Holiday grief is hard on the heart, and in the past month-and-a-half, I have occupied a space cluttered with conflicting emotions: joy and gratitude for a life well-lived, sadness for the soul I miss, guilt for the time I squandered. And then there is the anger — anger at myself for how infrequently I reached out to him when I lived so far away, anger at anyone who expected anything from me while I was embedded in my grief, and anger at our political atmosphere and the way it eclipses all other things.

Chuck was born with cerebral palsy in 1941, back before there were services available for the disabled offering anything more than custodial care. My grandparents, hoping to fill a void in the educational system that was supposed to prepare their son for the future, used a $3,000 G.I. loan to found a school in my uncle’s honor, and opened their doors to other families with children who were afflicted as he was. It was, and remains for me one of the most unselfish acts of love that I have ever seen.

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If you didn’t know him well, you might think that Chuck’s handicap was the most important thing about him. He spoke with struggled speech that required considerable patience to understand. He was wheelchair-bound, though when he was younger, he could walk short distances with the aid of crutches. In fact, when I was a little girl, Chuck could dress and feed himself and get himself to work, where he would mow the lawns and collect the trash and manage the soda machines at the Matheny School. There was a time when Chuck could do most of the things that the rest of us do, only slower and with much more effort. Everything was exponentially harder for him, and yet he did it all without complaint.

When Chuck visited my family in Ohio, I learned that I could gauge the character of an acquaintance by how they responded to my uncle. I became protective of him in public, staring hard at others whose gaze lingered a little too long when we were seated at a restaurant, or at people who changed their seats to move away from him when we attended a community concert. I shot daggers at them with my eyes while Chuck just continued living proudly, continued singing with his quiet dignity.

I didn’t know it then, but in those moments while I stewed in my anger over other people’s actions, my Uncle Chuck was teaching me something about love.

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In the days following Chuck’s death, as my family and I sorted through his belongings, I came across some old letters that my grandparents had written to him in those very first years of the Matheny School, when Chuck was just a boy. In them, my grandparents expressed their tender affection for him, their gratitude for his sweet, agreeable demeanor, and laid out their ambitions to open a school in his honor. They called it their “Tribute to Chuckie.”

I learned from those letters just how hard it was for them in the beginning — and then my mother told me how my grandfather had once used his car as collateral to borrow the money he needed for payroll. These were difficult times, the end of World War II, in fact, when food rationing was still in place. And yet my grandparents persisted, boldly asking their community to invest in the education of children who had previously been hidden away.

I’m sure they heard ‘No’ a lot.

NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo

I think about how that must have felt — living in what was supposedly the greatest and most morally righteous country in the world, and having to ask for private money again and again so that their son could receive an education.

In 1948, on the two-year anniversary of the opening of Matheny School, my grandmother wrote these words to my Uncle Chuck, who was seven years old at the time:

“Please don’t become intolerant when I try to explain why we may fail. You see, dear, there are some people who don’t understand little kids like you and [the other students]. Perhaps they had little boys & girls who could run and play, and had no physical handicap — they don’t know how much courage it takes to fight your battles. They cannot know, dear, that within that handicapped body, lies a mind so keen, so alert, so willing to contribute — and equally important, a courage and a determination to conquer no matter what the barrier.

“Do not be intolerant, Chuck. Accept this as something which you will always have to face — be tolerant of these people because they do not know. It is hard for them to realize that you and [the other students], just given the inherent chance, will help in a productive and practical manner to formulate our world of tomorrow.”

Be tolerant of these people because they do not know. In that letter, my grandmother was teaching my uncle something about love.

*

In all the times I’ve had to advocate —whether for environmental conservation, or protective regulations, or for accommodations for my own child to access her education— I have struggled with anger.  It ignites in me upon my first whiff of indifference to the things that I hold dear. It roils under the sense that someone else places money or convenience or political popularity above right and wrong, or the health and security of my environment, my body, or my child — and it flares at things like vulgar tweets and internet trolls and unreturned calls and passive-aggressive emails because, my God are you not human? Where is your compassion and decency?

I often use my anger to protect what I love.  But then, perhaps I’ve been doing it all wrong.

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Advocacy can take you to dark places when you don’t come up for air. When you walk around with your muscles flexed, always poised for your defensive stance, the fatigue will eventually set in. You may begin to question the humanity of the people on the other side of the table, regardless of where that table is: in Washington, in your community, or even your own home. It’s exhausting to maintain this suspicion of one another, this belief that everything is a win-or-lose game. You may pride yourself on your vigilance, on the power of your love to keep fighting, fighting, fighting. But the truth is, it’s exhausting to be at war.

*

After the end of the war, my grandparents opened the doors of the Matheny School with a $3,000 G.I. Loan and three students, including my Uncle Chuck. In just one year, the school grew to 34 children with a staff of 21 — which means that somewhere in between all the No’s came an occasional Yes.

How did they get there?

I can tell you one thing for sure — they didn’t get there with anger. They didn’t get there with shame.

Be tolerant of these people because they do not know, she said.  Be patient and be kind. Or in other words, lead with love. I think this is what my grandmother meant. I know this is how my Uncle Chuck lived. If there’s one true thing I can take away from his life, it’s how far love can carry a person, how far love can take a family, and how wealthy a community becomes when its currency is love.

The post On Advocacy and Love appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

After visits with my relative and meetings with the facility staff, we sat in the hotel room to debrief, trying to ignore the muted television in the corner — the nodding heads, furrowed brows, and moving mouths of CNN political pundits. We made tentative plans to meet again in the near future, said our goodbyes, and then I drove home through 5 hours of pouring rain. By the time I reached my home in Vermont, my shoulders had migrated up to my ears and my neck was so tense that I could barely turn my head from side to side.

I could chalk it up to the drive, I suppose, or the emotional challenge of why we were there in the first place — the contemplation of mortality and the indignities that often proceed it: adult diapers, depression, round-the-clock medical care. But if I’m honest with myself, I will admit that it was our silence, and my guilt about our historic silence around these matters and more that made me tighten into stone. There are so many difficult things to talk about in my family, so by default we usually don’t. Except when we are forced to; then we do it out of love.

After the last presidential debate, I posted a comment on Facebook about Donald Trump’s terrible debate performance, specifically his refusal to state that he would accept the results of the election if he didn’t win. After all the people that Trump has thrown under the bus during the course of his campaign, it enraged me to hear him incite some kind of conspiracy theory to cast doubt on his own independent failure to earn the trust of American voters. So I said something.

My comment got pushback from a friend (a conservative, but not a Trump supporter), who suggested that my crowing seemed a bit narrow-minded, unsportsmanlike, perhaps — that it’s easy to say these things when your candidate is winning, but that it’s harder to get into the minds of some of the really good people who happen to be Trump supporters. In other words, consider all of those nice folks with Trump signs in their yards. Most of them are legitimately disenfranchised with their government. Trump may not be ‘good people,’ but they are, and right now Trump is all they’ve got. In other words, be quiet.

We are both products of Ohio, this friend and I. Like him, I have conservative friends and family who lean right in their political views, and probably more than I care to know who have even donated to, or wear merchandise from the Trump/Pence “Make America Great Again” campaign. I have a history with these people. I care about these people; I even love most of them. Why do I keep insisting on stirring the pot? Don’t I care about how they feel?

I can tell you that I have spent most of my adult life with a buttoned lip and a careful eye on ‘caring about how they feel’ — and the only thing I can be sure that my silence successfully accomplished was the sustenance of an unhealthy environment, and a cultivation of a toxicity that served neither myself nor the people with whom I lived. It’s not that I don’t empathize with the struggles of Trump supporters; it’s that I take issue with the racist, misogynist, and xenophobic scapegoating that has been taking place inside that camp, and the general sociopathic traits of the person whom they have identified as their desired leader. To be blunt, I resent the expectation of my silence about all of the above, just because the people with Trump signs in their yards might be good people, friends or former neighbors, or even members of my own family. I have stumbled along this earth long enough to have at least figured out that love should not require silence, and that silence is not the same as love.

Much has been written this year about the “call-out culture” in our society — the act of publicly identifying individuals who have made offensive comments or taken actions of a discriminatory nature — and the pitfalls around the practice of progressive shaming. And while I agree that the reflexive pouncing that often occurs on social media can be counter-productive, I can’t help but be amused by the irony of people whose sensitivities are suddenly aroused once they have been scolded for their insensitivities.

But at least a dialogue is happening, right? Which is to say that although it may be messy, this is all an imperative conversation. We need to sit with our discomfort and acknowledge the pervasive rape culture that hovers over our girls. We need to talk about why using the term “Bad Hombres” during a presidential debate is right-to-the-bone offensive. We need to dissect the incongruities between “All Lives Matter” and “Black Lives Matter.” We need to face the tension between our country’s freedom of religion and our population’s fear of certain ones. Because the civil discourse in our country has been ailing for a while now, and it’s time we start thinking about its long-term care. We may not agree on how to avoid the demoralized, shit-filled bedpan state we’re currently headed toward, but we have got to figure this out. Our dignity as human beings is at stake. We’ve got to do this out of love.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

The post Love Does Not Equal Silence appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Eleven years ago, I celebrated Mother’s Day as an expectant mother — just far enough along to have publicly shared the news.  I was an elated mother-to-be, a pregnant woman without morning sickness, for whom springtime took on hues more vibrant than usual.

For me, those first few months were a distilled, almost cliché kind of happiness — my pregnancy a postponed and then achieved-as-planned goal that I now see as blind beginner’s luck — and Gavin and I were in a good place to add parenthood to our life skills.  We were so focused on the intense hazing of parenthood in its early stages, that I don’t think the magnitude of its lifelong commitment, or the emotional holdfast that binds you to your children long after they leave had even occurred to us.

But a few days after that Mother’s Day, as I glowed with the secret feeling of being maternal in disguise, we got a call from one of our closest college friends.  Another friend — one of our core group back in the day — had died suddenly from complications of diabetes.  He’d been found in his apartment by a colleague, after his mother — worried that her son hadn’t called her on Mother’s Day — had asked someone to check in on him.  He had never forgotten to call on Mother’s Day.

The news sent me and my husband reeling, but for me it cut even deeper than the surreal emotions surrounding a funeral/college reunion, or the fact that the drive down there was like a scene from The Big Chill.  In the funeral home, I sat in my folded chair, rubbing the beginnings of a baby bump while I watched our friend’s mother greet callers with red eyes and wadded tissues in her hands.  Every few minutes she placed her hands of the backs of her other grown sons, who stood next to her, and who looked so much like my dead friend it was like being able to see an echo.

That was the first time I realized the magnitude of what I was taking on — that there were no guarantees that everything would turn out okay, even after you’d successfully raised your child and ushered him through school and college, graduation and beyond.  It was the first time I realized that the duties of a mother could include something like this.

Most women who choose to be mothers learn and faithfully uphold the pact of parenthood — which is to guide your child to all manner of milestones, and help them navigate the obstacles along the way.  It’s hard work — we know this — but whatever pain we encounter is usually justified by the reward.  Nobody tells you about the fine print.  Nobody tells you how quickly and how easily your reward can be whisked away.

I don’t know what I said to our friend’s mother in the vacancy of that moment.  I’m sure I said that we loved her son and that I was sorry for her loss — words that seem empty without the specificity of what I meant.  —Which is that I would never forget her son because he was part of the story of my future.  He was the one friend who let Gavin borrow his car to take me out on our first real date, even though he never lent his car to anyone.  He was that kind of person: a good, generous person, especially when it mattered.  He was the type of person who never forgot to call his mom on Mother’s Day.

I’m thinking about her today.  As I sit with my own family, enjoying the flowers and the homemade cards and the excitement of two little girls proudly expressing their thanks, I’m thinking about all the mothers along the way who had a role in this.  And hoping they realize that no matter what happens in the end, their love has made a difference and has a way of echoing back.

Photo credit: Kristi Eckberg Photography

The post Echo appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.