Sometimes I feel sorry for myself

Then I listen to what other people are going through. During a single weekend, I heard updates on way too many sad tales. One friend struggles with depression and anxiety two years after her husband committed suicide following a lifetime of unremitting pain. Another friend helped his wife kill herself after a lifetime of unremitting pain. Two other friends cope with grief and loneliness years after their husbands dumped them for other women. Another friend is helping her brother raise his daughter because his sportswoman wife committed suicide when her chronic fatigue syndrome made living unbearable. That same friend, whose husband limps from a stroke, is helping her sister deal with multiple myeloma.  Two other friends are coping with the health problems of their adult sons, one with a disabling seizure disorder, the other with a life-threatening colon condition. Another friend, who recently watched her father die, is trying to figure out retirement as she watches her husband descend into “mild cognitive impairment.” The daughter of another couple cannot work because she suffers panic attacks in the wake of a concussion. And yet another friend is the single mother of a foster child born with fetal alcohol syndrome whom she has placed in a residential school because he was uncontrollable; he begs her to let him come home. And that’s not all. But I just can’t bear to go on …