If you’ve lost a joy over a coronavirus or other premature death, what I’ve learned from a Ugandan youth organization playing football may recover.
When I arrived in Africa in the summer of 2014 to volunteer at Children of Peace Uganda (CPU), a rehabilitation center for former infantry children who escaped from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), I saw dozens of young people and teens playing football and laughing. Together. in a green meadow. “They’ll all have to be ex-infantry, ” I thought.
But I soon discovered that only a part of them were former child soldiers. The other part were young people whose relatives had been killed through the LRA, some through the very young with which they played football. I was stunned.
I approached CPU founder Jane Ekayu, a wonderful Ugandan with a dominant presence, and asked her how she had gathered the opposite sides of a war.
All those years later, I don’t forget that he smiled and said, “First, we teach the youth to forgive, because the faster they forgive, the faster they heal. For young people who have been forced to kill others, their own parents, we teach them to forgive themselves. We remind you that it was not your will. They were forced into this situation.
She continued: “For young people whose enjoyed beings have been killed before their eyes, we teach them to forgive because the perpetrators deserve forgiveness or have even asked for it, but because they, the victims, the survivors, deserve to be freed from pain.
Feeling that he had greedy problems with these noble concepts, he summoned scholars for an exercise. Holding each child with a colored balloon, he asked them to walk the grass with the horse ball between their legs. Naturally, they swayed like penguins, laughing uncontrollably. After several minutes, Jane gathered the students in a nearby classroom to unpack the exercise.
Leaning forward in her office, the young men listened intently as Jane made her way to the room.
The balloon represents the anger, bitterness and resentment you feel for what happened to you, he said. But just as it’s hard to walk with a ball between your legs, if you carry that bitterness at your center forever, it’s going to be hard to move on in life. Our bodies were not designed to contain anger, it causes them to collapse. We don’t sleep well, we don’t eat well and our intellectual and emotional states deteriorate,” Jane explained.
Eradicate dissent: Hong Kong freedom enthusiasts deserve global opposition to new red terror of the Chinese Communist Party
Jane paused and her eyes slowly roamed the room. “In time,” he whispered firmly, “you will have to renounce your wrath and forgive, for you deserve to be free.
She escorted the young men abroad and, in combination, threw their balloons.
That moment replaced me. When my mother died at the age of 58 in 2010, it was not COVID-19, but unforeseen headaches during a minor medical procedure. In the midst of an eight-year herculean war on cancer, he suddenly left. The fare doctor never apologized for his negligence, and I was bitter. Like many members of the surviving circle of relatives who suffered COVID-19, they also fed me through the guilt of being absolutely powerless to replace the result.
But seeing those young people who have suffered so much and lost the healing location in forgiveness, I learned that I too can. So I consciously forgave the doctor, the medical staff, the hospital, all those I had blamed for my mother’s death. Whether they apologized or not, irrelevant. I have also learned to forgive myself, to free myself from the guilt of damaged opportunities and promises. And in doing so, for the first time, I began to heal.
Illusion of ‘rotten apples’: like the Catholic Church, the police will have to face an abusive culture
It’s been 10 years since my mom passed away. When I of her now, I feel nothing yet immense gratitude for the possibility I had of having her as a mom.
COVID-19 is complicated for everyone, but especially ruthless for families who had to watch them die alone through a hospital window. Unable to bring a chair to bed, shake their hands and whisper “I love you” in their ear before they leave.
It’s hard not to think about all the things we just did when we lose someone we love. Especially when we cannot escort you from this global world with the dignity you so deserve. But if you might not be in the hospital room when the one you enjoyed died, forgive me. That was never your will. Let yourself be healed, for the one who has enjoyed would really need it.
There will come a time when the elastic of feelings calms down and you look through that window between you and your beloved, this temporal divide between this global and the next. Remember in those moments that each window is also a mirror, reflecting you and the fact that your well-being counts.
Just hours after my mother died, my sister gave birth to a little girl. He named it after our mother. We didn’t even have time to deal with death before life reminded us that even in a deep loss, rebirth and healing are possible.
Aviva Feuerstein has spent the last decade as a security and counterterrorism specialist in the New York Police Department, the FBI’s Joint Counter-Terrorism Task Force, the Boston Police Department, the Navy SEALs and the National Basketball Association. She graduated from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is co-chair of the Justice Defenders committee in Innocence.