What To Do If Someone Tries To Tell You Bad News

Perhaps you will find yourself in this situation, returning late at night to a university campus, deserted for the summer. This is where all of you visiting chemists are bunking during your one-week Biomolecular conference. You left both your wallet and cell phone in your assigned dorm room because you were rushing out the door to get a ride to the dinner in town for all the chemists. That dinner was a clever concept, but off-putting to eat (like the fizzing cake—who would want to eat a fizzing cake?).

So you’re already stressed about getting past the security gate because it’s late at night and you have no ID, and therefore startled when the security guard looks you in the eye, as if he’s been waiting for you, and says “Are you Mrs. Gallatin?” [insert your own husband’s last name here]. You pause because that isn’t your name, it’s your husband’s name, which you never adopted, so you think the security guard might have you mistaken for someone else. But then he says, “Are you Christine Gallatin?” [insert your own first name], dispelling all confusion. So you nod, even though that isn’t technically you. And he takes your elbow, gently, not in an alarming, arresting-you sort of way, though you are nonetheless alarmed. He says, “Come over here, please, Mrs. Gallatin,” leading you to the left of the security gate to stand by a peeling eucalyptus tree.

A young woman walks swiftly towards you. She’s wearing a dark suit and has a low ponytail, and her face is a perfect oval, egg-shaped. But the thing you notice most is the concerned expression in her large eyes, which makes your heart, already beating quickly, race. She says, in a gentle voice. “Christine, I’m afraid I have bad news.”

Instead of saying “What?” you say, “Really bad news?” which you understand, even while saying it, is not a question so much as a deflection, a bid for more time. She doesn’t respond to this verbally but tucks her chin in a quasi-nod. Now your brain mimics your heart, racing from your mother (awful but tolerable, she’s old) to your sister (two years younger than you, shocking) to your husband (not tolerable) to your—and here your brain shudders to a halt and you say, “Just tell me!”

So, here’s my advice.

Instead of saying “Just tell me,” swap out the first word and say, “Don’t tell me!” Then run. Run as fast as you can. You will be traveling light. You may be wearing a silly dress and a thin green cardigan, and you may have a small purse with nothing inside but lip gloss and a box of Tic Tacs, but whatever! You will just have to make do. And no phone, but that’s for the best, because the last thing you want right now is to be accessible. And espadrilles instead of sneakers, but tough shit. Run! Run for the woods outside this bucolic campus. Run before the social worker and the security guard pursue you. Disappear in the woods. Make a life there. Try to recall your forestry skills, which are negligible (you dropped out of Brownies and went camping twice when you were a kid). Eat nuts and berries and mushrooms. Hope they aren’t poisonous. (Though, do you really care if they are poisonous?).

As long as you hide in the woods, sleeping on the damp ground, you won’t have to hear whatever news that pony-tailed, sad-eyed woman intended to tell you. If you think about it, think about it cautiously. For instance, consider who could stand to have a job like that young woman has, telling people terrible news? Or realize how certain phrases like “Are you sitting down?” aren’t delivered because anyone actually needs to sit down, but to offer a built-in delay, an opportunity to prepare oneself (as if one could ever prepare oneself) to receive bad news. Or think about Shrödinger’s hypothetical cat in the box.

Do not, under any circumstances, think about your daughter. It may occur to you that the news could be bad, but in such a way that knowing it would be useful. For instance, your daughter might be in a coma, and you might have an opportunity to visit her and hold her warm, dead-weight hand. But in your heart, you know from the sad-eyed woman’s face that this is not the news, which is why it is best to simply make a new life, alone in the woods.

Of course, this advice is all contingent upon the supposition that you have only one child. If you (like me) have two children, then I am afraid that there is no holding your hands over your ears and running off to the woods for you. When the sad-eyed woman does her chin tuck, half-nod thing, your mind will go to the one daughter (the one you worry about). But of course, it’s possible that the bad news involves both children, which will then make you realize there are degrees of intolerability here, and one intolerable thing is preferable to the other.

At any rate, I am afraid, in the instance that you have more than one child, that you are stuck, and in that case, I can only say, like the pony-tailed woman said, I am so very sorry.