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By: Mary Morrell, Things my father taught me
During a recent lengthy drive to another state, I realized that truck stops and rest areas, filled with so many people coming and going and interacting with each other, hold a unique opportunity to reflect on the question, “What does it mean to be human?”
Whenever I ask myself that question, I still recall the day of my father’s wake, more than 30 years ago.
On that night, my youngest son chose to express his grief and love by drawing pictures and writing “I love you, Poppy,” on little pieces of paper and placing them around my father’s body as it lay in repose. Crosses, hearts and crooked XXXs and OOOs were lined up with as much importance as the American flag, folded and resting on the casket.
His demonstrations of love brought most of the adults in the funeral parlor to tears, and one elderly onlooker was heard to say, “Oh look, he’s just like a little person.”
With that, my son crawled up on my lap and said stoically, “I don’t like being a little person. It hurts too much.”
I hugged him tightly to myself and whispered in his ear, “I know. It hurts to be a big person, too.”
In an incredibly touching moment, he looked up at me and brushed large tears off my cheeks. We understood each other. We shared in the grief. He reminded me of a painful truth – it’s hard to be human.
It’s hard to be human because it hurts to be human, and it hurts for the same reason that it’s a joy – because we love. And it seems the more we love, the more we are open to hurt from loving and the experience may leave us wondering if love is worth it; if the vulnerability that is required of real love isn’t more something to be feared than something to be valued.
There were times in my own life when the pain of losing someone I loved was so overwhelming that I determined I would build walls around my heart so as not to be hurt the next time. But in the midst of the pain, I soon learned something professed by Irish author Enid Starkie: “Unhurt people are not much good in the world.”
The greatest model for us was our own Christ who loved to what others considered excess, who painfully lamented that his love was neither accepted nor returned, crying, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were unwilling!”
It was this bruised and wounded Jesus, rejected, denied and spat upon, who continued to love none-the-less – enough to die for all of us, not just for some of us.
So great a love is difficult to understand, and perhaps more difficult to accept, because it often engenders the fear of expectation – what do I have to give in return?
It was another young child, this time my feisty six-year-old granddaughter, who shared a lesson about overcoming fear – of all kinds. After our discussion about how best to deal with monsters, she said in her tiny voice, “You know what Abuela? I threw away all my scaredness.”
She crawled up on my lap, and I hugged her to myself and whispered in her ear, “You are a very wise little girl, and your decision makes me very happy. No more monsters for you … or me!”
Love and fear are both decisions we make, and what we choose affects what being human will mean for us – and for those we encounter.
Mary Morrell is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Spirit, the Metuchen Diocesan newspaper.