Dying and Living

This week I found out that my good friend from high school died suddenly of unusual complications from the flu. Laura Lee Carter Myers was one of the bubbliest, most positive people I ever knew. Homecoming queen, parents’ pride and joy, mother of two young daughters, beloved high school teacher, talented baton twirler, Sunday school leader, loving wife, woman of faith. She was 37. My age.

I’ve been thinking about Laura a lot. I’ve thought about how it had been a year since I’d been in touch with her and how I should have written to her again. I’ve thought about her husband and the grief he must feel without the love of his life. Mostly, I’ve thought about her two little girls.

It’s hard to imagine a young girl not having her mother to talk to when her body starts to change. Or going to her high school and college graduations and hoping that mom would have been proud. It’s sad to think of her wedding day without a mother to check her makeup and reassure her before she walks down the aisle. I think about her being denied that magical moment of watching her own baby lie in the arms of the one who gave birth to her. I imagine a future generation of grandchildren who would never know their grandmother.

Then, as is the self-centered nature of humans when we are reminded of death, I thought about my own mortality.

I do not fear death, not really. I have believed in God my whole life, and I am secure in my belief that beyond this life lies a better, more complete one. I believe in letting people die with dignity and not being selfish about wanting to hold them here in this life when God has different plans. But when I became a mother, I also gave birth to a lurking anxiety about ever leaving my own children motherless. The thought of not being there for them is too much to bear.

And yet yesterday I had a small “aha” moment. Like most of my epiphanies, it is something that I somehow knew all along but had not yet brought to consciousness. It is this: If I am doing my job as a mother, although my children would miss me, they should actually be okay without me when I die.

Don’t worry. I don’t plan on going anywhere just yet. I love my life and I have a lot more living to do. But it’s like the philosophy that I’ve had about teaching for years, that a great teacher should become less and less necessary as she shares her knowledge. A secure, mature teacher knows that it doesn’t really matter what students think of her. What matters is what they think of themselves as a result of what she taught them. It’s not about teaching kids facts. It’s about teaching them the why, how and so what about those facts, and even more importantly, how to learn for themselves.

So it should go with motherhood. If I am raising secure, confident, able children, they should become more independent every day. I love that the German word for independence is “unabhängig” or “not hanging on.” But in order for them not to hang on me, I also can’t hold them back. I have to let go. I have to let them fail to learn those hard life lessons. I have to teach them self-care, mentally, spiritually and physically. I have to guide their choices but let them make them. If my daughter wants to leave the house dressed in plaids mixed with florals, it is okay. It is not about me. If my son wants to learn to cut his apple with a sharp knife, I should teach him instead of telling him to wait until he’s older. My kids should learn to play alone sometimes instead of needing me for every game, book, puzzle or art project they want to do. I need to not seem so indispensible.

I have to fight the part of me that wants to hang on to their babyhood, to do for them, to protect them from every nick, scrape, and disappointment. It’s also important that I not avoid the hard questions they ask. I look back and realize times when my weakness caused me to evade being totally truthful with them. Like, when we left the cat in America when we moved to Germany, we never should have agreed to an open-ended arrangement in which the cat’s caretaker could keep her or send her to us, “whichever worked out best.” It was easier to say, “we’ll see” than to be forthright and say that it was just too hard on our very nervous cat to fly her here. We didn’t want to be the bad guys breaking the bad news. That was a mistake and a disservice to the kids.

Kids are so much braver than adults sometimes. I am amazed at how fearlessly they chatter around in German, not worrying about whether the verb goes on the end or if a noun has the right article. In the time it takes them to plunge in and forge a new friendship in the park, I am still on the bench trying to formulate the perfect sentence in my head to speak to the mother.

I don’t want them to inherit my insecurities. I believe that insecurity is truly the root of all evil. So many atrocities are committed by people who are confused about who they are and don’t believe in their own worth. Because of low self-esteem, bullies hit, great novels don’t get written, cruel words lash out, wars start, the cosmetics industry thrives, dreams wither. Insecurity causes us to overeat, overspend, over-commit, and overload. Being insecure means not enjoying the pool because we look too fat in a swimsuit. It means eating a steak that is too rare just because we don’t want to make a scene in a restaurant. It means not saying “no” because we fear not being accepted. And it means not speaking up or speaking out for fear of confrontation.

Secure people are happy people. They don’t steal because they realize that all is God’s anyway and are grateful for what they have. Secure people know who they are and where they belong. They are people who don’t need to start fights to prove themselves. They are people who find strength within instead of looking for it in drugs, alcohol, sex or money. They are kind people who value all persons because they know their own value is neither more nor less than anyone else’s. Secure people are not afraid to ask for what they need, to fight for the oppressed, or to demand justice. They are in control of themselves and their own impulses and don’t try to control everyone around them.

So what does all of this have to do with Laura? Well, her death shocked me into the realization that I have wasted too many years living in fear for myself and my children. Faith in God and in ourselves means freedom to try and fail and still know that we are loved and worthy. That is so hard to believe sometimes. But then I think about how deeply and unconditionally I love my children and I realize how that is exactly how God loves us and how we are supposed to love ourselves. And they can’t learn that from me if I don’t show them.

So it is time to take some baby steps back to myself. Somewhere inside me is still a teacher, a writer, a lover, a dreamer. If I dig deep and let go of the fear that I won’t be liked or loved or approved of, maybe I can live a little before I die. As my five-year-old son said to me recently, “We get a little bit deader every day, and then one day we die.” That may be true. But I’d rather spend my life every day than to save it for a rainy day that may never come.

See www.kwtx.com for Laura's story: Sudden Death Of Popular Teacher Stuns Students, Friends And Colleagues