In my job, I have witnessed some awful things. I have arrived on the scene just moments after a young girl was decapitated by a car in a hit-and-run. I have seen photos during an inquest of a father who hanged himself from a tree, and watched the utter heartbreak of his grieving family as they unwittingly looked at the same images. I have seen fear, squalor, depravity. I have interviewed murderers and had to be polite and professional on the phone to convicted sex offenders and paedophiles as they ranted about my newspaper’s coverage of their horrific actions. I have listened to a woman’s graphic account of years of child abuse at the hands of a family member. I have seen a dead body after a week lying undiscovered in the Water of Leith, bloated, discoloured, barely recognisable as the man he once was. I have drank tea in the home of a family who lost their beautiful ten-year-old boy to a hit-and-run driver in a stolen car trying to escape police capture.
Two of those things made me cry. I remember clearly the drive home through tears after watching the devastated family in front of me in the courtroom sobbing when the coroner – rather cruelly, in my opinion – showed them the photos they could never unsee. And I cried every night for a week after listening to the father of the young boy so tragically killed on his way home from school talk about the son he would never see again. I couldn’t get my head around how life could be so unfair, and also couldn’t begin to understand how the boy’s grieving family were capable of such immense courage and resilience. I still can’t let myself think about it too much.
Both those stories I covered relatively early on in my career. I didn’t grow less sympathetic as the years went on, but I did grow hardened to the fact that life can be horrendous at times and that bad things happen every single day. They just happen. As a journalist, you quickly develop a skin thick enough to allow you to deal with situations like the ones described above; to get involved in someone’s tragedy to the point where they open up to you and share their innermost grief and suffering, and then walk away and barely think of it ever again. You also develop a humour black enough to make light of the most devastating situations. I quickly got to the stage where I no longer cried about the things I’d witnessed in my job, and stopped taking everyone’s pain and anguish home with me.
But today I’m worried about an interview I have to carry out with a young mum who lost her newborn baby. Since having my own child, I struggle to deal with stories like this anymore. I cannot even begin to imagine the pain and there seem to be no words capable of describing it. Where the rookie reporter me would have felt great sympathy, I am now capable of that more powerful emotion of empathy.
Today might be another day that I cry.
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