To call everything that happened concerning Beckett last year a learning experience is an enormous understatement.  I had never experienced the death of a close family member, so to lose my own son was going from one extreme to the other.  I have learned so many things in the wake of his death, but the lessons started with his diagnosis.  Many are things you would guess at-that you should be grateful for the good things that you have, that bad things happen to everyone, that you cannot control everything-but one of my favorite lessons, a silver lining if you will, is that I really, truly, like myself.

That isn’t to say that I had a sense of self-loathing before.  I didn’t.  But I hadn’t been tested by the fire yet so to speak.  I am a flawed human being in many ways.  I am a terrible gossip.  I have sometimes unfairly high expectations for my friends and family members.  I can be cruel and cutting with my words.  But under the traits I am less proud of are so many that I am.  I am an incredible mother.  I am resilient.  I am smart and capable.  I didn’t run from the fight.  It has been a beautiful experience to look straight in to my core and love who I see there.  The brokenness is extensive.  It’s everywhere.  And some of the cracks are going to last a lifetime.  But I love them too.

I often reflected on the many heroic parents living in the hospital alongside me.  Beckett was one of hundreds of children living in the hospital.  And not just any hospital but one filled with the sickest of the sick.  The general areas of which were constantly filled kids who were cancer patients, or had painful physical abnormalities, or iv poles attached to their little red wagons.  And with these beautiful warriors were my counterparts.  Parents, with the sickly look of someone living out of a hospital room.  People with unwashed hair and clothes, with faces aged by stressful days and sleepless nights.  Living the nightmare I was, I still often came out of the cafeteria with a sense of “at least that isn’t happening to my baby.”

Having been surrounded by these people, I can attest to something I truly believe.  That anyone can be this good.  That the worst circumstances can bring out the best in a person.  I was often applauded as doing something others would tell me “they could never do.”  But oh, you could.  And you would.  So many have and so many will.  I would have lived in that hospital for the rest of my life to spend it with the child I joyfully created and desperately wanted.  And that isn’t something spectacular.  It is the nature of a person who knows what it is to love. 

This was my truest test as a human being, and while it wasn’t so simple as a pass or a fail, I feel my response was gallant.  I realized a few weeks after Beckett’s death that I am filled with remarkable traits, and that I am so proud to be who I am.  I hope I am not presenting an air of presumption.  My intention rather is to bring you in to the fold.  To encourage you to look within and love the person you see too.  I am searching the universe for truths, which is much like sifting through the sands of the earth for pearls.  But this truth is one I made within myself.  That fate is not governed by a single source, because what happened to my child and to our family was undeserved.  But that the importance of karma is to believe in it within yourself, because believing in it alone makes you a better person.  Do not rely on outward powers to hold you to a higher standard.  Rely on your own moral compass.  Worrying about cosmic balance in and of itself proves that you are a good person.  Because you know there is one.  There is no true karma but the karma we make for the world.  And if you are concerned about yours, you are already ahead of the game.  You are already making the difference.  I really like myself.  And I really like you too.