Choose Hope
Editor’s Note: We previously noted in a column that we hungered for positive contributions about people whose lives are inspirations to us. We thank Sarah Cooper, and The Forum, the quarterly publication of Mothers and More, in which this article was copyrighted in the May issue, for sharing this first place essay. Sarah is the daughter of Jane and Dan Schaffer of San Diego. If other readers have positive stories to tell about the people in their lives, we urge them to share them.
By Sarah Cooper
My mom, Jane, is the last person I thought would get brain cancer young, at 61. She seemed indomitable, a road warrior on a mission. As a high school English teacher, she wanted to prepare students to tackle freshman composition in college, largely to make up for her failing grade in English when she was 18. After raising the essay scores of students in her school, she developed a nationally known writing program and incorporated her own business, in which she gave writing workshops for English teachers and published curriculum guides. Until three years ago, airports were nothing to her. When I went to college on the East Coast, she frequently flew out to meet me “on the way home” from a workshop in Dallas or Chicago—and home was in San Diego.
Along the way, she let me, her only child, watch TV at midnight during a bout of junior high insomnia,cajoled me into writing seven drafts of my college application essay, and cooked me over-easy eggs and toast for dinner. My own children are still little, but already I’m making my older son eggs and toast after school, buttered just as she did, and trying to say “Really? What do you think about that?”rather than ask too many invasive questions when I pick him up from kindergarten. Already I sense her seemingly laissez-faire yet critically observant eye in my motherhood persona.
Although my mom retired from daily teaching in 2001, giving a farewell speech at graduation in which she spoke of classrooms as “an oasis in adolescence, islands filled with rigorous academics andrelentless caring,” a year ago she had the chance to return to this oasis when she helped some friends teach AP English literature at her old school. The students called her “Mama Jane” and wrote her a poem, in sestina form, as tribute. During part of the year, my mom got chemo treatments on Thursday and returned to the classroom on Friday. She wrote up three-page lesson guides and sent them on to me, a middle school English teacher, so I could see her mind grinding through ideas. Last summer, buoyed by her recent teaching experience, she did her first writing workshop in years for a school that already knew her. Last October, she gathered several members of her “brain trust,” a group of people she hired to do workshop presentations, to brainstorm about her writing program for two days. Watching her—as she has continued to teach teachers, high school students, and her own grandsons—there is no room for me to despair.
Although I’ve always been pretty driven, I used to find it easier to take time to do nothing, to watchTV, to fritter away a couple of hours. Now I feel as if every minute must count. The clichés about seizing the day pile up because they are so true. We don’t know, any of us, how long we’ll be here. I also have less patience when dealing with people posturing about unimportant issues. “Cut the crap,” I think in my least charitable moments. “My mom has brain cancer. What’s your excuse?” And this tough-girl stance has changed my mom’s and my relationship. I used to complain to her about my worries, the slings and arrows that crossed my path each day. Our meals and shopping trips together used to be a litany of how my life could best be analyzed and scrutinized. Now the conversation is more give and take.
Aside from watching their physical pain, this must be hardest thing about a parent’s becoming ill: You say a final goodbye to your childhood, no matter if you’ve long inhabited adulthood. I feel healthier, more mature for it. I am more stalwart with my own family, more supportive for my parents, more unflappable at work—but at the same time, there’s still a part of me that wants to be taken care of by my mom. It’s been a while since she’s held me and said, “It’ll be OK. It’ll be OK.” Because, you know,it probably won’t. She will fight this scourge as much as anyone on earth can—friends have sent her Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” because she epitomizes the poem’s theme—but eventually, like all of us, she will die. And it likely will be sooner than my child or young adult self would have hoped or imagined. But in the meantime, I’ll be damned if I don’t choose hope over despair, each minute I am awake, to do honor to her take-no-prisoners, awe-inspiring, kick-ass example.
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Sarah Cooper has been a member of Pasadena, CA Chapter 252 of Mothers & More for three years and is grateful to Mothers & More for introducing her to such dynamic women and important issues. She lives near Los Angeles with her husband and two young sons, Noah and Sam. Last year Sarah published a book on teaching, Making History Mine: Meaningful Connections for Grades 5-9.
An editor’s call for letters of another kind
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – There are times when I would prefer not to open my e-mail. So often it seems that the only people really motivated to write are those with some axe to grind.
These include a vociferous minority of Jews who seem to hate all Arabs and Muslims, and a smaller, but equally strident, minority of our people who take any opportunity to denounce Christians. As we refuse to run on our news site generic attacks on any group of people, these messages all are consigned to the trash, where they belong.
I find myself fantasizing at times that our e-mailbag will be filled with positive letters from people who want to write about the mentors in their lives who have motivated them to do good. How I would love to read—and to re-publish—letters and commentaries about those people whose lives were spent in service to others, and especially those who dedicated themselves to making peace between rivals.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, instead of clenching our jaws in anger as we read some missive, we could nod with appreciative understanding and admiration? Wouldn’t you like to read about people whose lives exemplify the highest aspirations—rather than the lowest emotions—of humanity?
I don’t believe that we will preserve and enhance Jewish life simply by being more militant than our adversaries. While there are short-term P-R gains to be made by counter-picketing and having questioners ready to contradict biased academic panels discussing the Middle East, our longer term goals will be served by publicizing not what we are against, but what we are for.
I believe that we Jews, as a people, must continuously articulate for ourselves standards of goodness that we can take pride in upholding, and core beliefs that others, upon reflection, will consider worth emulating.
One such belief is that every human being deserves to be treated with dignity, and that when we debase or dehumanize others, we undercut our own humanity. The great singer Aretha Franklin had it right, what people need and want is r-e-s-p-e-c-t, and we ought to give it to them, all of them.
I’d like to invite our readers to write to us about the people in their lives who have been positive influences on them, who exemplified values worth upholding, and who could benefit the world if only more people would profit by their positive examples.
Let’s discuss and refine our appreciation for the good. Please consider sharing with us stories about the people for whom you have r-e-s-p-e-c-t, and why!
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World