My classroom was dark when I returned to it a year ago this week for the first time in more than a month. In many ways it may have been too early to return to work. But I could not face sitting in an empty house staring at the walls. And our students–some of whom saw us as substitute parents or an aunt and uncle they were very close to–had been without us long enough.
My journalism and AP students were already in the room. They had fashioned a giant “WELCOME HOME” sign at the front of the room lit by illegal Christmas lights. It stayed there until June–and I left it there to welcome my replacement to the spirit of the place.
That day–and the week
that followed–were filled with small blessings that reminded me of the power of unconditional love in the world. It was a subtext of so much that Jane and I did–and attempted to do–during the course of our careers. That week I lived on what we had sown.
But, in retrospect, we had lived for many weeks–both of us–on the power of unconditional love. It had showered down on us from the day Jane’s doctor first said, “I think you have liver cancer,” continued as we met the and forged friendships with the specialists and surgeons and nurses and technicians who gradually became central fixtures in our lives, and was reinforced and extended by the friends who went out of their way to visit–bringing Jane’s father and sister with them.
“In 900 years, I have never met anyone before who was not important,” the Doctor says in the most recent incarnation of Dr. Who. The implication is the person he is talking to believes himself to be unimportant. And the truth is that everyone is important. Every action has an impact–for good or ill–on someone or something. When we act within the framework of unconditional love those impacts are more likely to be good than ill. None of us is perfect–we forget what we should do periodically and do the wrong thing at the wrong time. And we have to forgive ourselves–and others–when that happens.
I have been blessed this year-and-a-half with endless amounts of patience and unconditional love from those around me. At times my own pain and stupidity has overwhelmed my ability to repay some of you in kind. I will try to be better.
What we do here, I hope, will help to generate a cure and greater awareness of this disease. But equally important, I hope it will help me to rekindle that flame of unconditional love that both of our lives were based on–and spread that love to everyone I encounter in the time that remains.
Jane will not come back to us if we do this. “What’s done is done and cannot be undone,” to quote Shakespeare. Unconditional love does not seek reward. Instead, it seeks the greater good–and the greater joy.
