Empathy Clarity

When I first began caring for my grandmother Martha, she’d broken her femur and wanted to get better, to become independent again. We hired a physical therapist. I cooked meals with more vegetables and less processed food. We had a plan, and it felt like progress.

A few months later, she had a serious stroke. The therapist stopped coming, and Martha stopped talking about independence. But I kept preparing vegetables.

One morning that changed. I’d made Martha breakfast, the Malt-O-Meal she’d been preparing since well before I was born. As I finished some work in the dining room, I overheard her telling Dalia, her caregiver, that the Malt-O-Meal was fine and that she was glad Dalia would be there for lunch and dinner because Kimberly (me) simply didn’t understand about cooking because of my odd and probably life-threatening vegetarianism.

I laughed. I understood about cooking. She taught me to cook. I could cook the things she liked. And so I began: red meat prepared in butter, fried potatoes at nearly every meal, a polite side dish of green vegetables, and an appropriately sinful dessert.

For twenty years, I’ve either been providing care or supporting the people who do. Often both at once. And in all that time, people kept talking about “good caregivers,” the ones who could be fully present, who didn’t burn out, whose relationships with clients were steady and real. I knew what they meant because I’d seen it. But I didn’t have a name for it until I learned it myself, cooking steaks in butter.

The magic thing that ‘good’ caregivers have actually is a thing with a name: empathy clarity.

It isn’t just patience or positivity. It isn’t absorbing someone else’s pain until you’re hollowed out. It’s staying close enough to support and ease suffering when possible, while honoring that even the end of life is still life, and in this case the life was Martha’s to live.

Martha was outwardly stoic, but inside she was furious, at her body, at her losses, at the indignities of needing so much help. I couldn’t make that fury go away with vegetables. So I stopped trying, and instead accepted her truth, her pain, her anger, her frustration, her grief for the life she had loved that was leaving her with excruciating slowness.

Empathy clarity is presence, lovingkindness, and being a gently honest witness. It was me finally listening that it wasn’t time for yet another way to incorporate kale. It was time for steak. It made me laugh when she complained about my cooking to Dalia. It let me be steady when she was angry, soft when she was grieving, flexible when her journey changed again.

Empathy clarity isn’t magic, it’s a skill. Some people are born with a lot of it. Some of us have to study it for 20 years and then experience the end-of-life of the person we love most to get it. But anyone can strengthen their empathy clarity. You practice by pausing before you react. You practice by feeling into what’s yours and what’s theirs. You practice by asking, “What would ease this hour?” and then doing the next kind, ordinary thing.

With practice, your clarity will increase. You’ll still be moved, but not swept away or drowned.

We learn skills as caregivers, skills that most people think are known by all, because doesn’t everyone know how to bathe, dress, eat, toilet, and the rest, when in actuality very few of us practice that skill that makes caregivers the most magical.

Our entire organization is designed to support the growth of empathy clarity, and while we believe it’s a skill and treat it as such, it sure does feel pretty magical.

This column ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican on September 16, 2025, under Business Different.