Lessons learned

When it was announced last year that Teddy Kennedy had a malignant brain tumor, I was very saddened. I know the man was far from perfect, but something about his spirit has always resonated with me. Faced with an assortment of adversities in his life, he just kept on, and that sort of endurance really spoke to me.

Just now, I have read an excerpt of Ted Kennedy's autobiography, which I understand will be released in the next few days. I think he writes very well. His language speaks to the heart of the matter and I found myself drawn particularly to this statement about the time when he was told he had only months to live, at best.

"I am a realist, and I have heard bad news in my life. I don't expect or need to be treated with kid gloves. But I do believe in hope. And I believe that approaching adversity with a positive attitude at least gives you a chance for success. Approaching it with a defeatist attitude predestines the outcome: defeat. And a defeatist's attitude is just not in my DNA."

It was in that paragraph that I realized what I had found so appealing about the man all these years. I agreed with every word he wrote.

There's something else that he wrote that resonated with me profoundly, too.

"When I sit at the front porch of our Cape Cod house, in the sunshine and sea-freshened air, I think of them (my family) often...I remember how each of us, distinct and autonomous from one another though we were, melded wholeheartedly into a family; a self-contained universe of love and deepest truths that could not be comprehended by the outside world."

I have had the very same thoughts about my own little family. Each of us, so very different from one another in a multitude of ways can come together at our round table at the end of the day to experience the sustenance of 'belonging'. The love we share and the respect we hold for one another is deep and true.

It is my hope and expectation that each of my children will carry that sense of a "self-contained universe of love and respect" with them wherever they may go in the world and however old they grow.

A sense of hope. A sense of belonging. The world has not really changed all that much in some ways. What was important then is still just as important today.