Unprepared for the Journey

[ Note: This blog entry was originally posted in May 2012.]

I'm beginning another journey, but for this one I don't pack any bags or make any reservations. However, it requires a lot of organization, and the making of some difficult decisions, not one of my strengths. On this journey I will be travelling backward in time. It will probably be an emotional roller coaster. I'm tempted to just cancel my reservation.

My sister got me started. She brought over two large boxes of letters and cards that our mother had saved over the years and asked me if I wanted to go through them.

Our mother died in 2008.

I am tempted to push everything to the back of the closet and leave it there, because I'm really not ready for this trip. However, I have already started, by pulling something from the top of the pile and I am hooked. It is a gorgeous Mothers Day card, which was given to mom not by one of her eight children, but by my dad , who loved to give her cards at every occasion. I think she kept them all!

Next, a letter, written by me, when our children were young. It includes a note written by our youngest, who was seven at the time. There is no time limit on this journey, and I stay here for a very long time. My baby has learned to read and write, and in her childish scrawl she sends her Oma a poem. Now, when I read this poem I have reached the age my mother was when she received it, and I can read it with her eyes and with her heart.

Strange Tree

Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Away beyond the Jarboe house

I saw a different kind of tree.

Its trunk was old and large and bent,

And I could feel it look at me.

The road was going on and on

Beyond to reach some other place.

I saw a tree that looked at me, 

And yet it did not have a face.

It looked at me with all its limbs;

It looked at me with all its bark.

The yellow wrinkles on its sides

Were bent and dark.

And then I ran to get away,

But when I stopped to turn and see,

The tree was bending to the side

And leaning out to look at me.

I know this tree intimately. It has my mother's face, one of the last times I saw her, after she had a bad fall, and I hardly recognized her. The wizened face of age that pleads to be recognized, the one I don't really want to see, but it keeps looking at me, beseechingly.

Comments (received after original posting in May):

Marge:

Okay, so this is why we don't throw this stuff away. It's so that people like you, who have so much talent for the written word, bring us back to look with wonder at how incredibly blessed we were to have the life we had. How wonderful that we had a father who loved to go out and buy our mother beautiful cards. He couldn't afford much, but wanted to express his feelings and if he couldn't do it with his own words, then he'd do it through Hallmark. It doesn't matter, he did it and that's what counts. And a young granddaughter who at the time, probably didn't even see the significance of the poem she was sending. But, on some level, knew how important it was. And we read it now and think of our mother and maybe even think of ourselves growing old and hoping we can be even close to the woman she was. 

Elfrieda:

Thanks Marge, for your affirmation! Your last sentence expresses my sentiments exactly. I just pulled a photo out of the box of Mom wearing a baseball hat, which I can't even imagine her doing! Christine took the picture. I showed it to Ivan and Sasha and they both thought it was me! 

Dora:

I'm glad you're taking us along on this journey! 

"To be a healer you need seven wounds"

"To be a healer, you need seven wounds" (Wilma Derksen, Path of the Heart)

When you have lived as long as I have, it is not that difficult to find seven wounds. However, most of the ones I listed occurred when I was younger. I had the rest of my life to deal with them, to try to come to terms with them. Wilma Derksen, in her book Path of the Heart, writes, "Life continues to break us and those around us. The challenge will always be in the putting together of the pieces, not in looking at the completed [puzzle].”

I work hard at trying to put together the pieces, and then an enraged psychopath comes along and kills twenty elementary school children by shooting them at close range. It devastates me and I walk around preoccupied with the thought of evil.

"Every criminal was once a tender, innocent and defenseless child."

Organizers of an art display by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan made the above comment. Cattelan's work, which explores life, death, good and evil, is installed at the former Warsaw Ghetto, where thousands of Jews were killed or sent to their deaths by Hitler's regime. It features, among other items of art that try to speak about the situation of hidden evil everywhere, a statue of Adolf Hitler on his knees, praying. (Winnipeg Free Press, Dec.19th, 2012). Can you imagine this man at his prayers? What would be the content of his petitions?

It becomes easier when I picture him as a youngster, waiting in fear and trembling for his father to come home and give him a beating every day for no reason, other than that of venting his own frustration on a defenseless child! (For Your Own Good, Alice Miller)

Recently I heard a CBC broadcast that asked people to report on their feelings of revenge when they had been wrongly treated. The most powerful story came from a woman whose father had been bludgeoned to death by a schizophrenic neighbour whom the family had befriended. For a good part of her life she carried around thoughts of revenge. When she finally met the perpetrator, he talked about the devastating loss of his mother when he was four years old. Suddenly she could imagine him as a four-year-old, bewildered, alone and frightened. She pictured her four-year-old niece whom she loved dearly, and she forgave him at once. This woman was liberated from the burden of revenge she had carried with her all those years.

Wilma Derksen, whose pre-teen daughter Candace was murdered in Winnipeg in 1984, was the invited author at a supper book club meeting my four sisters and I held recently, after we had read her two latest books, Path of the Heart and Echo of the Soul. She shared with us that she and her husband Cliff made a promise to each other very soon after the police discovered Candace's body, that they would not be consumed by anger, bitterness, revenge and other negative emotions. Since Candace's murder, they have worked tirelessly helping others in similar situations to deal with their trauma.

In Wilma's above-mentioned books, many people need healing from what life has brought them and from their reactions to it. They come to an elderly woman whose only claim to fame is that she has seen an angel, and this made all the difference in her life. This woman takes time for everyone who asks for her counsel. Mostly she just listens, with understanding and compassion. The narrator of the story is her little granddaughter, who is also "wounded" and sits at the grandmother's feet listening to the people and learning from her grandmother's counsel; in the end she finds the path to her own healing.

Evil will always be a part of our world. It is so relieving and liberating when someone who has been victimized shows us by example how to not only cope with evil but how to become actively engaged in fighting it -- not with guns and other violent means but in a spirit of listening with love and compassion.