My father, who is nearly 90 years old, has suffered from dementia for more than a decade now and currently lives in a memory care residence, since my mother was unable to care for him full-time and he wouldn’t accept help in the home. It has been a painfully long decline, made even harder by the fact that our relationship was so complicated in the years before his condition became acute. I visit him whenever I am there (I live on the opposite coast) but my mother is the one who sees him the most, she brings him meals and gives me frequent updates on how he’s doing and I try to help her process what she is observing and feeling. I come from a family of medical doctors (I am the only one who demonstrated humanities-related skills, and generally sucked at math and science), but I have been in the lead on all of the interpersonal and cultural aspects of dealing with this disease – I was the first to ascribe his early symptoms to a possible neurological issue (confirmed later by brain scans), and I am much more knowledgeable about end-of-life and palliative care experiences than many of my family members, who tend to see things from clinical perspectives only.
Anyway, my father has become less and less interactive and mobile in recent months and my mother told me that the residence staff said he is not taking part in any of the scheduled activities anymore. During her last visit, she was startled when he used a Korean phrase to describe how he exists when she is not there: jeok-mak-gang-san. When I asked her what it meant, she struggled a bit, but then she said, “It means the deep quiet of mountains and valleys.”
I looked up this phrase later and indeed, there is a Korean phrase that literally translates to “deep mountains, secluded valleys,” but it wasn’t the same phrase. The phrase I initially found, Shim-san-yu-gok, refers to a place deep in the mountains that is remote, quiet, and seclude, to evoke a sense of profound and serene quietness, far removed from the hustle and bustle of the human world. The phrase my father uttered – jeok-mak-gang-san – literally translates into “silent rivers and mountains,” and is meant to evoke a quiet and desolate landscape, one of loneliness or stillness.
I was so, so struck by the difference in meaning of these two phrases. My mother was full of wonder that my dad had even uttered this phrase at all, because he has lost a tremendous amount of language during his decline. And I am full of wonder that not only did he utter this phrase, but he used it to perfectly describe, with pinpoint accuracy, how he was feeling and existing in his current state. He comes alive when my mother is there; when she is not, he exists in a place of silent rivers and mountains.
Why did this mean so much to me? Well, obviously, it made me hurt afresh with respect to that bundle of complicated grief and sadness I am carrying around in relation to my father. But also, it made me realize how much our current state of discourse around social and political events works against our understanding of meaning and nuance. We are so much less able to hear what people truly meant to say with their words, because there is so much noise and bad feeling present in our public dialogue spaces.
[I would also note that humans are not the greatest at understanding one another’s meaning: this article, sorry for the paywall, lives on in my mind forever.]
I found it horrifying that Charlie Kirk was murdered in such a violent way, in front of so many people, period, full stop. But the ugliness that followed was truly awful. So. Much. Ugliness. We had the desperately grasping rhetoric from people hoping that the killer was a foreigner, or a transgender person; we had the MAGA Republicans pointing fingers at the “left” and accusing this amorphous “left” of stoking violence and not grieving appropriately; we had to re-acquaint ourselves with the misogynistic, racist statements Kirk put out in the world; and now, we are watching people get fired for pointing out that hey, this person said some pretty objectively terrible things and can I please be excused from pretending that I am grieving his demise, even though I decry violence, and always have?
Throughout this deluge of ugliness and obfuscation and hypocrisy, I did, in fact, find people who helped my understanding of the meaning and nuance of what happened. There were times when I stumbled across a thoughtful commentator, such as the independent journalists I support through Substack or some other mechanism, and I thought: okay, this is more like it. This person is offering me a legitimate, non-ragey take on what happened. This person is speaking with meaning and nuance, and I love that, although I wish I didn’t have to slosh through all of the ugly floods of shit to get that.
I often advise people who are suffering from the mental onslaught of so much un-nuanced, often provably false, rage-filled commentary to step away from their social media feeds, and I try to do that myself, too. But I am a person who likes to stay informed and who likes to understand what is going on, and who still joneses for meaning and nuance. I don’t want just one take, or an absence of a take: I want to know what multiple people are thinking so I can arrive at my own conclusions about the meaning and nuances of a particular event. I believe that this is called, uh, critical thinking and analysis?
Throughout my entire career, I have chased after the stickiest messages, and the most moving, human-centered stories as ways to engage people in caring about something that is very much relevant to their lives. It’s like when I worked on the issue of uninsured Americans: sure, at that time I had GREAT health insurance through my employer, and since my family members were mostly doctors, we never lacked for healthcare. But I cottoned on to the idea that when approximately forty million Americans at that time lacked health insurance, it mattered not just for those Americans, but for everyone. Other industrialized and successful nations have figured that helping out with things like childcare, education, and healthcare are actually good for all of us – it helps the economy, it helps communities thrive, it puts so much less strain on the systems designed to coordinate how these services will be safe, available, and affordable. (Of course, if you truly believe these systems shouldn’t exist, I can’t help you, but may the gods be with you the next time you need to call 911 for an ambulance.) I always thought of it as this way, especially when I was doing environmental communications: if your neighbors were truly all for individualism, then they would have no compunction about coming over and letting their dog poop in your yard, as long as it’s not THEIR yard. But if the neighborhood actually agrees that EVERYONE should pick up their dog’s poop, then the neighborhood as a whole becomes a safer, cleaner, more livable place. (I may be drawing from recent real-life experience, ahem.)
Anyway, with respect to communications: while I still think that sticky messages and compelling stories matter, I am starting to think we may need to evolve some communications roles to meet the rigors and demands of the times we’re living in. Communications teams at most organizations eventually evolved to focus on new things, like having a social media specialist or coordinator. But nowadays, I think that organizations might want to think of developing Sherpa-like communications roles where we communications professionals spend a little time guiding our audiences through the overwhelming mess and the ugliness of our current public discourse, explain to them what’s really happening with respect to a particular issue, and clearly indicate what our position is and why we have that position. I dunno, I just think we may be past the point of being able to hit up our audiences with an ask based on some sticky messages and stories. And I don’t think it’s possible at this moment to make the ugliness and noise completely go away.
What I yearn for and will work towards, forever and always, are the signs that communicating with nuance and meaning can then lead to connection and understanding. My dad’s condition is not going to get better. But at least for a moment, my mother – and now, me – understood exactly how he was feeling. And as painful as that may be, I can’t help but see that as a good thing.
Minna Jung Consulting 