There are moments when things feel almost right. Moments when we’re with the right people at the right place. Even then, in picture perfect scenes, the shadows of a twisted reality creep across our path.
Yesterday, we met a home educating family at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library for fun and exploring in the snow. Snowball fights, storytelling, nature appreciation, and my sons’ love of getting away from the grown ups ruled the children’s day.
We’ve been friends for years and probably share more common interests with them than any other family I know. The kids love each other, I’ve played innumerable hours of soccer with the dad, and the mom has been one of my best spiritual and emotional supports in widowhood.
The mom and I walked and talked at a healthy distance from our rabblerousers and couldn’t seem to stay off of sad topics. My recent breakup, wrestling with depression, the aggravations of Zoom school (they are educationally diverse), and the unreality we are experiencing.
We only saw another dozen or so people during hours in the thousand-acre expanse, but they were mostly masked. Couples, hundreds of yards from other humans, walking along with their faces covered. There was no breeze and the sun was brilliantly warming, although the air was chill. It’s troubling and scary that this behaviour is being normalized. This particular oddity of covering our skin from the vitamin D-producing sunlight our bodies so desperately need to stay healthy is worrisome. We’ve known for months that vitmin D deficiency is rampant in hospitalizations. It is difficult to get the necessary exposure to sun in the winter, why are we covering our faces?
I take heart in the example we’re setting for our children. We teach them that health and freedom are not mutually exclusive. We teach them that health is an individual responsibility. We teach them that you must first care for yourself before you can be able to care for others. More importantly, we model these principles in our own words and actions.
In March of this year, just as the world was turning to fear and I watched fellow Christians recede from one another, I had the opportunity to help a homeless family. The mom wasn’t feeling well and needed to be seen by a doctor. Her children and mine piled into my minivan and we headed to an urgent care in heavy morning rain. It wasn’t open yet, so she asked to go to the bus stop to get to a hospital. She wasn’t in need of emergency care, but that was her only option. I almost dropped them off at the bus stop, but thought better of it. I insisted on driving her to the hospital and she begrudgingly acquiesced, her pride was worn from little sleep and respiratory distress.
I didn’t think about being in danger. I didn’t think I was putting my children in harm’s way. It felt much more dangerous to walk away, or leave them at a bus stop.
Later, I Iearned that she had a strep infection. My wife and sons had suffered strep infections two years previous and she didn’t survive. Maybe we survived in order to help that mom. I don’t know.
I don’t know why we’re hiding from each other now. Maybe people need the illusion of safety and security to go about their lives. I don’t ever remember being blinded by that lie, but going through tragedy has stripped away the delusion that existence isn’t integrally bounded by suffering.
Today, I’m going to do my best to accept neccessary suffering and work to relieve unnecessary suffering in myself and others.
