Letting Go

Student assembly address:

Most of you know my father died in April, so my siblings and I agreed to use the Labor Day weekend to converge on my mother’s home in Mobile, AL and help her begin the process of purging the house of “stuff” to get it ready to sell.

My mother has lived in that home for almost forty years. It’s the place where she and my dad raised me, my three sisters and brother, and where she and my father built a life together. Mom has an eye for decoration and over the years, through several renovations, purchases and inheriting some nice furniture, she’s been able to build a home that resembles something you might see in Southern Living magazine.

Mom loves that home, and she’d prefer to live there until she dies, but it’s simply too big for her to live in by herself, and she’s having a hard time getting up and down the stairs. It’s time. We spent this weekend clearing out the attic. It was like an archeological dig, sorting through old pictures and other memorabilia, deciding what should be kept, what should be given away and what should be thrown away.

It was a hard weekend for Mom. Losing one’s life partner is very hard, but she had no choice in the matter. Deciding to sell one's home is a voluntary decision—a “letting go” of something of great importance, a decision to “move on” to something else even though what one is moving on from is very precious.

“Letting go” isn’t something that only 73 year old widows must do, however. It marks all our lives. Fact is, we don’t like change—we have a natural aversion to it. It’s why you sit in the same seats for every class and get really annoyed if someone else sits there. It’s why it’s so comfortable to let our mothers wake us up in the morning for school as if we were still five years old, or be the one responsible for remembering deadlines for us, or appointments, or waiting for her to tell us to do things that we knew needed doing long before she told us.  It’s why mothers, by the way, are so reluctant to give up those roles as we get older—to withdraw that support they must acknowledge that they are no longer needed in the same way as when we were children.

“Letting go” is hard, because it means we’re accepting something new, something unknown, while giving up what is safe and familiar. And yet, that’s the journey that mature, healthy people take. Seniors, you’re less than a year now from moving out of the house, most of you, and beginning to forge your own life. Whether you attend Church next year, or go to bed at a reasonable hour, or wake up on time for your classes, whether you party 4-5 nights/week, the friendships you make, the activities you choose, the amount of studying you do—it will all be up to you. And as exciting as all that sounds, it will be also difficult. Most freshmen get terribly homesick and go through a period of depression—not so much because their lives are awful—in fact, they’re quite interesting and exciting. The depression comes from giving up something very precious—our childhood—and instinctively wanting that security and order that marks our childhood, where others do things for us instead of us having to do things for ourselves.

Freshmen, beginning high school is partly about letting go, too. Homework folders are no longer being sent home to your mom and dad which tells them what they should tell you to do for homework—it’s up to you know to keep all that tracked. The clubs you join, the friends you make, the kind of person you become, is much more up to you.

Sophomores, most of you will get your driver’s licenses this year, and it marks a big break in your relationship with your parents, as you are no longer tethered to them to get where you want to go, or where they want you to go,  and that sweet freedom also carries with it the burden of having to decide whether you’ll attend events or parties that you know you probably shouldn’t and being placed in that new position of saying “yes” or “no” to situations that would never have arisen if we’re being driven around by our fathers. 

Juniors, the world is opening up to you, with classes getting harder and college decisions looming, and there’s real temptation to cling to our childhood, where life was easier but you also know, instinctively, that those days are behind us now, and we must move forward.

My prayer for my mother, for you and for me, is that all of us have the courage to “let go” of our pasts and the maturity and courage to embrace the future that awaits us. All of us are tempted, I think, to want to know exactly how the next twenty years of our life will unfold, hoping that we could look inside that crystal ball to map things out. But in the words of John Dunne, a poet-theologian-priest, that would be the “deadly clear path” which would rob our lives of adventure, wonder, awe. Instead, we are like cars driving down a windy road at night, with the headlights only illuminating a patch of darkness at a time. The only way to see beyond that patch is to keep driving forward. That’s the excitement of life, the thrill, the journey of our lives. 

May we all have the courage to accept what’s in store for us!

Friday Nights Lights and Being Grateful

Student assembly address:

Friday night was a great night for our school. First, congratulations to our football team for their 59-34 win against Stratford. The 59 points were the most points ever scored by a JPII football team in our school’s history, so it was a heck of a start to the season. In the decisive second quarter, we scored 35 points, all touchdowns from "Q" behind really magnificent blocking from our offensive line and a defense that completely shut down Stratford in the quarter. Great game, fellas.

But Friday night was great for more reasons than that. Y’all were great. Our cheerleaders, our dance team, our blue man group, our pep band (with just two weeks of practice)—all of you guys made the evening a great celebration of spirit for our school.

My congratulations also to the House of Gregory for their ALS Icebucket Challenge. I and nine other teachers were doused with ice water to raise money for ALS research at halftime. And before I say anything else, I understand that once you take the challenge you can challenge someone else, so I am calling out Mr. Mila, who was on the football field on Friday as a spectator, laughing at us. Mr. Mila, you’re challenged.  Next Monday assembly—in front of the students—man up.

And in case you didn’t know, another JPII athletic team had a great weekend, too. Congratulations to our Lady Knights volleyball team for winning SEVEN matches this weekend in rout to coming in first place in the tournament at White County.  SEVEN matches in two days is a lot of volleyball—congratulations, girls!

Let’s keep that spirit going this fall—keep coming to the ball games, for sure. But let’s keep that spirit going, too, in terms of kindness to others, reaching out to people that look like they need a friend, supporting the teacher’s efforts in the classroom,  striving to be the best students we can be, challenging ourselves to stretch, dig down and study hard.

On my way to Nashville from Montgomery to be interviewed for this job almost seven years ago, I stopped at a gas station to fill up. A late model car pulled up on the other side of the pump, and an old man got out of the car, looked at me with some embarrassment, and asked me for $10 for gas. I told him when I went in to pay for mine, I’d put $10 down on his pump. Casting his eyes downward, he said with some feeling: “Gratitude”.

Since I had little else to do as I drove home, I thought quite a bit about this fellow for the rest of the trip. Judging from his car, his clothes and his diction, he didn’t appear to have a job, or a good one at least, and his language suggested he wasn’t very well educated. His sad eyes conveyed loneliness, and I wondered if he had a family, or was close to them if he did, and guessed he may not have been. Few things are more humiliating than asking for a handout, but he was out of gas and so he had to swallow his pride to ask a stranger. And yet, despite all that, I sensed his gratitude was real.

To be honest, his gratitude was unsettling to me, for it forced me to compare myself to him, and in so doing, made me wonder if I who had so much in comparison was as grateful as he with so little. And that’s not a bad thought for all of us—as we come can cheer at ballgames, as we wake up each day and come to this magnificent school, with great teachers, good friends, and fun things to do—are we grateful for all this?

I don’t know why some people are given so much and others so little. But for we who have been given much, much is expected. Let us, at minimum, be grateful each day for all God has done for us-- for JPII, for our friends, our family, our talents and abilities. And for Friday night home victories—Go Knights!

Bracketing

Student assembly address:

On my way back from dropping my youngest son off at Purdue this weekend, I was listening to National Public Radio, and they were doing a story on living with someone with Alzheimer’s disease. Most of you know that Alzheimer’s is a brain disease that affects memory, thinking and reasoning skills— and for women over sixty, there’s a one in six chance that your grandmother or great-grandmother might start showing some symptoms, so it’s pretty common. You may have someone in your family that has Alzheimer’s, and if you do, you know it’s hard on the family because when the disease becomes advanced, people don’t remember much about their past, and when they do remember, they often don’t have the timeline right—something that happened forty years ago in their mind might have happened yesterday, and even worse, they often forget their loved ones, or important details about their loved ones’ lives, of even their children themselves.

Since ‘who we are’ is a function of our memories and experiences, people with Alzheimer’s often change personalities, and that too, is very difficult for loved ones.

The NPR feature concerned a middle-aged couple caring for their elderly mother.  In her younger years, this woman was so proper that she believed that saying the word “Dang” or “Shoot” was swearing, but now, when the daughter didn’t let her have a second bowl of ice cream, she called her daughter a “supreme –itch.” In fact, it was war all the time in the household, because the couple found themselves always correcting their mother—“No, Mom, your husband’s name was Frank, not Bill.” “No Mom, that’s Jenny, your grand-daughter.” “No, Mom, you have never been to France” and things like that, which meant that the woman was being constantly reminded of her Alzheimer’s, constantly frustrated by her declining memory, constantly angry. It was as if they couldn’t even talk to her anymore without everyone getting upset.  

So they began to read research and talk with Alzheimer experts about that precise question: How do we talk to her? Should we, for example, correct her? Should we try and cue her to reality by placing reminders about who the president is, what the date is, pictures of her children with labels around her room, to keep her from losing her memory even faster?

And the fundamental insight they came away with is—no, don’t try and correct. If you want to have a relationship with your mother with advanced Alzheimer’s, you should instead enter her world in conversation, on its own terms, where ever she takes the conversation.

They described this amusing back and forth as an example of what they meant:

Mother, looking out the window:  “The monkeys are back in the trees.” (How might we respond? Those aren’t monkeys, mom, those are squirrels.”)

Instead, the son in law says, “Are they back already? They’re a little early this year—it’s not their season yet.”

Mother: “No, they’re back, I’m looking at them.”

Son in law, looking out the window: “I wonder if they’d make good pets?”

Mother: “Oh heaven’s no, you couldn’t bring monkeys into the house. They’re not house-broken.”

Son: “Well, they’d have to be trained…and wear pants.”

And they proceeded to have an extended conversation about it, with the mother obviously pleased to be engaging in what felt to her to be human dialogue with someone—a very basic human need.

Honestly, I was a bit moved by the whole NPR story—impressed first of all by this couple who loved their mother so much as to keep her in their home, but also that they looked for ways to lovingly engage her, even while her mind was failing.  The willingness to bracket themselves and “enter into her world, on its own terms” seems to me to be a genuine act of selfless love.

But here’s the cool part. According to this couple, when they started bracketing, letting her lead the conversation, and engaging her on her terms, the warring ceased, she was happier, and they were happier, as they felt good to be connecting with her again, however amusing the conversation became. 

We are blessed here in our daily interactions with each other not to be dealing with Alzheimer’s patients. But all of us have the human need to connect, and if we can develop this skill of bracketing—of putting the other person first in the conversation—we can both build them up, but in so doing--following the laws of spiritual physics which says the more we give to others the happier we become—we can build ourselves up in the process.

Try really paying attention to your younger sister or brother, or your mom or dad, or your friend, without an agenda, on their terms alone, totaling entering their world in the conversation. I think you’ll be pretty amazed at how much power we have to make others feel good about who they are.