Are You OK?

Chapter 3 in Loveable Baxter series

Baxter has a favorite spot on the couch at my feet on a gray blanket. When he is concerned about me (like if I fall asleep watching tv),  he climbs on my chest and stares into my face. Early on, after we adopted him, he’d come running to check on me whenever I sneezed. One time, my daughter and her husband were visiting and I’d given them my bedroom; I was sleeping on the couch in the living room and in the middle of the night, I started sneezing. Must be the ice cream I had earlier, I thought. It always does that to me. Within seconds, Baxter came running from a bedroom down the hall to check on me. Eventually Baxter came to realize that my sneezing was nothing to sneeze at (bad pun intended). He ignored my explosive dairy induced outbursts after that.

There was the time, too, that I teared up watching a touching PBS Newshour show. Baxter ran over to me from the other side of the room to discern if I was OK. Then he jumped up on my lap and kissed my hand.

I looked up the definition of empathy. According to Oxford Languages, it is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”. I think Baxter has empathy.

In the last few years of my husband’s life, we dealt with a difficult family situation. I must have complained about it one day or exhibited a lack of understanding of the person involved.  “You lack empathy,” he gently told me. This surprised me. I considered myself to be a caring person. I realized later that he wasn’t suggesting that this was a pervasive problem in my life; I just needed to look at the situation from the other person’s viewpoint. That’s something we all struggle with. When I think of Baxter’s empathy, I am reminded of this life lesson. Like Baxter, I can ask “Are you OK?”