counselor would have been brought in to explain why an extra bottle of pills could not have done any good or just how unlikely it was that this would have helped.
In the Netflix series Russian Doll, which presented truth recognizable to me at a rate I had not previously experienced, a character gets fact counseling, though possibly only after a significant delay. I write “possibly” because it may be that the depicted counseling was a booster dose.
Fact counseling as I describe it would come under the heading of stitches sewn in time, and there might be circumstances additional to aftermaths of deaths under which it would be of help, as well.
Now sometimes I recommend not sewing, or more generally, not intervening. I wish that more people remembered such sayings as, “The best government is that which governs least” and “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” These adages counsel nonintervention, just as, “A stitch in time saves nine” and “Nip it in the bud,” counsel intervention.
In fact, I am unable to think of a common piece of advice for which its exact opposite is not also given. The desirable approach seems to be that when one finds another person extreme in their behavior, one counsels the opposite course of action, in order to restore moderation. Since each extreme has its opposite, so too does each adage available to give weight to one’s advice. Even, “Everything in moderation,” is complemented by, “Live a little!”
Nevertheless, many authority figures, including parents, find it difficult to deploy the opposites of certain adages. For example, an extremely conscientious child should rarely or never be told to mind the consequences of their actions, because conscientiousness shades into paralysis as it becomes excessive. Likewise, a highly considerate child should not be reminded of the need to be careful of other people’s feelings, because raising the price of relationships for someone already paying top dollar will lead the person to be chary of forming new connections.
Vice is not just an absence of virtue but also an excess of it.
If you find a human in need of being reminded of this principle, challenge them to a game of Opposite Adages, or better yet, challenge someone else in their presence to Opposite Adages. Play is simple. One player states an adage, and the other states its opposite. Players reverse roles, and play continues until someone is stumped or gives an invalid response. The game might lead to spirited discussion on the validity of responses.
For example, “Look before you leap,” might draw the response, “He who hesitates is lost.” The Parable of the Coins might be countered with Lilies of the Field.
I’m hard pressed to find the opposite of “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch,” so I’m saying to myself that this adage counsels against being certain about future events. The opposite would be deployed to someone who thought the future completely unpredictable. It would begin, “As sure as …” Ah, “As sure as shooting.” “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” “Bet your bottom dollar on it.” These are all examples of ways to counsel certainty in the future.
There are people in authority unaware that each adage has a corresponding adage that is its opposite. I suggest that they be reminded. The following poem explains why in an educational context. To cite an example from my life, there came a point in my first doctoral program at which I would have had to submit work I knew to be imperfect in order to succeed. I certainly had made mistakes in homework assignments before, but I can’t remember having submitted work that I knew was incomplete or incorrect. I was not yet able to do that when it first became necessary. I needed to have in mind that one ought not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Years later, I started to think of my mistakes as spillage for the gods, a way to avoid the impious error of seeking flawlessness, possible only for supernatural beings. Even bridges are designed with tolerances.
You Ask a Physicist
You ask a physicist
To tell you why a cannon tilts
At 45 degrees
To send the shell the farthest should
We drop effects of air.
They’ll tell you that the range
Is due to simply trading off:
The more the barrel tilts
Upward to vertical,
The greater time the shell will fly;
The less the barrel tilts at all,
The faster flies the shell
Downrange while it’s aloft.
That’s fine.
It’s not a big surprise
That neither aiming up,
So that the shell will land on you,
Nor aiming straight downrange
So that the shell will hit the ground
In near no time at all
Will send the shell the farthest should
We drop effects of air.
You ask a physicist
To own that always cautioning
Their students, every one,
To be more careful in their work
Is not the way to get the best results
In classrooms or in research groups.
You might be told that checking out
A paper one more time had never hurt.
You might encounter nothing more
Than tilted-head solicitude.
The math is really not that hard:
If care should grow unlimited
The speed will go to naught.
No work will e’er get done,
Just as the work will value lack
Should speed be all one seeks.
Thus speed and care must balance out.
Yet many teachers never say,
Regardless of how many culls
Their student passed through safe
To get to where they are,
“You need to be less careful now.”
It’s in this mindless way
That teachers maximize
The count of empty chairs
At every level schools possess.
And many physicists will say that’s good,
While all along they know
That Euler cleaned up Newton’s work,
Where Émilie du Châtelet
A gaping void did fill,
And Hilbert’s published works
Were filled with errors that
Another woman fixed
So that they could be issued bound,
Besides which Einstein in the course
Of taking back ideas he then thought wrong
Was wrong to take them back!
James Lyons Walsh, PhD
The preceding was adapted from my memoir, Proud Father of None: How I Found My Purpose by Dropping Out of Religion, High School, Sobriety, and a Top Graduate Program on the Way to My PhD.
