The Courage to Give. Jackie Waldman

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СКАЧАТЬ kids with homework after working all day, it made me angry. The more he did without ever complaining, the angrier I became.

      How could they have fun? Didn't they know how much pain I was in? But as soon as those questions came into my mind, I would immediately feel guilty for wanting anything but happiness for the people I loved.

      In 1992, because I wasn't able to work full-time anymore, I had to close my business and sell all the inventory.

      I had ruined an absolutely perfect life.

      Steve didn't bargain for this, I told myself over and over. Instead of wasting his time with me, he could be with an energetic, vibrant woman. Before I got sick, we loved to dance. But afterward, my legs were so weak I could barely walk without getting tired. If we did go out to a party, we never danced and we always left early. I kept thinking that he would be better off without me and that maybe I should just let him off the hook.

      All day long, terrible thoughts ran through my mind. Why doesn't Steve care about the pain and turmoil I'm in? Why does he keep telling me he loves me and that my MS doesn't matter to him? What if I have to come down the aisle at my daughter's wedding in a wheelchair? What if my family is just pretending to still love me? When they were alone with their thoughts, did my children resent me?

      I tried to get rid of these questions by looking everywhere for a cure for MS. I knew that cure was out there. It had to be. So I made it my full-time business to find it.

      I tried Chinese herbs, acupuncture, chiropractic, and protein diets. I traveled to Israel to become part of a trial study with a new drug. I'll never forget Steve meeting the drug company representative at the airport in the middle of the night. He carried the medicine home in a special container filled with dry ice. Things looked good for a few weeks, but my body rejected the drug within a month.

      Throughout everything—and no matter what I was feeling inside—I outwardly maintained a positive, cheery appearance. I made sure MS was not the focus in our home. The kids’ schoolwork, outside interests, and social calendars never suffered. When friends called, I was “fine.” When family called, I was “fine.” If people offered help, I didn't need it.

      I was even “fine” for Steve. I knew he felt my pain and devastation. But I couldn't bring myself to talk openly about my feelings with him. I didn't want to feel his pain. I just couldn't face it. I had enough of my own.

      I did have one dear friend, Dee, who understood me almost better than I understood myself. She had two rocking chairs on her front porch, and we spent many, many hours just rocking and talking. I often thought how good it was those chairs couldn't talk—they knew way too much.

      Dee never sympathized with me. She never judged my anger. Instead, she talked about Eastern religion and philosophy. And she talked about the book A Course in Miracles.

      Many days Dee made me angry with her calm, peaceful manner. I was frustrated by her daily affirmations, her quest for inner peace, her belief in God as an encompassing Source of unconditional love within each of us. I told her the philosophy was easy for her to embrace—but just wait until she suffered in some way. And that's when she told me about her childhood, about growing up with an alcoholic single mom, about being on her own by the time she was seventeen, about having faith and choosing love.

      I'd leave Dee's house thinking about how impressed I was with her courage. It didn't occur to me to think about how I could apply her philosophy to my life.

      When the movie Schindler's List came out, Dee and I went to see it. After the movie, we rocked on her porch and talked about how one person's kind act could make such a difference. By not giving in to the Nazis, Oskar Schindler saved 1,000 lives and, indirectly, all the future generations that would be born to those people.

      As Dee and I talked about the power of Schindler's kind acts, we began to brainstorm the idea of a week in Dallas celebrating the value of kindness as part of the National Random Acts of Kindness™ Month. And we decided to turn those ideas into reality. We asked Jim McCormick, a well-respected businessman in Dallas, to be the chair.

      The week of February 7-14, 1995 was a miracle. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King III, W. Deen Mohammed, and Dennis Weaver came to Dallas and spoke at kindness rallies, at schools, and at interfaith services. Under the guidance of Police Chief Ben Click, the Dallas Police Department handed out “kindness citations” that week.

      We had a kindness rally for 10,000 school children. Girls from the YWCA handed out hot chocolate to downtown workers as they left their buildings; kids with learning differences made art exhibits depicting kindness; a kindness song, “We Believe,” was written; 800 Christian, Jewish, and Muslim children heard a Sunday School lesson taught together by Martin Luther King III and Dennis Weaver; children and adult choirs sang in malls; the African American Museum held a reception in honor of kindness; and Lovers Lane United Methodist Church hosted a fifty-year celebration of the liberation of the Nazi war camps.

      Kindness was everywhere in the media—radio talk shows, television morning shows, the news, even on the front page of the Dallas Morning News. Billboards proclaiming kindness were everywhere.

      And throughout all the planning and all the activities, Dee kept reminding me to watch the miracles, to see the love, to see God. And as tired as I was, I did feel a new energy. That's what kept me going.

      When Kindness Week was over, I didn't want those good feelings to end. Since I wasn't working or doing athletics, I thought I might spend some time volunteering. So I called the Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies and trained to become a docent.

      Soon I was speaking to fifty middle school children each week when I took them on tours of the center. We stood in a boxcar—a real boxcar that had been used to transport Jews to the Nazi death camps, that had been donated to our museum—and I told them, “When you leave here, do not hate Nazis. Vow in your own heart never to be prejudiced. That's how you can make a difference.”

      During each tour, when I told them about a particular survivor who lost his parents and brothers and sister, I always started to cry—it was the man who had founded this center so that could never happen again. I left the tour each week exhausted—but feeling new energy that I had discovered. And kids wrote me letters affirming that same feeling of hope and love.

      For the very first time since my MS diagnosis, I was feeling someone else's pain and not thinking about myself.

      I liked the way I was feeling. And so I took on more volunteer jobs. Within a year, I was serving on the boards of several schools, as co-vice president of community service of the National Council of Jewish Women, as our neighborhood March of Dimes volunteer—and the list goes on. I said Yes to everyone.

      Right around that time, I happened into a used bookstore. An old copy of Wayne Dyer's book, Real Magic, caught my eye. I had never heard of Wayne Dyer, but the picture of the rainbow on the cover and the subtitle Creating Miracles in Everyday Life attracted me to the book. I grabbed it, paid for it, and went home.

      I could not believe what I was reading. Everything I had been feeling since Kindness Week was written in this book. Dyer wrote of creating real magic in your life, which he describes as those times when we can see beyond the concrete five senses and know there is more. He wrote of going within and discovering that our purpose in life is to love unconditionally and to live a life of service. He spoke about life not being a “What's in it for me” experience, but being about our spiritual selves having a human experience.

      He asked the reader to have an open mind when first learning about spirituality and to suspend disbelief. Then he talked СКАЧАТЬ