When Things Fall Apart, Believe You Have the Answer
If you’ve spent any amount of time in armed conflict or war, then you are intimate with a whole range of feelings from disappointment, frustration, and anger to profound sadness. To survive requires a certain kind of emotional resilience that is built up with experience. My father told me about a situation he endured in Vietnam that would have tested anyone’s strength.
He was called one day to go on an urgent mission. He was needed to pick up injured American soldiers and two allies, who if memory serves him correctly, were Australian troops. He immediately headed north to the spot somewhere between Nha Trang and the DMZ. When he arrived, he got out of the helicopter and realized that enemy combatants were also there for pickup. The thought of taking wounded soldiers and the guys they knew had just killed some of their own on the same aircraft together seemed like a form of torture that he wanted no part of. He knew he couldn’t do it. He had heard of other pilots who faced the same dilemma and had no choice, but he was determined to keep them separate. While medics worked on the wounded, he stayed on the ground with the combatants until a second helicopter showed. He boarded the combatants on that other aircraft and sped off as fast as he could to get our own men the additional attention they needed. He told me that there were times when being in a situation like that was so traumatic for the soldiers being picked up that they had to go to the hospital to be treated for trauma more than for their physical wounds. He didn’t want that to happen to these men so he had to think quickly about how to work effectively around the challenge.
What contributes to emotional resilience is the ability to problem-solve—to find a way to lessen the pain, frustration, anger, or whatever else the experience brings up for you in that moment.
My father had also endured loss. He had survived people who were more than buddies—they were friends and brothers. He has said, “The prospect of losing such a fellow in arms is terrorizing, but the reality is worse.” In the thick of action all you can do is try to get a downed soldier to safety. If they don’t make it, you still need to keep your head in the fight. Only when you return and the adrenaline has subsided can you begin to deal with the complex and mixed emotions that follow. You are angry at the enemy, gutted by your loss, yet you’re also relieved that you made it out alive. My father told me, “As an officer you live every loss along with those you lead. If a fallen soldier was a best friend to one of your men, then he was a best friend to you too.” He explained that you have to find ways to memorialize the fallen right away. A talk that honors their life is sometimes all you can do. But you have to really speak to who that person was. Everyone wants to know they will be remembered too should it happen to them. You have to also stress the importance of moving on and getting the job done or you will be mourning more people in the end. Of course, you don’t say that, but that is the underlying message.
I hadn’t heard him speak of those events until very recently. I was sheltered from some of the realities of war. That is just not the thing you tell a young girl unless you want to worry her more about your safety.
But I was raised with a strong sense that if there is a situation that seems insurmountable to you right now, trust that there are many ways to look for and find the solutions, the words, and the reliable emotions that will help you make sense of it or at least help you cope with it.
STRONG IN THE BROKEN PLACES
My hope is that you never have to experience the pains of war, but contending with a wide range of deep emotions is an inevitable aspect of life in and out of the military. You will have some experiences that really challenge you, even if you employ all nine of my rules. There will definitely be times on your quest for success when these rules will serve as your compass, guiding you safely to higher ground. But there will also be times when you will feel very vulnerable. There may be occasions when you take some incoming fire, too. I don’t know a single person with a true fighting spirit who hasn’t had to face a trying situation head-on at some point in their journey.
It’s during these challenging times that my final rule, “When Things Fall Apart, Believe You Have the Answer,” will prove to you and everyone else that you can be tougher than military-grade steel if you have to be. This rule has the potential to be your best protection against defeat. It demands that you trust yourself in the most difficult of circumstances. It reminds you that because of all of your training—all of the developmental work you have been doing on yourself—you will come to a better understanding of the situation and your ability to weather it. Developing emotional resilience and leaning on it when times get tough is essential. Sometimes emotional resilience is a matter of temperament, but it is also a learned and practiced art.
LEARNING BY HEART
The value of this rule became clearer and clearer to me over time. As I said, emotional resilience is something that builds over many experiences. What seemed to be an ordeal when I was much younger paled in comparison to challenges later in life and certainly to the challenges my dad faced in war.
One of my earliest memories of moving quickly to address disappointment before it could stall my progress occurred during the year I was applying to colleges. In the hearts and minds of most teenagers, that’s a pretty rough time. There is a lot of pressure not just to be your best self, but to make sure all the schools you are applying to see that version of you too. Despite how intimidating the process can be, I was excited and curious to see what my future would hold.
My father had just retired from the military and he and my mom had decided to settle in California, so we headed there together to check out schools that might be a good match for my interests. I loved the East Coast, but I was clearly attracted by the West Coast weather. I had set my heart on UC Davis, Santa Cruz, or Santa Barbara, though I applied to a few other schools as well. I did my homework regarding their curriculums, their faculty, and the breadth of their extracurricular activities, thoroughly weighing the pros and cons of each school. The good news was that all of them had excellent communications programs. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write or produce yet, so having general communications skills—script or screenwriting experience—was important to me.
Once I completed my applications I was naturally anxious for the schools’ replies. I talked with my parents, as all kids do, about the impatience I was feeling. I’m not sure how the subject came up, but they were surprised to learn that I had not listed my ethnicity on the paperwork. All my friends were shocked too that I didn’t apply as a minority candidate. When I didn’t get into UC Davis I was disappointed. Although I was a good student and had very respectable SAT scores, I knew from the start that Davis was a highly competitive university. They received so many applicants each year that I suspected I might not get in. But I was still upset to receive the bad news. I wondered if not checking that box hurt my chances. I also began wondering what more I could do to sway the other schools’ decisions. My concerns engendered an interesting talk around the dinner table one night. I questioned aloud how not making a distinction about race could affect my prospects of getting into some of the other universities. When my dad asked why I didn’t identify myself as a minority candidate in the first place, I simply said, “I just don’t see myself that way.” My father’s response was very specific. I recall it almost verbatim. “If you don’t see yourself that way, it’s okay. Other people see you that way, so if you are concerned about not getting into the other schools, what you need to do is write a letter to those schools telling them all the reasons why you would be an asset. Make the best case for yourself that you can. Since you didn’t check the African American box before, you’re not going to check it in that letter either. You’re going to find a way to convince the admissions committee that you’re a great candidate no matter what.” And that is exactly what I did.
As I look back on that experience now, I realize it was a similar logic that led my dad to join the Army. In the military you are free to be yourself and to progress because of the abilities you bring to each position you seek. You can be whoever you want to be so long as you are consistently you, possess the right skills, and sell the fact that you have those skills. As you are going through the ranks of the military, you’re green above all else. You’re not brown; you’re not white. You are simply you. Your abilities are what carry you forward. Think about it: When troops walk around in camouflage, how can you tell a colonel from a lieutenant or a sergeant from a general? You tell it by their behavior and their ability to assert themselves and their leadership qualities. That’s how.
My father understood how disheartening it was to me that the color of my skin might have anything to do with my getting into school. In encouraging me to write those follow-up letters his message couldn’t be clearer: Show them your best self and let the integrity of that choice drive you to succeed on this mission and any other one you pursue in your future. Tucked into that lesson was one on emotional resilience too. When you hit a bump in the road you’ve got to figure out the best way to keep it from stopping your forward motion. In this case, that bump was disappointment that the question of race mattered at all, and concern that I might not get into a school if I didn’t do everything I could to persuade the decision-makers. That’s a heck of a lesson for a seventeen-year-old to learn.
By the way, I acted on my dad’s wisdom and wrote that letter. I was accepted to several schools after that, including UC Santa Barbara, which is where I happily spent the next four years of my life. During this process I also figured out that if you can just reach up and easily grab something, it probably doesn’t have a lot of value. Your effort has to match your purpose, your mission, and that all-important goal.
There were other times in my life, as you now know, when I acquired additional layers of emotional resilience. Reaching a career impasse that warranted me innovating around the obstacle—as I did when I developed my radio show—was one such example. Finding the resolve to stop my stalker, hold him accountable for his actions, and prevent him from doing harm to me or anyone else in the future was certainly another example. But as challenging as these experiences were, none of them was as devastating as the one that truly defined this rule.
Because this chapter is not just about the times when the roof leaks; it’s about the times when things really fall apart—when the whole house comes crashing down—allow me to tell you about a particularly overwhelming time in my life when even my father, who has dealt with so much in his days, was acquiring a new layer of emotional resilience along with me.
THE MOURNING AFTER
The date was November 21, 2016. To say that was a day when everything crumbled for me is an understatement. It was the day of my mother’s passing. Her death was so unexpected; it left my heart severed more than broken.
I now know why people use these kinds of words to describe losing somebody they love so much. Because there are so many touchstones in your existence that connect to your parents, losing a mother or a father could break your heart over and over again. Something as simple as a smell in the kitchen could do it. Or I’d be at a perfume counter weeks later when another scent I associated with my mother would trigger my deepest darkest hurts. Love sneaks up on you. It envelops you, so when someone who expresses it so freely and so often departs and you no longer hear her voice, there is a void in your life that nothing else can fill.
But despite these shared expressions and experiences of hurt and pain, what nobody ever talks about is how to actually mend your heart after loss. Time may heal it. I know that’s what people say, but it hasn’t for me, and it doesn’t for many other people, whether or not they were as close with their parents as I’ve been with mine.
Somehow, despite the depth of our losses, we still have to find and exercise the emotional resilience within us to continue living our life—the life we were put on this earth to lead until our own demise. We can’t just quit living while we are alive because someone we love is dying on us, or has died. I don’t know how other people do that, but in my case, I watched my parents’ valiant efforts to sort it out as it was happening, and tried to do the same.
Yes, my father had experience with grief in the war and was certainly conditioned by that experience to press on after loss as a matter of survival, but this was a heartache of a whole different magnitude. This was his wife, his life partner. There had been no precedent for this depth of sorrow.
Beginning on September 15, 2016, when I received that fateful call from him telling me that he had just called 911 because my mother had collapsed, I saw this man push past his own confusion and fear and immediately kick into action. My mom had told him that she was bleeding, but my dad didn’t see any blood. Noticing how quickly she was fading, he assumed the bleeding was internal. In addition to calling an ambulance he had the presence of mind to call my aunt Vanessa, who is a nurse. She assured him that she would meet him at the hospital and would know what to do. My father then called me. He sensed time was fleeting and he wanted me to know what was happening. I asked him to put the phone to my mother’s ear. I told her that I loved her and then asked if she could talk. Her response was so weak I don’t know why I did that. I should have known that if there was any breath left in her she would spend it on me. She told me she never really thought it would feel like this. She didn’t want to breathe anymore. She was so tired. Seconds later there was pounding at the door and the emergency medical team took over. But before they did, she said that she had been taking some medication and she wasn’t sure if that was the problem. Until then, I had been completely unaware that she was ill.
Things were moving at a frenetic pace. My father took back the phone and told me to reach out to my aunts and uncles.
“I love you,” he said. “I’m sorry this is happening.”
And then he hung up. I don’t know how he got out most of that information because, as it turns out, my mother was very close to death at that point and he knew it.
I was in New York and they were in Dallas but I followed my dad’s orders. When I couldn’t get through to my sister, I texted her. I then called my father’s younger brothers Tim and Ronnie. The rest of my family is spread out in Dallas Metro and while they all offered for me to stay with them, I wanted to be in a hotel close to the hospital. My father never left my mother’s bedside so he didn’t need a place, but my relatives helped locate one for me. That emergency call from my dad came on a Thursday. I caught the earliest plane I could, but with flight delays, I didn’t get there until the next afternoon.
When I walked in the room, my mother had just awakened. She was very glad to see me. The doctors had given her a lot of blood and she was starting to come around. They had also begun to give my father some further information about her condition. He didn’t immediately share it, which frustrated my sister Annissa and me. Neither of my parents told us much about their health in later life as you will recall from the story about my father’s earlier close brush with death. But because I have my own children, I understand that if you give loved ones too much information it disturbs their lives. In my end of days, if I should ever get the heads-up by even a few weeks the way my mom did, I probably will be close to the vest with what I know too. I’ll keep it to myself until I can no longer be the one disseminating that news—until it’s the doctors telling everybody what they need to know. When you love somebody and you understand the end is near, there’s no need to disrupt the rhythm and flow of things for them—especially if you helped to create those loved ones. They’re my legacy. Instead, I’m going to fill them up with what I know will help them rebound, and that’s what my mother did for me.
I stayed with my mom until Saturday night when I had to fly back home to do my Sunday night show. Then on Friday, after the last Outnumbered of the week, I hopped on a plane to Dallas again, arriving in time for dinner. I shuttled back and forth like this for three weeks. By the end of that third week, I found out that my mother had stage four lung cancer. She hadn’t divulged that information to anyone earlier because her sister Mary, whom she was very close to, had been battling stage four breast cancer at the same time and lost her life to it earlier that month. My aunt’s funeral was Friday, September 2. The last picture I have of my mom standing was in her living room as she was hosting what we call “the afterglow”—the reception following my aunt Mary’s funeral. Thirteen days later, my mother was admitted to the hospital facing the same fate.
She had a tumor resting on her lung and some sort of mass near her kidney that they couldn’t get to. The biopsy almost killed her. She didn’t wake up for a week after that. It’s a simple procedure for most people but her breathing was so labored because of that tumor, it took every ounce of energy from her. It was decided that she would undergo radiation, but surgery was out of the question. She could never withstand it. The radiation shrank the tumor a little bit, but she still needed a tracheotomy to help her breathe. She was fading away in front of our eyes. It was happening all too quickly for me. I felt like everything was just flashing by, like when you stick your head out of a car window while the car is moving—you know, how a dog does—and you can barely catch your breath. For some reason, dogs don’t mind that, but I did. I needed the fresh air to revive me but the car I was in was going one hundred miles per hour toward a destination I didn’t know.
When I was back in New York, I’d call my mother several times a day. I would just ask my dad to put the phone up next to her so I could tell her how much I loved her. She must have heard the words “I love you” more times during those few weeks than she did her entire life. We had been phone buddies ever since I went to college. She was the person I turned to regularly. The one who helped me navigate my incredibly full schedule as I got more successful—the one I always told the good news, the bad news, and the “news” news to. I mean, some of the things I’d say on TV were thoughts I’d run past her first—especially if there was something the magnitude of a Ferguson, Missouri, happening.
I definitely thought of her after Charlottesville, Virginia. It seems as if a lot of the bigger news events of the past few years had taken us backward in time to decades before I was alive. Heck, we were having the kinds of conversations about race in America after the news about Trayvon Martin broke that we hadn’t had in this country since the 1940s. People were talking about it on TV, in their homes, at the gas station, and everywhere else. President Obama said, “Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago.”
I remember some of my mom’s white friends were upset. They felt as if the whole world was comparing them to what they called “the kinds of white people who just don’t care.” Of course, the irony, as my mom and I discussed, is that the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin and was acquitted of second-degree murder was part Hispanic. George Zimmerman’s mother was reportedly from Peru originally and is believed to have some African lineage, so he might have understood more about the idiosyncrasies of being a minority than anyone ever considered. I brought this up on the air with a couple of guests. One was George Zimmerman’s brother; the other was Reverend Jesse Jackson. It was amid the national protests and dialogue surrounding the case. I observed that the biggest issue was how people were talking past one another. They were not seeing each other as individuals.
My mom had a way of breaking things down. She didn’t even know what a producer does, and she certainly was not a content driver anywhere. Nevertheless, she was great at prompting me to see every single person for who they are individually, coming into an event. She always reminded me to make who they are matter, not just because of what they did at the event, but because of her belief that they were there for a reason. She would say, “If God wanted you to be someplace else, He’d put you there.” She felt that way about everybody, even people making horrendous mistakes. Now follow her thinking on this with me: “Yes, we have free choice according to the Bible,” she’d say. “But in a split second, God can move you if He so chooses. You may have willed yourself to be in that spot, but more likely something pulled you there—some point of destiny got you there. So what lesson were you put there to learn? The mistake most people make is that they see themselves as the higher power in those moments when the big decisions are to be made. Instead of letting the Divine guide their next step, they act on their own rash instincts.”
She’d tell me again and again that I always have the ability to pray and listen for the answers in a calm and still position—that there are always answers that will come to you at those critical moments. She also reminded me of a line I say all the time on television, “You play like you practice.” So in those split-seconds when you react impulsively—when you might be tempted to pick up a gun—if you have practiced greater control and awareness and have a connection with the Lord, what will likely come quickly to your mind is a more peaceable way to respond. She would say, “You only need to practice one thing all the other times of your life, and that is to be pure of heart, so that when life calls on you to learn a lesson, when life puts you in a position to make a difficult decision, the one you make will be one you can live with because it comes from a good place.”
My mom was the queen of my inner circle. I loved those conversations with her and I was already beginning to miss them. Saying, “I love you” over and over again was the deepest expression of my gratitude for those talks when they could no longer be had.
On Thursday, November 10, when I returned to Dallas again, my dad was a soldier with a battle plan. He was determined to find a hospice facility. We had all made the decision together a few days earlier. My mother had been part of that process as much as she could be. So my sister and I were deployed to find just the right one from a list of several places. When Mom was sedated, we scooped Dad up to show him the final selections. He liked one place more than the others and said that he wanted her moved there the very next day. I couldn’t quite figure out the timing of it all. It seemed rushed. But I assumed it was a military thing—once a soldier comes up with a solid plan he wastes no time executing it.
The next morning, before moving Mom into hospice, I was reading Scriptures to her. The TV was playing softly in the background. My show Outnumbered was on. She saw somebody else in my seat but she didn’t have the little piece you insert in your trach tube to help you talk, so she pointed and mouthed, “Why are you here?” When I told her I wanted to spend time with her, her lips moved again, “I’m not dead yet,” she replied. Then she reached around and finally found that missing piece and said, “My journey is not your journey. Trust me, when your time comes it will be hell too. Wait your turn.” God, I can barely repeat those words. “Wait your turn,” she said to me. “I built you to take it. You’ll say goodbye. You’ll be fine,” she continued. “I’ll still be with you if you let me. You have what it takes when this falls apart. You do. I have to make sure you believe that.”
Those words were more than she had said in all the combined weeks she spent in the hospital. And boy did I feel their intensity. Then she began to cough. That cough racked her body from head to toe. It hurt her so bad that it hurt me. I ran to get a nurse, but when I reached the hallway it was as if all the lights went out. I was crashing. With very heavy steps, I made it to the nurses’ station. By then, they were already mobilized to get to her room because they heard that awful cough too. They told me to stay out and I did. My dad and my uncles Tim and Ronnie had gone down to the break room for just a second. My father never left the hospital so they were trying to convince him to go home to rest and take a shower, but the best they could do was to get him to walk around a little bit. The nurses got Mom stabilized before they returned and told me that she needed to sleep. I just stayed in the room holding her hand as she dozed off. Every now and then she would open her eyes and smile the most heart-permeating, proud-mom smile you could imagine.
The next morning we were moving her according to Dad’s plan. As the ambulance took my mom from the hospital she had been in for several weeks to another hospital-like setting where we knew she’d never leave, I noticed that there were flags waving in the breeze out front. It was odd that I hadn’t seen them the day before. I have to say that when someone you love is about to pass away, your concentration tends to be totally focused on that person, but I still didn’t understand how I could have missed that detail earlier. And then it occurred to me. You know why she had to move into the facility on that day? Because it was Veteran’s Day! November 11, 2016. That Friday, Dad wanted her on her way for a reason. My parents were like two warriors in a bunker planning every move. Although Mom was sedated throughout the day, she apparently had some clarity at night, and that’s when they’d talk. They had chosen this facility because it was the only one that would allow Dad to stay with her, and they had chosen this move date for what were now obvious motives.
Her suite at the hospice was beautiful. It was like a small apartment, but without a kitchen. What it had instead was an awesome veranda and a set of gorgeous French double doors that led to a courtyard. My dad wheeled my mom out there to sit in the sun. The place was big enough for our family members—my eleven cousins and my aunts and uncles who lived in the Dallas metro area—to come and visit. My aunts are truly amazing. They all arrived with flowers and food. Aunt Vanessa, who is my uncle Tim’s wife and also the person who guided my dad through those harrowing moments after calling 911, was there. My mom’s sisters Aunt Maxine and Aunt Ruby were too. They are such funny women. They fight all the time but they can’t live without each other. We already missed the presence of my aunt Mary. Her nickname was Pig because she squealed with laughter at everything—I really longed for her joy that day. I sure could have used it. But my dad was a true soldier. He was determined to keep us positive and focused on the mission. He told us that it was important to live in the moment and to fulfill any desire that Mom had. She liked ice cream, but as a diabetic the nurses at the hospital wouldn’t let her have it. Here the rules were different so we let her know that she could eat it to her heart’s content, and we made plenty of it available to her, though by that time, she had no appetite and could barely tolerate water.
After that day, I had to make one more trip back to New York. In the time I spent so far saying goodbye to my mother, I had realized how unsustainable a six-day workweek was. I had asked for some time off from the Sunday night show right after the day I discovered it was stage four cancer we were dealing with, but I knew some additional choices in my life still needed to be revisited. I was really grateful to work at a place that valued me and was so considerate of the journey I was currently on. I was also very moved by all the flowers, notes, e-mails, and text messages my coworkers sent. They were, each and every one of them, a blessing.
But what my mom was helping me to discover there in Dallas is that we have more time than we think and we have less time too. We have more time to complain and do things like shop because they take less energy. But we also have less time to love and to be engaged in relationships of all kinds with others because those are major commitments. When you grumble about stuff or go for a little retail therapy, it doesn’t require a lot of brainpower. It doesn’t consume a lot of energy. It doesn’t take much creativity either. But when you’re raising a family and you need to be at a gymnastics meet or you need to be at a soccer game or you need to just give the other parent a break because they’ve earned it too—when you need to be present in your marriage, in your interactions as a daughter, sister, and friend—that level of energy is different. It’s electric. It’s life-burning energy. You can’t just give that away. It is intended to be spent on those who matter and those who will appreciate it the most. I love what I do and am grateful that everybody in my family gave me a pass for three years to be gone every Sunday through Friday—and sometimes Saturday too if news broke on that seventh day as well. But I owed it to the family that I love so much to restore some greater balance—to allocate energies differently. I was going to work for another week before returning to Dallas for us all to spend Thanksgiving together. After that, I would come up with a plan.
Before I left, though, I caught sight of a notebook by my mother’s bedside. It contained the rest of my father’s plan. He called it a “going home plan.” It was filled with notes about a military spouse burial to be held after my mother’s funeral. He was talking to people at Dallas Fort Worth National Cemetery—a vast military memorial park in Arlington, Texas. It made perfect sense. The military had always grounded our family. We always relied on our military principles. Of course, the military would be behind us as we faced our greatest headwind—the hardship of life leaving us.
While it gave me comfort to know that my dad was leaning in for support from his A-team—the Army—something about that notebook nagged at my heart. To this day, I’m not sure what it was, but I believe in God so I suspect it was His Divine Grace at work. Tony, the girls, and I were scheduled to arrive back in Dallas on a Wednesday but because of that nagging feeling, I changed our tickets and flew back on Monday, November 21, instead. My mother passed just three hours after my plane landed. I was able to see her and be with her right up until midnight when the undertaker came to pick up her body. I would not have been there if I didn’t have that tug on my heartstrings.
From that point forward, my father, sister, and I shifted into high gear. We were unstoppable forces. The pastor at the funeral home said he never saw anybody plan something so big so fast in his whole career and that man was just over seventy years of age, I’m certain. The funeral was a funeral. It was sad, although we did sing a rousing rendition of “This Little Light of Mine” that I led. I didn’t know that I remembered the words until I started singing spontaneously at the end of the eulogy I had given. We all had big smiles on our faces because my mother loved gospel and she loved that song, though we sing it a little bit differently. It’s got some backbone to it when we do it. By the time of the second service—the spousal burial held at the top of a very tall hillside at the center of the cemetery—there was a gentle wind blowing even though there was still warmth to the Texas air. The skies had opened up and delivered a severe thunderstorm hours before we were set to lay Mom to rest there. Just the closest of family were present at this ceremony led by a military veteran who introduced my father to give my mother his final salute. My dad stood at my mother’s casket and that’s when we heard these words for the first time, “I have led so many into battle. I have hoped to return so many times, and in each moment, I knew that I had the greatest soldier I have ever known on my side. I salute you, Shirley Temple Harris. I will love you forever.”
There are two things I have come to know for sure after this journey. The first is that my father and mother were each other’s most trusted special forces. My father reminded us of that when he made certain that my mother began her journey to the other side in hospice care on Veteran’s Day and concluded it with this military spouse burial in a most sacred and amazing place they chose together. My sister and I may not have been privy to their late-night conversations at the time this was all thought out, but the essence of those conversations was being revealed now. My parents had not just prepared a funeral; they had prepared a message. It was one of love, but it had a tone of discipline to it. They saw our last weeks together as an opportunity to gain a renewed spirit and understanding about how precious life is. They wanted the experience to change us because it was one worth changing for. They wanted us to know that we only grow in one direction. No one gets to go backward. Learning to bounce forward is critical. They wanted us to understand that the same values that carry us through this world will carry us into the next. My mother would be okay in that world and we would eventually be okay in this one. While things most definitely fell apart for me during that difficult time, therein was the answer as to how to move on. How to be resilient. How to survive.
Some weeks later I decided that I would try to talk about the experience. I wanted to find some meaningful channel for my grief, for my own sake and the sake of anyone else who has ever felt so bereft. I was scheduled to give a speech so I broached the subject then. I told the members of the audience gathered there:
When things fall apart we really do have the mechanisms—the resilience—to “bounce forward.” I’ve always disliked the phrase “bounce back.” I mean really, who wants to go backward? Things are never going to be the same. Whatever it was that got you to this point is still going to happen, but now you’ll have the forecast of it happening, which could technically make it more difficult to overcome and survive because, of course, you can’t change the past. I guess you could only relive it. But who would want to do that? Even when times in the past were glorious, they still led to this point right here. The time in between isn’t any longer, any richer, any deeper. Knowing that the end is coming might make it worse, so the goal is always to bounce forward.
The speech helped because what I realized in writing it was that this sentiment really wasn’t mine alone. My parents had put those thoughts in my mind and heart during my time of shock and sadness when they became actual examples of bouncing forward themselves.
Sometime in the future, or maybe even right now, you may feel your world crumbling too. Perhaps that’s why you gravitated to this book. It may be due to the loss of a job. It may be because you or someone you love is also waging war against a disease. You may be picking up the pieces of your home after a natural disaster. You may be involved in a divorce. Or maybe you’re the person in a marriage who really doesn’t want to give up. Whatever it is, if it feels like everything is falling apart, please heed the message of my mother’s last days and believe that you really do have the answers. My greatest lesson about overcoming hardship did not come from a famous general or battle, but rather from the end to her journey. This wise woman, who lived most of her adult life in that rare space between the military and civilian worlds, had a clear enough perspective to see that whenever you are grappling with loss and it feels as if the fire has left you, that is the time to remember what you were fighting for to begin with: Life. Reclaim it. Rethink it. Rebuild it. Make it the best life it can be no matter what the circumstances. We only grow in one direction. No one gets to go backward. The part about bouncing forward is critical.
BUILDING YOUR EMOTIONAL FOUNDATION
As it turns out, I wrote this chapter on the one-year anniversary of my mother’s passing, so I am still learning ways to bounce forward. Collecting wisdom from my early life with her and my father for this book is just one of those ways. Recalling now how she told me that she built me to be able to withstand her death, I know that what she meant is she and my father tried to teach me lessons that would make me emotionally resilient. So those are the types of exercises we will focus on here. With a stronger emotional foundation, the hope is that we will all be better able to move forward meaningfully when things fall apart.
As I said earlier, disappointment and grief are sure to visit us all. At some point each of us will lose the personal rock we leaned on most. We are lucky to have had them in our lives, but the strength we cultivate before as well as after our loss is what will make all the difference in how we ultimately cope.
As always, let’s start out with a few questions:
Have you ever faced a difficult challenge and been surprised that you got through it? If so, what inner resources did you rely on? It can be helpful to take inventory of all the strengths you’ve forgotten about or didn’t even realize you have. You may not consider yourself the most organized person, for instance, but if that skill kicked in and played a part in powering you through your prior difficult situation, then you know that ability is available to you, but it has to be developed further.
Some experts say that to build any kind of resilience you should take on new challenges that enable you to grow in those areas where growth is needed most. It’s good to try new things that require you to invest more of your emotional, mental, and/or physical self. Doing so helps you stretch beyond your present capacity. It is also better to acquire the skills that contribute to mental and emotional strength in a situation of your choosing than in a crisis situation. Once that strength takes hold it will be there for you when you need it again. For example, as a journalist anchoring my first newscasts in Greenville, North Carolina, I would challenge myself to be as familiar as possible with the teleprompter copy before a show. TV journalists usually review copy in advance, but I went beyond that reviewing process so I would anchor much more of the show without a teleprompter. It was terrifying to go without that safety net. I was already nervous enough just being on camera! But it was worth working through that fear. To this day some of my mentors, who are now my peers at the network level, praise me for being a strong ad-libber. My ability to extemporize derives from learning very early on not to depend on what is in front of me even if it was already carefully written and prepared. The teleprompter copy provides a little backup for me, but I don’t rely on it completely. I have the ability to know a story well enough to tell it without that help, which means when breaking news happens it’s natural for me to ad-lib.
If you are in a challenging situation right now, can you name the emotions you are feeling? Are any of them fear or worry? If so, bear in mind that in this instance they may be your enemy because they have the potential to keep you from dealing with your crisis. Once you recognize them as such, there is no way you will join forces with them. And if they can’t join forces with you, they can’t control you. This is the best of military thinking for sure.
With these distractions out of your way, try to visualize the outcome you are hoping for, no matter how difficult it may seem to achieve. From where you are standing at this moment to the point of attaining your goal, how many steps do you count? What are those steps? How many of them seem doable? Focus on the ones you have identified as possible. This will put energy in motion and move you closer to your goal. Focusing on the positive sets your mind in only one direction at a time—the direction that gets you to your destination. If you are consumed by thoughts of all the things that could go wrong, that is the course your brain will take instead. You don’t want to do that. Negative thinking will only get you lost. It serves no purpose on this mission.
Now that you’ve disengaged the parts of your mind that could get in your way and you have actively engaged the parts that are primed for success in facing and overcoming your challenge, you have to call in your special forces. Who has the skills to help you tackle the obstacles you know you can’t? Bear in mind that bringing in a support team does not mean you are any less resilient; it just means you are resourceful. Assign everyone his or her role and act in unison.
If your optimism wanes at any point during this process, it helps to remember the others you may be doing this for. I set goals for myself, but I also bear in mind how much of what I do might benefit my family. When my girls get to see their mom persist and live out her dreams, they will believe anything is possible too. Somehow seeing the big picture sends a message to my subconscious: “Dig deep. There are more people than just me counting on you.”
When you emerge from the challenge having succeeded, you will have acquired more emotional resilience than you had before. If you were up against ginormous odds and you only got by with better-than-hoped-for results instead of full victory, take heart because you will have gained much from the effort. Many people who have helped loved ones survive cancer for years more, months more, weeks more, or even days more than their prognosis indicated have felt greater peace for the added time they had with each other. The outcome was inevitable but the emotional resilience they maintained helped everyone involved to make the most of those moments together.
While I wish you a life of peace and joy, I hope this advice helps fortify you for the times when things do fall apart.