Choosing to Be Happy

I talked with a woman who said something interesting.  She said, "If you met my mother, you would know within five minutes that her mother died when she was five." 

I found this interesting because my mother's mother had died when she was five.

She used to talk about it to me, mostly because I asked questions.  I asked myself, "Would she divulge this information to someone within five minutes?"  I couldn't imagine it.

My mother was not someone who went around complaining.  In the midst of a trial, she would count her blessings.  "It's a good thing the car broke down at that point in our trip instead of later, because. . ." she could see some blessing that she might have missed otherwise.  Even when my dad, her best friend for over fifty years, suddenly died, she was saying, "I'm so blessed!  I'm so blessed!"  She was reflecting on how he would have hated to be ill or suffer.

My mother had an uplifting attitude.  She looked for and saw the good in everyone, so people all loved her.

Yet, my mother was no stranger to adversity.

I can scarcely imagine how she bore the pain of her young life.

When she was three, her mother became ill.  She was more or less ill from then on.  My mother was the youngest of eight children.  There were plenty of people around to take care of her, but there is nobody else quite like a mother.

As far as I can tell, her mother died a slow death in a bed in the dining room of the home.  My mother and the other small children had not been allowed to see her for some time, except to peer at her from the doorway.  Although her mother was probably only a few feet away from her when she died, she did not get to say goodbye.

I've been through the death of my mother.  But I did not have to go through it at age five.

Even as a little girl, I tried to comprehend this tragedy.  "How did you ever stop crying?" I remember asking her.

She smiled softly.  "I just eventually did," she said.  "People were kind to me."

The year she was nine, however, was even worse.  First, her grandmother died, then a beloved sister.  My mother herself was burned in a fire that fall and had third degree burns on her arms and upper torso.  She wasn't expected to live, so the doctor let one arm grow to her side.  He had sprayed her with an acid that formed a thick crust on her wounds.  When her father became convinced that this doctor was doing her no good and insisted on moving her to another hospital, the doctor, in anger, ripped the crust off her healing skin and wrapped her in gauze.  My mother remembers the nurses at the new hospital weeping as they tried to remove the gauze from her raw flesh.

She spent four months in the hospital and required skin graft surgeries, which also left her legs scarred.  She was bashful about her scarred limbs for years.  One month after she finally left the hospital--and six days before her next birthday--her father also died.  Her grandfather died a few weeks later.

She grew up an orphan then, raised by her remaining older sisters.  She was so ill with pneumonia, that she had to be sent away from her family for two winters so that she would survive.

She came back from California two years ahead of her class, mortified to think that anyone might find out her age.  She graduated from high school at barely sixteen and would have liked to be a doctor, but there was no money for that.  For a girl, it would have been almost unheard of, anyway, in those days.

So often, I hear or read complaints from people about how others are trying to make them miserable or are ruining their lives.  Or that life itself is unfair.  I have been guilty of this at times, myself.

My mother chose to be happy.  She was never rich. She only attended one semester of college.  No one outside of her neighborhood or family ever heard of her. 

She married young and worked hard.  She was kind and faithful.  She was tactful and truthful.  She loved much and was much loved.  She had everyone's respect.  She set humble life goals, centered around her children and what she hoped for them.  She met them all.

No matter what happened to her, she chose to be happy.