Remembering Who I Am

I am the six year old, who could read at a sixth grade level, who read the air raid drill signs in the hallways in school, about how we were to sit under our desks if bombs started falling on us. Even at six, I knew what bombs looked like from seeing them on the nightly news being dropped in Vietnam, along with seeing the daily count of missing and injured. I knew my desk would not protect me.

I am the six and seven and eight year old (and actually well into my twenties) who had a recurring nightmare about nuclear war. And in the dream I am always searching for anyone and everyone I love in the rubble, but never find anyone.

I am the seven year old who cried when I learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated.

I am the eight year old who woke up to the news that Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated the night before in the Ambassador Hotel, after winning the California Democratic primary.

I am the eleven and twelve and thirteen year old who wore a POW bracelet, and prayed every day for Ronald M. Mayercik, a man I didn't know, to be found and to come home. He was reclassified to Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered on July 28, 1977.

I am the fifteen year old crying harder than I have ever cried before or since waiting for the adults in the room to decide what the future will be for me and the child I am carrying.

I am the sixteen year old on a train fleeing the first episode of domestic violence.

I am the twenty-one through twenty-six year old taking my child to college with me at night so that I could try to make a better life for us.

I am the twenty-six year old who took her nine year old daughter and moved fifteen hundred miles away from everyone she knew and loved to continue to try to make that better life.

I am the sixty year old who held her husband's hand when he was given a terminal cancer diagnosis.

I am the sixty two year old who drained her beloved husband's pleural cavities every day so that the cancerous fluid that was filling them up would not prevent him from breathing.

I am the sixty three year old who held her husband's hand as he departed this life, and who then planned his funeral, wrote his obituary, and read the eulogy at his funeral.

I am the sixty four year old who is typing this, heartsick.

Reminding myself of who I am, I know that I can put one foot in front of the other and just keep trying to make the world a better place. The same stubborn pragmatism that has brought me this far will serve me well now.

There will be dark days ahead, and I am terribly afraid that I will see people I love hurt by what happens next.

To everyone who is heartsick and afraid, I see you. I will do all I can to fight for peace, for decency, for equality, and for justice.

What I won't do is make empty promises that everything will be okay. Because no one can know that.

But for as long as there is breath in my body, I will continue to live as have by these two commandments given by Jesus:

“The first is this:

Hear, O Israel!

The Lord our God is Lord alone!

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,

with all your soul,

with all your mind,

and with all your strength.

The second is this:

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

There is no other commandment greater than these.”