Grandma Henke

I am not an expert on adversity, but I feel qualified to talk about it.   I worked for 25 years helping people who have cognitive disabilities … they never give up.    I spent many years working closely with Native Americans on reservations and saw the prejudice they have dealt with.    I have a son who had a head injury as a child and saw him eventually triumph.   Depression runs in our family and I and at least three of my five children have dealt with it.         My husband went to Vietnam for a year when my two youngest children were small.   The month after he left I had a miscarriage.     I have an auto immune disease that causes me pain.   I helped my mother through Alzheimer’s.   I could go on … but you get the picture.   There is adversity involved in living and none of us are immune to it.    But how we cope and what we learn from it is up to us.

We start out in this life with problems that are suitable for our age.   The first problem being an air bubble that hurts … we focus on that and cry.   Later on we have to share our toys and don’t want to … then it’s off to school where there are plenty of children to play with and squabble with.  We have to learn how to get along in situations we don’t like.    Jr. High comes along and some person of the opposite sex breaks our poor little hearts … our best friends can turn on us.   As these problems arise they are big deals for us.    But, we learn how to cope with them and move on to bigger and more challenging challenges.    Because we’ve had some experience in getting through difficult times we’ve gained confidence and make it through the next phase.

I remember worrying about Lynn having to go to Vietnam.   I worried about it for at least three years before he went.    I didn’t know how I would be able to stand it.     Then … he went, and life went on.   I was lonesome, but I learned to do a lot of things for myself that I didn’t know I could do.   We wrote letters every day and learned a lot of things about each other that year that we may not have learned otherwise.    We had a unique closeness even though we were thousands of miles apart.   Worrying about him leaving was almost harder than having him gone.

When my son received his head injury it changed him.    It was like our son was stolen away and another boy was left in his place …  one we weren’t familiar with.     I remember crying in my pillow night after night because of the things he faced and might not ever be able to do again.   I wanted him to be the same boy and not have to go through so many trials.    All the wanting in the world didn’t change what was … so we finally said goodbye to the first boy and accepted and loved the 2nd boy.     Feeling despondent about the things he couldn’t do took the focus off the things he could do … It was much easier to deal with it all when we accepted what had happened and moved forward.     When we did we learned he was still the 1st boy after all.

We had children with broken arms, gashes, burns … many trips to the emergency room.    We gradually learned they could be put back together and that as we coped with each new emergency it became a little easier.   When our son in high school knocked his 4 front teeth out we took him to the dentist and had them put back in.   It was sad to see him in pain but we didn’t fall apart.   A friend of mine said, “How can you handle it?  I’d fall to pieces.”    I thought about it and was surprised that I was handling it so well.    I had been practicing how to handle things for about 40 years by then.      I had learned there is no point in wallowing and asking “why me?”   Why not me?     I certainly wouldn’t wish our troubles on anyone else if I could have skipped them.  

The things that have happened in my life have given me a lot of faith, not only in myself but in God.     I’ve heard people blame God for the bad things that happen in their lives.      I’ve learned to know He hasn’t sent me the trials … trials are a part of living on earth.    God has been there to give me the strength to face them, to lift me up when I am ready to quit, to open a window when the door swings shut.    

Trials aren’t fun to get through.   There is a lot of pain involved, a lot of self reflection and a lot of wanting to give up … but you can’t give up.   What would happen if we did?   If we said .. “no more … I’m done.”     For one thing everything would get much worse very quickly.    If we don’t handle our own problems somebody else has to cope with them and handle them for us and we become dependent instead of independent.    We become disabled instead of abled.     We lose our confidence and become insecure.      We can’t just walk away or turn our back on the hard times in our lives … and we definitely don’t have to wallow.

My mother taught me my first coping skill almost 40 years ago when our first little baby was deathly ill in an army hospital on the east coast.    We were just a young couple.   Our families were 2,000 miles away and we were so worried and afraid.   It triggered a homesickness in me that I could scarcely cope with.   Mother told me to memorize the words to uplifting music  and sing them whenever I started to feel overwhelmed and hopeless.   She learned this technique after spending the five months of her pregnancy laying flat in bed, trying to save the baby she was carrying.    She couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom so she had to depend on her husband and children to help her even with a bedpan.   She couldn’t take care of her responsibilities as wife and mother to the rest of us.  There was no electronic gadgets to entertain her back then, so she memorized the words to the hymns from church.      She stoically went through this tremendous trial for five months, and then her baby boy died two days before he was born.  Not only that, when he was born she happened to be in a room all by herself with no one to help her.    Can you even imagine?     I was about 12 years old at the time and I didn’t know for years and years what she must have suffered.   How could I since I had nothing to compare it to?    Mother just kept on being Mother and comforted the rest of us who were disappointed and sad.  She couldn’t just quit.  There was no time for her to wallow.    

Mom also taught me a 2nd coping skill when times were the blackest … to count my blessings instead of my trials.    She told me to get out a paper and start writing down all the things I should be thankful for … fill pages if I needed to.    ”Count your blessings … name them one by one.”

My third coping skill?    I found it helps to find someone who understands … someone who has gone through the same thing, someone you can trust who will listen to you and really understand your emotions.    

My fourth coping skill?    Return the favor by looking for people you can help.    You’ve had these experiences and grown from them … there are others who need you to help them face the same challenges.     

Adversity is a part of life.    God doesn’t pick on us or single us out to see how much we can take before we break.     We just live in a world where there is good and bad … and bad things happen to everybody.    There are many people who have unbelievable problems and trials in their lives who cope with them heroically.    Those are the people who teach me I can cope, too.   

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