Who's to Judge?

 

Unlived Life

“One of the greatest sins is the unlived life, not to allow yourself to become the chief executive of the project you call your life, to have reverence always for the immensity that is inside you.”

John O’Donohue (Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World)

          My mother would have been 97 years old two days ago. I always judged her life. I always wondered why she didn’t claim some of it for herself. I believed her to be a victim of fate. Now I know that all three were wrong—which is what I get for judging the life of another, even my mother.

          My mother married young, right out of high school, and was on her honeymoon the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. That threw the world into chaos on both sides of the planet, so my father shipped out to the Pacific a year later. By then, Mother had a baby—three-months old Jerrie. From that time until her death in 2007, she trod the path of service to family; with my younger sister, Missy, having Cerebral Palsy, she did not leave child-rearing for fifty-one years. Even though Mother was smart, she never seemed to crave an outlet for her intellectual curiosity. She would regularly beat me, with my advanced degrees, in Scrabble, worked crossword puzzles like a mad woman, and read every book she could lay hands on until her last weeks of life. I remember straining to push her wheelchair up a ramp in the Marion Public Library so she could peruse the shelves of mystery writers for her favorites.

          Somehow, I thought of all this as sad—why did she not do something with all that intelligence? Why was she so content to be contained and constrained without complaint? I have now had time (12 years) to step back and recalibrate my relationship to my mother. Who am I to say she did nothing with her life? Who am I to say she was a victim of anything? Was she not the “chief executive of the project she called her life?” She chose a life of service—if not to exactly to the greater good, then to one small household of human beings, and to Missy, specifically. In that, she was unflinching.

I suspect that I will have to live many lifetimes to become as good-hearted as my mother. Also, I’ve come to realize that being good-hearted IS the goal—not over-achieving, not making a fortune, not establishing a name for oneself—just being kind and caring. That is what life calls us to. That is our soul work. All the rest is window dressing.

                                        In the Spirit,

                                        Jane