Reflections on my mother's passing

Personal loss is never easy and as we continue living, we continue to be incomplete in some way. During my last moments in my mother's living presence, morning light was streaming in through the window as I stroked her hair and hoped that she knew I was there.  At her funeral the next week, I could barely speak.  But others spoke comforting words of great eloquence, and sang the music she loved. My nephew Tyler, now a strapping athletic young man, spoke tenderly of his childhood memories, and many hours spent with his grandmother. My brother, a PhD student in mathematics, mentioned her love for education. Many people spoke of how she had touched their lives as a teacher.  This brought on intense reflection of how she impacted these and many more lives, like ripples in a pond, including my own humble efforts in that direction.

Through random coincidence, on the same day that my mother passed away, another person died under quite different circumstances.  In Libya, close to the end of a brutal struggle that tore his country apart and cost thousands of lives, the former dictator was found hiding in a drainpipe, and quickly killed.  Over a period of 42 years, many people sacrificed their lives in resistance to his brutality.  In a cruel reversal of the spread of good will by the acts and lives of kind people, the ripples of violence, brutality and deferred dreams spread throughout his country, the region, and the world.  In contrast to my mother's 80 years, many of the lives that were lost were quite young, including many children in neighborhoods that had been attacked with deadly military hardware.  But the healing began even before Gaddafi was killed, in areas that were free of his rule. People started broadcasting opinions and even entire languages that had been forbidden. Even as the last vestiges of fear were broken down, people in other parts of the word drew hope from the successes of the Libyans.  But much needs to be done. There is still a great deal of cruelty and oppression in the world, especially in Syria at the moment. My own personal losses, as real as they are to me, seem insignificant by comparison.

May the collective power of all of the compassion and good work of people like my parents and grandparents, the good people of Libya, and others all over the world outweigh the evil, and may we go forward in hope and peace. For the rest of my life, I will hold the examples of my parents, grandparents, and my other teachers in my mind for ongoing inspiration. As Sophocles' Antigone spoke in his play from so long ago, "it is the dead, not the living, who make the longest demands."