Dave Kindred's Leave Out the Tragic Parts and Sympathy (A6)

Leave Out the Tragic Parts, by the sportswriter Dave Kindred, is a grandfather's memoir of his grandson Jared, a bright boy who became a train-hopping drifter and drank himself to death at twenty-five. It is a book written not to report but to grieve and to love. In an interview with WGLT Kindred says simply, "I loved him in ways that I never loved anybody." How deeply another's suffering moves you, and how tenderly you hold the people you love, is, in the Big Five, one facet.

Being moved by a loved one's suffering is the Sympathy facet

That facet is Sympathy (A6), under Agreeableness, how tender-hearted you are and how much others' pain, especially a loved one's, moves you. A high scorer feels a family member's struggle in their own chest and cannot look away; a low scorer keeps a cooler distance. Kindred's book is high A6 poured onto the page, a man who could not stop loving a grandson he could not save, and who wrote a whole book rather than let the boy be reduced to how he died. The tenderness is the point, held steady even through helplessness and grief.

What the book adds to the trait is the ache that comes with it. High A6 makes love deep, but it also means a loved one's suffering lands with full weight, and Kindred does not flinch from how much it hurt to watch and not be able to fix it. This post is about the trait, not the addiction, which is a clinical condition and not a substitute for treatment. That helpless tenderness ties Sympathy to the Vulnerability (N6) of being shaken by what you cannot control, though A6 is specifically the being moved by another. Kindred's grief is the cost of a love that would not quit.

For a reader placing themselves, your A6 is a fair read on how deeply you feel for the people you love and how hard their pain lands on you. High on it and Leave Out the Tragic Parts will move you, a portrait of love that outlasts even loss. Low on it and the book is a window into a tenderness that others carry through their whole families. Where you sit on Sympathy tells you how much others' suffering moves you, and we take the facet apart in Sympathy (A6).

Read the book: Leave Out the Tragic Parts: A Grandfather's Search for a Boy Lost to Addiction by Dave Kindred.

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