Some Much Needed Perspective....

Last night, during the film "Keepers of Memory," I had an epiphany.

Watching survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide explain how they cope with unimaginably horrific memories and loss, I finally got it. It doesn't matter whether I'm single or married, young or old, straight, gay, rich, poor, black, yellow, whatever. It doesn't matter
if I live another 40 years or another 40 minutes.

What matters is what I do with the time I have left. The Rwandan survivors who tend the stacks of skulls and bones piled in former churches where tens of thousands of people were slaughtered have decided they must accept that responsibility. Many of those bones belonged to scores of their own relatives, but it doesn't really matter does it? Those bones all belonged to someone's family. Besides, if they weren't doing that, where could they even begin to try and seek revenge?

I can't stop thinking about one woman in the film. Her entire family was shot and bludgeoned to death. She managed to survive, left for dead in the pile of carnage. She lay there for days before anyone found her. During that time, she remembers being desperately thirsty.

There was no water, but she was lying in a pool of blood. The blood of her husband, and children, and parents, and siblings. At first she took one lick. But then she started lapping at the blood. It did not quench her thirst, but she kept drinking.

That's when my epiphany hit. Suddenly, NOT having a husband didn't seem so bad, when I think of that woman drinking her husband's blood to stay alive. Suddenly, I remembered the very moment I wanted to become a writer--when I finished the last page of "The Grapes of Wrath." As I imagined the grief-stricken Rose of Sharon agreeing to nurse a dying man with breast milk that should have been for her stillborn child, THAT was the first time I ever confronted the depth of horror that being human could yield.

But it was also the first time I realized the incredible power at our disposal, the truly awe-inspiring choices we confront at various points, and how we handle them. And I remembered that if you're as lucky as I have been in my life, you can choose to focus on what you don't have, or you can choose to be grateful for what you do have, and use it to make a positive difference.

I never expected to leave that screening feeling so buoyant.