"So Proud of my Children"

A statue yesterday at the Denver Botanical Garden captured my attention.. It is breathtaking; a tall figure of a mother from Zimbabwe and under her proud and protective gaze two children carrying a heavy book. It is called “I’m so proud of my children," and it is sculpted by Zimbabwean artist Nicholas Kadzungura.

I think all of us who have raised or taught children can identify with this sentiment, and I was going to write about this today. But instead, now I am thinking about loss; about 67 lives lost in the plane crash last night in Washington; about those beautiful children who won figure skating competitions, whose parents were so proud of them--or the military operators of the Black Hawk whose parents were so proud of them. What do those of us who are still living do with this?

We want the best for our children. We want them to learn to read; to do better than we did. We want them to excel.. to go to good colleges and become CEOs, professors, doctors, generals, lawyers. Mostly though, we want them to be ok, and there is no guarantee of that.

My husband and I were fortunate and blessed to raise 4 beautiful children—and with all my heart I am so proud of them. I spent much of their growing up years afraid, though, trying to shore myself up against the terrible possibility of loss. I did not know for a long while that this was a logical trauma response to witnessing the death of my brother when we were all young, and finally I sought help for some of my fears.

I talked with a psychotherapist who specialized in PTSD and who had just the week before served as a counselor to survivors of the Murray McMurray Federal Building bombing. He asked me when I visited him how long I thought I would live. “ Maybe til I am 85,” I said (I was younger then and 85 was much further off than it is now). “How many days is that ?”he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. He picked up a calculator and said, “If you live to be 85, you have 18, 262 days left.” What surprised me about that finite number was that it didn’t seem like that much time.

He looked at me and said “Even if you live to be an old woman, you don’t have many days on this earth. Every moment you spend worrying about future loss is a moment lost from being with your children now.” He went on to talk about his experience in Oklahoma with the federal building survivors. He spoke with people who had been chatting with a co-worker seconds before the explosion—and that co-worker didn’t make it. “The most important person in your life,” he said, “is the person you are with right this minute. “The most important time in your life is right now.”

His words were wise. However, though I never forgot them, I struggled to heed them and still sabotaged so much precious time feeling terrified about future calamity. Writer Eckhart Tolle says that our greatest suffering is our practice and I am finally beginning to understand that I may always live with this struggle, but I can find some acceptance of it.

Here are words from Tolle‘s The Power of Now that have helped me and hopefully may speak to one of you.

“Don’t look for peace. Don’t look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance... The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender” (Eckhart Tolle)

My heart goes out to the families who lost their loved ones. May they be comforted as they walk through their journey of grief. And may we all realize the fleeting and precious gift of a moment in time.