My mother, Linda, was the oldest of 7 children. She was raised in a small town in the Midwest. She attended a catholic grade school (I recall her talking about a strict nun.) Many people have told me that she was the most beautiful girl ever to come from McCook, Nebraska. Linda appreciated compliments but at the same time she was uncomfortable with the notion that she was beautiful and never quite accepted or entirely believed that this was the case. Linda attended junior college and worked as a receptionist and bookkeeper and was not a particularly sophisticated person. She was not versed in the matters of Washington or Wall Street. Linda was a compassionate and loyal person with a devotional love for her family and for the extended family of people in the circle of her life.
My mother went through a very tough divorce. Linda raised three boys on her own on a receptionist salary and enlisting help from her parents before she remarried a man who would provide for her and her boys and give her a complete family. She suffered two brain aneurysms in her life, one in her thirties and one in her fifties (almost exactly 20 years apart.) Although she had some imperceptible issues from the brain aneurysms, she was fortunate to recover remarkably well. Her family all reasoned that she had her full share of health issues and that she would now live a long life (her grandmother and mother both lived well into their 90’s.) However in 2006, Linda was diagnosed with glioblastoma (an insidious and incurable brain cancer) and she died in October of 2008 the age of 68.
I sat with her one night next to her bed while she was in a rehabilitative care facility after they attempted to remove the cancer from her brain surgically and held her hand while we watched a crime drama on TV. At one point she pulled her hand away and rubbed the incision on her head and said, “I had another one of those things.” I said, do you mean an aneurysm.” She said, “yes, one of those.” I said, “no Mom, you have a terminal form of brain cancer.” She asked some questions and then stared at the TV. I began to cry and then squeezed her hand and said, “Mom, I am so sorry.” She squeezed my hand and turned to me and looked me square in the eyes. In an effort to comfort me she said, “babe, no one ever said life was going to be easy.” And then she smiled at me as if to say that she was fine and went back to watching the TV and continued to stroke my hand. She was intent on comforting me at that moment.
My Mother said things to me like: “no one said life was going to be easy” as I was growing up. She used to tell me to make sure that I gave more to the world than I took because, “the only way for the world to keep spinning is for people to give more than they take.” When I was in college and having the normal struggles that a young person trying to find their way has, my mother sent me the serenity prayer. I will not recite the prayer here but it is about acceptance and self-responsibility. Many would have thought of my mother as less than a formidable person. Now that she is gone, I realize that she was the strongest of us all and she had “the secret sauce.”
I am not certain that people can find true serenity until they find self-responsibility and self-reliance. Certainly freedom is an important element of serenity. Maybe a person can find peace in captivity but that is not the kind of peace and serenity that I desire. My mother would provide love and comfort but the greatest gift she gave me was the ability to love, accept and comfort myself despite my imperfections and mistakes. My mother taught me that I am responsible for my own happiness and that the key to my happiness was inside me. She taught to be happy with more or less and to be grateful for what God gave me, for better or for worse. Linda gave me a measuring stick to evaluate my life that did not lead me to envy others or to expect others to make me happy. I think my mother gave me the means of being free even if I were physically held captive.
While my mother would comfort me in a time of need, she would at the same time challenge me to find comfort in the simple things and to appreciate the opportunity before me. That was incredibly empowering. She was a true leader and motivator in that respect. She gave me an endless internal flame of independence and freedom.
Amazingly, I hear leaders today talking about income inequality and promoting envy and dependence. I do not hear leaders teaching people to love themselves for other than their income or possessions or providing a way for people to measure their value or chance for happiness in other than dollars. I do not hear our leaders challenging citizens to give more than they take to help keep the world spinning. I do not hear leaders describe a path to self-reliance and serenity. Someone will always have more and some will have less in a free society. I hear our leaders encouraging comparison to our neighbors who have more measured by income and possessions. This comparison can only promote envy and anger. Dependency is another form of captivity that is more powerful than physical captivity because it imprisons the soul and isolates the soul from what it truly needs. What the soul thirst for is self-acceptance and an internal strength and flame that allows us to love and accept ourselves regardless of the station of our neighbor, for better or worse.