A week ago, my gran passed away. The news numbed me, although it probably shouldn’t have.
She was 95 years old, and, as a family friend eloquently put it, in reality the better part of her had left us a while ago. She suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease.
As I reflected on her life, I became frustrated, thinking of the curveballs that life can throw at us; that a fit, charitable woman could succumb to a disease that would deplete her memory. I’ll admit, my frustrations got the better of me, but not for long.
During that same week, a 21-year-old white supremacist entered a Charleston church and shot and killed nine African-American church-goers, an incident that US President Barack Obama described as an ‘act of terror’. Closer to home, the municipal speaker of the ZF Mgcawu district died from burn wounds after she was set alight, and two children died in Joburg’s CBD after inhaling smoke when the building which they were sleeping in caught alight.
Such tragedies could bring adversity, just as the man accused of the Charleston shooting allegedly aimed to start a race war by his act, but instead, the community united.
Family members of the victims publicly forgave the accused and Obama empathised with the community, starting the church parish off in song to the words of Amazing Grace at the funeral of the pastor who was killed in the shooting.
As I watched the Charleston community react to the tragedy with forgiveness, empathy and openness, the words of Robert Muller came to mind, “What the world needs most is openness: open hearts, open doors, open eyes, open minds, open ears, open souls.”
I recognised that surely we can all learn to have the capacity to embrace these qualities in the face of adversity, no matter how big or small; far-reaching or personal.
