Change, Masks & Humankindness

How many Presbyterians does it take (you may have heard this one) to change a light bulb??

C-H-A-N-G-E???

I get to repeat this, having been a Presbyterian for about sixty years and being intimately familiar with our reflex opposition to change. However. The global changes of the past 14 or so months have given an entirely new meaning to things like the trauma of switching a word in some obscure hymn.

With the baby steps we are now taking into the New Normal, some of it looks pretty abnormal. We – I, at least –  created an interim sort-of normal and adjusted to it for a year. Wasn’t that normal? But now it does not feel normal to do normal stuff because we declared it not-doable for all those months of the old normal. 

The #1 case in point is the Mask Issue. Early on, I found masks to be a giant bother: hot in the sunshine, uncomfortable oftentimes, and impossible when trying to communicate with someone hard of hearing. Not to mention the regular panic over having forgotten the mask when already a half-mile out on a walk or – heaven forbid – about to enter a Walgreen’s. In my building, one could be sent unceremoniously back to one’s apartment if unmasked in any public space, although eating and drinking were indeed allowed once public spaces opened up. But still, masks remain the rule. They can be quirky, funny, political, decorative; Brian the concierge quickly turned them into fashion statements by appearing in matching mask and tie sets (he has five in all.)

But now. The CDC says it’s fine for the fully vaccinated to go maskless outdoors. Some governors agree. Some governors are thinking it over. Some governors still think Donald Trump is president and everything is a hoax anyway: virus, masks, vaccine, you name it, it’s all just a hoax, 580,000+ U.S. dead people notwithstanding.

There’s only one universal truth:

We need to be VERY kind to one another. We’re all on the same planet, and in the U.S. that includes people who are going to keep wearing masks for a very long time and people who absolutely refused to wear masks and now are more or less validated. And definitely unmasked.

Recently, while walking in a super-trendy area of San Francisco, about a mile from my home (which is in a good but hardly trendy area itself) I had my mask hung over my left ear while eating an ice cream bar. I was overtaken – within a few feet, certainly not a proper social distance – by an attractive, well-dressed white man who appeared to be in his 50s or early 60s. He was fit, maskless – and angry. As he strode alongside we both slowed (or, he slowed to match my already-slow pace) and he glared into my eyes.

“I thought we don’t have to wear masks outdoors,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, with a disarming smile that did not disarm him, “I just keep mine handy, in case I want to go into a store or something.”

“Ridiculous,” he said, as he began to walk ahead. Which was my clue to let it drop. But still seeking to disarm I added, “Maybe we’ll all avoid getting the flu!”

“The hell with it,” he threw back over his shoulder. “I’m getting the flu. I’ve had it with this expletive, expletive, expletive.”

So much for friendly passages.

I worry about the fact that this guy and thousands with similar sentiments and temperaments will continue to co-exist (and walk the streets) with mild-mannered sorts like myself. I think we need to find ways to avoid both shouting expletives and making inane comments that provoke others to shout expletives. Could we plaster the country with posters to this effect:

AHOY, MASK-WEARERS: You haven’t been vaccinated, and are being extraordinarily considerate of the rest of us. You have compromised immune systems and must be super cautious. You have terrible cold sores disfiguring your mouth. Thank you for wearing that mask!

AHOY, ALL UNMASKED : Happy to see your smile. Isn’t it lovely to emerge from the dark days. Thank you for being fully vaccinated which I’m sure is true.

TO EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE: Let’s just cut each other a LOT of slack until the world turns fully right-side-up again.

Remaining masked doesn’t have to mean I’m a snob, or a Democrat, or a generally bad person. Being unmasked doesn’t have to mean I’m a threat to your health, or a Republican, or a generally bad person. Several billion masks have been manufactured or created since early 2020 and it’s going to take a long, long time for them to go away.

In the interim, maybe we could take a collective deep breath. And try smiling.   

Downsizing: The incredible lightness of being

Photo by Ann Nekr on Pexels.com

On moving from a four-story, century-old Edwardian into a 1600-sq-ft condo eight years ago I wrote a lengthy feature for the local newspaper (The New Fillmore, May 13, 2013) titled “Lessons Learned from Downsizing.” It drew editorial applause and a bunch of affirmative comments. But it seems not to have sunk in all that well.

I am back in the downsizing business. This time around it is partly a matter of trying to get organized, but despite the donating/tossing/selling/shredding activities of 2013 I am once again (or still) overwhelmed with Stuff. You don’t have to be a Marie Kondo drop-out to know how quickly Stuff can overwhelm. (I applaud every KonMari success story out there, but frankly never got past Step One.)

Here is the Big Truth: downsizing is good for the soul. Whether it’s moving from a 4-story Edwardian into a 3-room condo or reducing a tall pile of photo albums into one small box, there is a lightness akin to joy in the afterglow.

Photo by Max Vakhtbovych on Pexels.com

Looking back on it, there was some pretty good advice in my 2013 article. But as it ran to something over 5,000 words I’ll spare you the whole thing. (Digital copy on request.) I itemized its wisdom in eight lessons learned, which included: Treasures are your enemy; and The Fast-Disposal Plan: put it on the sidewalk with a large sign taped to it reading FREE. Also, even eight years ago much of what is cluttering up the planet (and our lives) could be digitized and made to disappear.

Downsizing is probably good for the soul at any age. What’s your teenager going to do with that wall of blue ribbons from hockey games or dressage events? Maybe one Little League trophy could be representative of the other 57 after the other 57 go to the Goodwill? Or wherever the trophies of our youth go to die. And that, of course is the other half of the Big Truth: wherever our souls go when we leave planet earth, our Stuff remains.

Award-winning (multiple major awards at that) author Ann Patchett confirmed my theory of the Big Truth – this writer uses any crafty means of mentioning herself and Ann Patchett in the same sentence – in a recent, reflective article in The New Yorker. Letting go of an old manual typewriter was particularly problematic for Patchett, as it was for me. She had several more of these treasures than I, and solved the problem by keeping two that had maximum meaning and giving another to a delighted eight-year-old. I solved mine by giving Pearl the Pert Pink Portable to my daughter, in whose family room it is respectfully, somewhat regally, displayed. Although Pearl will live forever in my heart for getting me through college and launched into my literary career, she is undoubtedly happier on display in a room of constant socialization than on my dark closet shelf. (Patchett noted the tendency to anthropomorphize our treasures.)

Back to the issue of departing souls and remaining Stuff. “I was starting to get rid of my possessions, at least the useless ones, because possessions stood between me and death,” Patchett writes. “They didn’t protect me from death, but they created a barrier in my understanding, like layers of bubble wrap, so that instead of thinking about what was coming and the beauty that was here now I was thinking about the piles of shiny trinkets I’d accumulated.”

Pearl the Pert Pink Portable

Disposing of the shiny trinkets, along with the ancient documents and the favorite jeans from the 1980s and the shelf of folded paper bags – there’s an unwritten law about getting rid of paper bags that came bearing bottles of wine or small gifts? – and even beloved manual typewriters is a liberating act. If the disposer has begun to realize that he or she may, in fact, die some day, it is liberating to the extreme. With every drawer-cleaning comes lightness.

I may die? Worse things have happened. At least no one will have to curse my ghost while clearing out this junky drawer.

When my beloved mother-in-law died I remember flying to Detroit with a sense of dread about dealing with her house and the trappings of 93 years. My husband was her sole survivor. But nobody had had to tell Isabel Johns to downsize. We would find in a drawer one carefully folded, tissue-wrapped sweater. In a closet, perhaps several dresses and two pairs of shoes. In the pantry, the barest minimum of canned goods and a broom clipped to the door. There were no mysterious piles of documents and receipts, no dusty boxes of unidentified photos, no collections of sermons written by her Methodist preacher husband of fifty-plus years – worthy though a few of the hundreds might have been. In lieu of Stuff, Isabel left only the enduring memories of a life well lived. And a lightness in the afterglow.

This essay appeared earlier on Medium.com

The Beauty of Storytelling

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

 “There is no greater agony,” wrote Maya Angelou, “than bearing an untold story inside you.” Over the past, agonizing year, more than a few of us tackled our inner agony by telling our stories. Not for fame or fortune, just for the joy of telling that untold story. 

Everybody has a story. This is an argument for storytelling, along with a few suggestions about how to tell your own.

I have just finished (you might have figured something like this was coming) a collection of stories for my children and grandchildren, thanks to the help and persistence of an interesting website called StoryWorth.com. This is a totally unpaid plug. Other sites may also be great, among them StoryCatcher, StoryCorps, Ancestry and MyHeritage.com; I just happen to have landed with StoryWorth and haven’t tried the others. Consider this anecdotal – but enthusiastic.

My enterprising daughter purchased – with my advance consent (an important detail) – a StoryWorth account for me over a year ago; that’s how long I’ve been working on this project. In the end there is now a collection of stories – as close to a family history as this family will come – about their parents and grandparents. But it is also about great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles, far-flung cousins; cities and towns; quirks and foibles that inhabit the past. I would have given all my worldly goods for someone to StoryWorth my own grandparents.

How to start? The value of enrolling in a program of some sort is that the storyteller gets both guidance and a constant nudge. StoryWorth sent a weekly question such as ‘What were your grandparents like?’ or ‘How did you get your first job?’ or ‘What did you read as a child?’ When I later realized I could write my own questions I invited my children to submit their own. Surprise, they didn’t send any softballs. How about ‘What was the biggest challenge you faced growing up?’ ‘How did you handle it?’ But questions and nudges help get stories told; the challenges thing is in my collection.

Stories need not be just for families. Every cause you support, every job you’ve done or place you’ve lived weaves itself into history, just as all of us become a part of history in the process of passing through. And history is nothing but a collection of stories.

Storytelling also may just be good for the soul; what’s good for the story might be balm for the teller.

Among young people, storytelling is the great introductory ploy. It’s the way high school students break the ice, the way nonprofits build community among their supporters; in my MFA program (University of San Francisco, Class of 2000) we spent the summer session writing an autobiographical narrative – telling our stories – that launched us, both individually and as a community of writers, into the semi-rarefied atmosphere of graduate study.

In senior communities, encouraging people to tell their stories is increasingly seen as a way to bring meaning – and joy – into often lonely lives. For those not inclined to type their stories there is a growing supply of voice recorder apps, and there is the old-fashioned tape recorder which can record stories that then can be digitized. So it seems one is never too old (and seldom too young) to benefit from telling one’s story.  

Today looks like a good time to start.

Some Assembly Required

Confronting the task

It is the phrase that strikes fear in the heart of every parent of young children on Christmas Eve. Similarly, it raises the blood pressure of anyone over 60 (and this writer is wayyy over 60) in anticipation. Some Assembly Required.

The effort is launched

I have a very beautiful little 30” Baby Balsam Fir with LED Lights Christmas Tree now happily decorating my 7th floor balcony. Should you be in San Francisco, I hope you’ll drive down Post Street and admire it. But in order to appreciate it fully you need its story – a story not unlike the countless stories of parents everywhere faced with toys to be put together at midnight on Christmas Eve.

My daughter Sandy, a parent herself and someone with both great familial love and an interior designer sensibility, cannot handle the idea of her mother not having a Christmas tree. No matter that I’m 2000 miles away on another coast. And we’re in a pandemic forheavenssakes, who am I going to be entertaining? It’s Christmas, and Mom should have a Christmas tree.

Roquel to the rescue

It only took one glimpse into the box containing my carefully wrapped 30” Baby Balsam Fir with LED Lights Christmas Tree to convince me this was going to require help. So I closed the box and went for a long walk. On return I invited three 7th floor neighbors in my geezer house over for cocktails and (by the way) help assembling my Christmas tree. (All three are Jewish but compassionate.) Lois and Arthur declined cocktails or even a cup of comforting tea; Joel, knowing I don’t drink and not trusting my faux wine cellar, brought a fancy rum something he’d fixed at his place.

For about 20 minutes – a token amount of time, any parent of a 6-year-old will acknowledge – Lois and Joel and I deal with the initial Assembly and Care instructions. Remove tree stand, tree sections, and Welcome Kit from box(es), and identify the total number of sections of your tree. Joel has left his untouched drink across the room, but is probably beginning to be glad he brought it. Arthur, being already in his 90s (the rest of us aren’t quite there yet) has been exempted from active duty and assigned the position of assistant photographer. 

Eventually we work our way to the battery part. (By this time Lois is uttering a few bad words, Joel is drinking and Arthur is saying he knows from nothing about iPhones.) We persevere. Push the locking hooks away from the battery box and gently (Joel and I had different interpretations of the word ‘gently’) lift the battery box away from the base. Please mind the electrical cord attached to the battery box and base.

Progress

Do you have any batteries?” The second phrase any parent fears: Batteries Not Included. Joel went back to his apartment and produced several requisite AAA batteries for the something-or-other. For a while we proceeded nicely. Connect the male plug from the tree to the female sockets from the burlap base, secure the connection by fastening the lock nut. Well, we may be geezers but we’re still humanoids. The connection didn’t work (draw your own conclusions.) Maybe, suggested someone, your D batteries are a little out of date. Well, they did say “Best if used before November 1994,” but who am I to throw things away?

Enter the #1 advantage to living in a Senior Facility, especially The Carlisle, San Francisco. I called the Front Desk. “Lian,” I said in my sweetest helpless-resident voice, “is there any chance we might have, anywhere (by now it’s about 7 PM) two D batteries I could beg, borrow or steal?”

Well hallelujah. Not only did Lian find two D batteries, but the utterly brilliant (and way over-qualified; we’re likely to lose her soon) Activities Director Roquel happened to be still hanging around. We are saved, I realized, Roquel is here. There was unanimous applause when we burst into the room.

Here is the final truism of all Some Assembly Required/ Batteries Not Included reality: EVERYthing will be teeny tiny. The instructions, the assembledges (think male plugs and female sockets) the whole catastrophe. But then we find we know someone in a brand new generation, with delicate fingers that still work and a refusal to be daunted by anything digital or mechanical. (There are few daunting issues with computers that stump Lian or Roquel.)

City tree with city lights

Good friends to laugh with, young friends to fix things, there is hope for the world. Which is good, since the whole world now requires assembly.

Until then, I submit my tree.



And, as Tiny Tim so presciently put it:
God bless us, every one.

The Humankindness Revolution

It might be the people along protest march routes handing out bottled water to perfect strangers. It might be the people cheering healthcare workers. Or the guy piping a tune on his bagpipe from his urban rooftop every night at sundown for 100 days. “And nobody complained,” he remarked after calling it quits when he ran out of tunes. Or it could be my long-married gay friends who sponsored a persecuted young man seeking asylum and are caring for him “as the son we never had” in their small apartment while trying to guide him along the complex road to safety in the Land of the Free. But these and a zillion other small instances point to the same large truth:

Kindness is making a comeback. I believe it will become an integral piece of what emerges as our New Normal.

If that happens, it’ll be thanks to a lot of people already hard at work to make it so. Over at randomacts.org they are out to “conquer the world one random act of kindness at a time” – in case you think kindness-building has no lofty goals. The Random Acts people are in the business of fostering “small acts of kindness, such as inspiring someone to buy a stranger a cup of coffee, to much bigger acts of kindness like building a school in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua.” If you have a really good idea for a randomly kind act, they will even help you out with some funding to make it happen. (Or you can go fund them so they can fund more kindness.)

And then there is Kindness.org, which I discovered the old-fashioned way: by Googling the word. If you Google humankindness – which is what I really wanted to write about – you’ll find that word has been co-opted by Dignity Health. Dignity re-branded itself not long ago from Catholic Healthcare West. It is kind to its patients unless they want contraception, an abortion or legal Medical Aid In Dying. Full disclosure: I believe in contraception, reproductive choice and legal MAID, denial of which seem unkind to me. But back to Kindness.org, where they believe that kindness matters more than ever.

The kind folks over at Kindness.org have actually analyzed it all. Looking at 259 kindness stories posted on their site – good reading if you’re feeling low – they started with creating a definition: “Kindness is the act of doing something beneficial to someone (often at a cost to oneself) with an accompanying emotionally positive motivation.” That builds on the dictionary definition of kindness as “the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.” The kindness I believe will be part of our New Normal is going to be both quality and action, so I’m going with both definitions. Among those 259 kindness stories were discovered things like: about an even split between planned and spontaneous acts; or, people were kind for a variety of reasons – they wanted to help or make someone feel better; and it made them feel better to be kind. They also found that fully 76% of those acts involved kindness to strangers. If this isn’t enough to start a kindness revolution – concurrent with the other simultaneous revolutions for good that are now underway – I don’t know what it

You can learn more about the endeavors of the Kindness.org people on their kindlab blog, right here on Medium. And if you need scholarly proof of the incipient kindness revolution I offer the following;

My friend Steve Heilig, a distinguished public health professional, editor and environmentalist among other things, recently published a weighty article titled On Radical Uncertainty and Silver Linings in a Post-Truth Pandemic. It’s a thorough examination of the triple crises currently facing our battered planet: the coronavirus pandemic, racial unrest and the whole “post-truth” business, all of which currently involve more dark clouds than silver linings. But even in the experience of a deep-thinking ethicist/editor, the kindness movement crops up:

“On a more personal level,” Heilig writes at the article’s conclusion, “I have been heartened by countless smaller, local, human gestures, from spontaneous neighborhood helping circles assisting the most vulnerable, to lines to donate blood and to volunteer at food banks, to support for those in need financially, and more, including more efforts at “correcting” misinformation. There are actions that we all can take in our own realms and spheres of influence.”

Welcome to the kindness bandwagon.

This essay appeared earlier on Medium.com, a fine site for ideas and inspiration you may want to visit.

Talking Peace in Turbulent Times

FEMINIST FOREIGN POLICY vs NUCLEAR WEAPONS

nuclear-bomb-explosion2

We began with a little deep breathing and the day’s mantra: I am a powerful being; I am a peaceful being. Not a bad way to begin a day. Or a discussion, for that matter. This particular discussion was initiated by one of my all-time favorite nonprofits, Ploughshares Fund. Check it out. When I get invited to anything Ploughshares I tend to accept.

The event was a Women’s Initiative Sunday Brunch with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Beatrice Fihn. Fihn is director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN,) which won the Nobel in 2017 for its work. That year 122 countries adopted the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. If you haven’t been following all this, to date 37 countries have ratified the treaty; once that number reaches 50 it becomes international law.

Notably absent from any such ratification list, of course, is the USA. And don’t hold your breath for Russia to sign. The U.S. and Russia together have about 90% of the current supply of nuclear weapons – say, 6,000+ or so each. It will only take a handful to blow up the planet.

It was against the background of the above that we started Sunday brunch with the powerful/ peaceful mantra.

Fihn was in conversation – via Zoom from her living room in Geneva – with Elizabeth Warner, Ploughshares’ Managing Director & Chief Development Officer. Asked how she got into the business of fighting for nuclear disarmament, Fihn said it was “kind of accidental. I was interested in justice, equality, human rights, women’s rights . . . And then I did an internship on nuclear weapons – and realized nuclear weapons are connected to all of these.”Nuclear explosion behind statue

The conversation quickly brought in Feminist Foreign Policy, an alternative to ‘male’ policies reliant on strength and threat – the “humiliate and dominate” approach to relationships personal and international alike that is currently popular. “I’m not one of those people who think women are more peaceful than men,” Fihn remarked. But the ‘softer’ approach – creating security for everyone through healthcare, education, gender equality etc – can be equally effective, she and Warner agreed.

About this treaty to ban nuclear weapons – which supporters, including this writer, believe will eventually gain the magic 50 ratifications and become law: Warner explained there is a three-step process required. First the government signs on, then necessary adjustments are made, then the treaty is ratified. To the obvious next question, “How much does it matter, really?” Fihn explained that “the idea behind (international law) is to create a new normal. We’ve done it with biological weapons and chemical weapons, and inspired the land mines treaty.” This writer well remembers an uncle who was gassed in World War I and never fully recovered; a world without chemical weapons brings solace. Imagining a world without nuclear weapons definitely brings peace.

After a crisis – climate disaster, pandemic, nuclear warfare – “Who cleans up the mess?” Fihn asked; and answered her own question: “Those people who make the least wages.” As this pandemic is making clear, she added, “those who really save us, in addition to the doctors and nurses, are the people who bring food and water,” and all the other service workers.

Warner pointed out that with other global threats – climate change, pandemics – the effect is felt, and then action is taken. But with nuclear weapons, once the effect is felt “it’s too late.”

Asked what gives her hope, Fihn said, “We’re at a point where women have more power, including women of color. More and more people are questioning the powerful. There are also growing calls for justice and anti-racism.” Plus, we’re only 14 countries away from having nuclear weapons be declared in violation of international law.

A final, hopeful note about the Sunday Brunch hosts: As of May 2020, the Ploughshares Fund Women’s Initiative had invested more than half a million dollars in 23 projects focused specifically on the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the nuclear field. Highlighting the interconnectedness of nuclear weapons, women’s rights and other social justice issues is a powerful way to speed us toward a nuclear-free planet.

Sun thru clouds

 

Which is a peaceful thought.

 

 

dove of peace

 

 

This essay appeared first on Medium.com, a fine site for ideas and information that I’ve been writing for in recent months. You might want to check it out too.

Human Rights: Maybe We Can All Agree?

UDHR - Logo         You don’t really have to be as old as I am to remember the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You could, in fact, be brand new – and it’s still worth your time to revisit. The UDHR is based on the premise that every person is born free and equal in dignity and rights. Remember that quaint idea? The United States, thanks to its being a part of the United Nations, is party to the UDHR – even if some days it seems we might be shrinking the parameters down from ‘every person’ to, say, every white male (possibly female) citizen who agrees with my politics.

Sigh.

I admit to having had not the first thought about the UDHR for a decade or more. But I was reminded of it recently over breakfast in Washington DC with my remarkable friend Ally McKinney Timm. Timm is founder and Director of DC-based Justice Revival, a Christian ministry that “seeks to respond to the divine call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” While this space generally stays away from any focus on specific faith communities, it’s hard to argue with Justice Revival’s commitment. And since Timm left me with a pocket copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (she’ll send you one on request) it seemed a good time to enlighten anyone who’s interested in that good document.Justice Revival logo.jpg

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world. It was unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on December 10, 1948. It is, Timm explains, “aspirational” rather than a treaty which has the force of law. (The U.S. has so far joined only three of the nine treaties adopted by the U.N. and awaiting ratification – but that’s another story.) As a member state of the United Nations, here are, in order, the first fifteen of the thirty articles of the UDHR – to which we Americans, along with our fellow members of humankind, aspire:

Right to equality

Freedom from Discrimination

Right to Life, Liberty and Personal Security

Freedom from Slavery

Freedom from Torture and Degrading Treatment

Right to Recognition as a Person before the Law

Right to Equality before the Law

Right to Remedy for Violations of Rights

Freedom from Arbitrary Arrest and Exile

Right to Fair Public Hearing

Right to be Considered Innocent until Proven Guilty

Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence

Right to Free Movement in and out of Own Country

Right to Asylum in other Countries from Persecution

Right to a Nationality and the Freedom to Change Nationalities

UDHR - Eleanor
Eleanor Roosevelt with the UDHR

There are more. I particularly like Article 19, Freedom of Opinion and Information. It maintains we should be able to “hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” They hadn’t heard about Facebook in 1948, but at least these Declaration writers were trying. And I have to love Article 24, the Right to Rest and Leisure, because who would’ve thought, in 1948, that rest and leisure would be in short supply 70+ years later.

Maybe you’re ready to join the Human Rights Movement? One good way to learn about it is through Human Rights Educators USA, an excellent nonprofit founded in 2011.  Or you can order your very own free pocket copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from Ally McKinney Timm at Justice Revival, who is definitely part of the movement.

 

international-peace-dove

 

 

Paying New Year’s Blessings Forward

noah & zahraIn a new year with meanness and cruelty on the news every day, there are counter forces at work. Here is my favorite Pay-It-Forward story so far for 2019. It involves my lovely friend Eva Zimmerman, who agreed to let me to share it. Eva and her husband, Noah Schreck, welcomed their first child, daughter Zahra, into the world last spring. But the exuberant joy they were having was interrupted by Noah’s diagnosis of colon cancer, requiring surgery in December.

On January 2, Eva posted this story (lightly edited here) on Facebook.

“Noah is home! He has a lot more healing and resting (and eating) to do to get back to his old self and Zahra is being super helpful by screaming and screeching at a newly-discovered ear piercing volume, constantly. We’ll readjust and recalibrate and make this work. We’re thankful to be together.

“We are so fortunate to have so much support. Meals waiting on the porch, welcome signs and ice cream delivered, childcare, and just the love and prayer that we’ve felt this entire time… Thank you, all.eva, noah, zahra

“As I was leaving the hospital with all of Noah’s belongings, taking everything to the car to load it and go pick him up in the patient loading zone, I stood watching a beautiful young black couple comforting each other as they were waiting for the parking lot elevator. The elevator opened, she entered, he motioned for me to go ahead of him, he held the door open for me. As we stood there, heading to the same parking lot floor, he wished me a Happy New Year. I told him that it truly was a Happy New Year, that I was taking my husband home today after almost two weeks in the hospital.

“The woman said, ‘Our son will be here for the next two weeks.’ I told her I hoped he’d be home soon, healthy. She said, ‘Hoping for soon and cancer-free.’ I told her, ‘My husband is leaving today, cancer-free.’ She said, ‘This is why he’s here, they are doing surgery to remove his cancer.’ I told her that this is exactly why my husband has been here, they got it, they got the cancer, and he’s leaving today cancer-free. She and I held hands and I said, ‘I’m sending the blessing to you all now. It’s with you now.’ As we walked to our cars, she told her husband of the chills that went through her and simultaneously, they went through me.noah & zahra1 Though incredibly hard, we’ve been protected through this, because of you all. I gave that protection and blessing back to another family just as we left. It was a moment I’ll never forget. I don’t know their name. But as I write this, I’m watching Noah sleep next to me, and I’m thinking of them, envisioning their son home safe, soon and cancer-free.”

Take that, meanness.