By pure chance, I ended up sitting at the same lunch table as Rémy at our specialist hospital one sunny autumn day. He’s a charming chap with a contagious laugh, who had come to the hospital to pick up his medication and have a check-up.
It didn’t take us long to get talking. Before I knew it, he was telling me his story. The kind of story that makes the world stop around you for a moment. He had been young when his wife and baby were killed in a car accident. He told me that he’d headed to Platzspitz Park or ‘Needle Park’ the very next day – this was during the heyday of the open drug scene in the centre of Zurich. He took whatever he could get his hands on to numb his pain. Losing his life would have just been an added bonus. But his body was resilient and so his serious drug addiction went on for several years.
When he was on his way to one of the city’s legalised drug consumption rooms one day, he bumped into a friend with a puppy in his arms. He had been heading to the vets to have his pet vaccinated but, an addict himself, he quickly abandoned that plan and decided that he wanted to join Rémy instead.
It was a trivial encounter, really. And there must have been plenty of similar moments in Rémy’s life around that time. Medical appointments missed by him and his friends, family ties cut and counselling sessions skipped.
But on that day, Rémy decided to take his friend’s puppy to the vet for him. He actually told me what made that moment different from all the others: ‘You know, it was the first time that God had once more trusted me with another life to look after that wasn’t my own. I didn’t care about my own life at all by that point.’ And the rest is history. The friend handed his pet over to Rémy, who took care of the dog until it died ten years later. Rémy managed to overcome his heroin addiction and the path of self-destruction he had embarked upon.
His story only lasted a few minutes but it changed everything. It’s difficult to describe the natural ease of his laugh and his deeply trusting nature. Rémy sat with us at the table, full of life and happily discussing the best way to eat the Swiss roll we had for dessert (he settled on using his hands).
Resilience has become something of a magic word for our society recently. Something to strive for that combines so many hopes and dreams in one. We’re living at a time when we sometimes need to find the words to express the cascading crises in our society. Our world order is being destabilised, from the global level all the way down to our family units. We’re noticing this at our support centres, where we’re seeing an obvious uptick in people who had previously been managing to function in society. For the first time in a long time, we have young people who are using intravenously at our emergency youth shelter. With everyone feeling vulnerable, there’s a big push for a magic bullet that can protect us at a time like this.
We know that there are ways to build resilience. Things like self-care, healthy boundaries and resourcefulness. These are all tools that have been carefully researched and documented. And yet they stop at the individual. What saved Rémy was his ability to take care of another being again after years of physical and mental exhaustion. He was supported and sustained by the world around him, even though he perhaps hadn’t always been accepted by that world when he was overcome by despair and hatred for it. But the support was there as he started to escape his addiction.
Every day, we can make a difference for ourselves and the people we interact with – we just don’t always know what that difference will be. For me, this refusal to give up on ourselves or our loved ones is the one definition of resilience that really matters. Its social dimension that turns it from a self-improvement tool to a secret weapon for a community that never gives up – whatever the odds.
Friederike Rass studied theology and philosophy in Tübingen, Hamburg and Buenos Aires and has an Executive MBA from the University of St.Gallen. She holds a PhD in Philosophy of Religion, having studied in Zurich and the United States and graduated summa cum laude. She went on to work as a project manager in international collaborative innovation at the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation, before heading up the Foundation for the Evangelical Society of the Canton of Zurich. The 38-year-old has been the CEO of the social work organisation Sozialwerk Pfarrer Sieber since 2022.