A Moment of Reflection

The benefits of doing my IPSP here at home in Arkansas are quite different from those of my compadres in the rest of world - different in the sense that their experiences are new and somewhat detached from day-to-day life back here in the States. My experiences outside my project on the otherhand are familiar and routine - after IPSP work, I go to the school and battle the Mac for a few hours, then go home late in the evening, get in trouble with Lara, sleep on the couch or the doghouse, and wake to start it all over again. So my social comfort zone rarely receives any threat to the norms.

So, when on June 3rd I returned from lunch to find my dear friend Allison waiting for me in my office at AEDC, I had a feeling something was wrong. I instantly knew, but hearing the words made it real. Our friend Cooper had passed away at age 26 from advanced leukemia. Though he and I had lost touch in recent years, I found myself struggling with my grief: what to do, what to say, what to think, how to act...

Soon thereafter I went up to Iowa with the intent of visiting family only to find the heartland bandaging its wounds as it began the healing and recovery process. The scars of the recent weather disasters were still very visible both on the land and in the souls of the people: towns obliterated by tornadoes and swept away by floods, people with nothing, and a fragile hope fighting to survive.

All of this made Eleanor Clift's program all the more powerful for me. The school will likely post a blog or at least a news story about her program which will tell what she said, who she talked about, and the overall impact, but I wanted to tell what I heard. Her program was powerful, informative, and candid. I'd almost forgotten what it is like to sit in a public program here at the school. Her subject? Life, death, and dealing with it all in the public and private sphere. It was nice to hear someone treat it and the issues surrounding it with candor and humor and pain. It was important to understand that we all must deal with these things at one time or another, and it was even more important to hear her say that, contrary to what is "expected," we each will have to deal with it in our own way - there is no right or wrong. We have to find a way to work through it, remember it, and ultimately inspire us.

There is a difference between getting trapped in personal sentiments and in mourning a loss. Often we linger in the former. In this sense grief is understandably a personal and selfish emotion; a past but very real part of our own lives is lost in the tragedies before us. However, because we live and because we are untouched, we are in a sense sad because our past is now and forever only a memory. And, that hits home very hard. In another sense though, grief is also a very communal emotion. In my recent experiences, two communities held close to each other in effort to usher everyone through the toughest of times. I think that grief and sadness are all too often the unfortunate glue that holds together the bonds of humanity. However, it is from those bonds and those collective experiences that we can move on and find inspiration in them.

Here at home, I have found myself debating myself on many things in the past several months: what is right, what is appropriate, what to do, etc. And I think Ms. Clift is correct; we must all handle these situations as is appropriate for each one of us and not hold others accountable to our personal mettle. I am sorry to ramble on and on. Ms. Clift's program gave me an opportunity to reflect and try to make sense of some things. If anything, her message and her story were therapeutic for me.