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Mom,
I am not comfortable with the notion of debts that I can never repay. It is at this point and this point only that a debt becomes an immutable burden, something that we must carry with us for the rest of our life with not even the remotest possibility of ever escaping from it.
But in this case, it is a burden that I am fiercely proud to hoist upon my shoulders. And it is nothing less than the most important responsibility of my life to carry this burden, this heavy and substantial burden, with me until the very day that I, too, depart from this world.
You were born into poverty in Kentucky in the middle of the 1950's, in a time that I can scarcely understand and that I have only witnessed through your stories and the pages of history textbooks. You were the third of nine children in a family that knew few material comforts but subsisted instead on a type of family-based loved and support, forged in a milieu of social strife and struggle, that I will never be able to even remotely comprehend through my middle-class eyes and schema. You never had new clothes and cutting-edge comforts growing up, even being deprived of some things that many people would consider basic necessities at this day and time. You were among the very first classes of students to integrate public schools in the border North-South state of Kentucky, dealing with still persistent levels of racism but rising beyond the levels of possibility presented to my grandmother in her Jim Crow segregated schools just one generation earlier. You did not have the best books, the most adequate schools supplies, or even the full support of a still backwards educational administration, but you took your education seriously and capitalized on every opportunity that was presented to you. And you were never content with simply maximizing the opportunities presented to you, even though you yourself were so much worse off than much of your fellow Americans. You were instead one of the founding members of the radical Black Student Union at your high school, tirelessly striving for full equality even though you knew damn well that such politically-motivated activism could permanently burn bridges and eradicate your chances of future success in life.
You didn't give a damn - it was never your success alone that motivated you. While I growing up as a kid, sheltered in my racially integrated middle-class existence, could think of nothing more than my own grades and my own success, you at my own formative stages of life were infuriated at the other minority youth who were being ignored and neglected by a rotten system. You tirelessly and selflessly risked your own future ambitions to help them - even though you yourself had so relatively little to call you own, often having nothing other than mayonnaise rolled onto sandwiches for lunch.
You did not attend college to enrich yourself, as you very well could have. You instead first focused on the overall history of this country and specifically the history of African American subjugation, and then focused on the nascent field of urban and regional planning to help bring about change in challenged communities. Never once in reading through your personal writings was salary mentioned as a motivating factor in your career choices. You had seen, and lived through, a level of poverty that I simply cannot comprehend, and you framed your lifestyle choices by recognizing how better off you were than the vast majority of the rest of the world. Often I would complain about my relative lack of something as a younger kid, and you would give me the response of how much better off I was than the rest of the world; how foolishly I dismissed that suggestion. Me, me, me. How tirelessly I worked to build upon the foundation that you and so many others like you had laid out for me, all the while being so utterly childish and arrogant as to claim that it was "my hard work" that put me in my current situation of success. Not your driving 100 miles round trip, week after week, to go to work so that I could have the material comforts that you never knew growing up. Not you providing me with my own library of books so that I could learn to read and enjoy comforts that so many other worthy children were never aware of. Not you, all by yourself, working yourself into the ground as a single parent to ensure that my childhood would be better than what you experienced 40 years.
And how amazing it is that so much of this never registered with me during many of my teenage years. How ungrateful was I, looking in derision upon your choices to live where you live, worship how you worshipped, and explore the career paths that you explored. The snippy little comments that I made as a teenager that must have troubled you so deeply, though you were such a strong woman that you never once let me see you cry in front of me. The malicious ways in which I tried to push you away when you wanted to do nothing more than look after me in a troubled, hateful world. How in many cases, I often seemed to stick up for everybody else except for you. And yet, none of this ever once altered your commitment to my life. Not once.
Selfless love, it was something that in my immature and inexcusable selfishness I could not even begin to comprehend. As I read my disgusting little Ayn Rand novels and spouted off vitriol about how the world was against the high achievers, never paying attention to you working yourself so thin, all by yourself, to ensure the comforts that I enjoyed. To understand that my life meant more to you than even your own life and well-being. What did I do to merit such recognition, such caring? Next to nothing. I simply capitalized on the opportunities that you enabled for me and took credit for myself; regardless, you supported me tirelessly at each and every step of the way, even when all I could do was badmouth you for never "doing enough."
Come unemployment, come debt, come hell and high water, you never strayed from your vision of using your own blessings and good fortune to make the world around you a better place. I, meanwhile, never strayed from using the opportunities that you and so many others laid out before me to claim that "racism is dead" and that down and out people on welfare were "simply lazy bums." But this never altered your love for me. Not matter how little I gave you the proper credit, you supported me more and more as the years went on.
And what have I, blessed with so much more than you, dared to dream of? I am embarrassed - as I should be - to even answer that question when I consider your life. To consider my complaints about things such as salary when compared to the life of a woman referred to as a 'nigger' for simply attending schools in the early phases of integration.
I am so fortunate that much of that teenage and prepubescent ignorance melted off during my undergraduate years, and I can only hope that I expressed to you enough while you were here just exactly what you did for me - namely, everything. I can only hope that you knew how special that you were to me and how dearly I loved you. But most of all, I hope that you understand how in my youth, I am still utterly incapable of understanding how someone could love as you did - how someone could put their own self-interest last before the self-interest of others, even those - like me - who frankly did not deserve it much of the time. And there is no question, not even the most minuscule and undetectable trace of doubt, that I could have achieved nothing that I have today without your tireless dedication. That is the debt that I can never hope to repay - even if you had lived, as you deserved, into your old age and I had bestowed upon you the most resplendent, fabulous sums of wealth - for it is the debt of my life and happiness itself.
All that I can do is live my life as I know you would have wanted - happily, peacefully, and with my own self-interest never being the sole determinant of my courses of action, my choices, and ultimately my fate. Even in doing this, I fully understand that I can never repay the debt that you laid down before me. But I can at least live out your wishes vicariously, as I know you would have wanted to see them realized, in this perennially and increasingly troubled world.
And that, mom, is the burden that I will happily carry with me to my grave - the burden of using my own life to make sure that those around me have a brighter future than I did, just as you so selflessly gave for most of your life to ensure that I would have opportunities that you never dreamed of. And that is a promise from which I will never be separated, so long as I live.
I love you, forever and always.
Marsha Harpool: 1955 - 2008
I am not comfortable with the notion of debts that I can never repay. It is at this point and this point only that a debt becomes an immutable burden, something that we must carry with us for the rest of our life with not even the remotest possibility of ever escaping from it.
But in this case, it is a burden that I am fiercely proud to hoist upon my shoulders. And it is nothing less than the most important responsibility of my life to carry this burden, this heavy and substantial burden, with me until the very day that I, too, depart from this world.
You were born into poverty in Kentucky in the middle of the 1950's, in a time that I can scarcely understand and that I have only witnessed through your stories and the pages of history textbooks. You were the third of nine children in a family that knew few material comforts but subsisted instead on a type of family-based loved and support, forged in a milieu of social strife and struggle, that I will never be able to even remotely comprehend through my middle-class eyes and schema. You never had new clothes and cutting-edge comforts growing up, even being deprived of some things that many people would consider basic necessities at this day and time. You were among the very first classes of students to integrate public schools in the border North-South state of Kentucky, dealing with still persistent levels of racism but rising beyond the levels of possibility presented to my grandmother in her Jim Crow segregated schools just one generation earlier. You did not have the best books, the most adequate schools supplies, or even the full support of a still backwards educational administration, but you took your education seriously and capitalized on every opportunity that was presented to you. And you were never content with simply maximizing the opportunities presented to you, even though you yourself were so much worse off than much of your fellow Americans. You were instead one of the founding members of the radical Black Student Union at your high school, tirelessly striving for full equality even though you knew damn well that such politically-motivated activism could permanently burn bridges and eradicate your chances of future success in life.
You didn't give a damn - it was never your success alone that motivated you. While I growing up as a kid, sheltered in my racially integrated middle-class existence, could think of nothing more than my own grades and my own success, you at my own formative stages of life were infuriated at the other minority youth who were being ignored and neglected by a rotten system. You tirelessly and selflessly risked your own future ambitions to help them - even though you yourself had so relatively little to call you own, often having nothing other than mayonnaise rolled onto sandwiches for lunch.
You did not attend college to enrich yourself, as you very well could have. You instead first focused on the overall history of this country and specifically the history of African American subjugation, and then focused on the nascent field of urban and regional planning to help bring about change in challenged communities. Never once in reading through your personal writings was salary mentioned as a motivating factor in your career choices. You had seen, and lived through, a level of poverty that I simply cannot comprehend, and you framed your lifestyle choices by recognizing how better off you were than the vast majority of the rest of the world. Often I would complain about my relative lack of something as a younger kid, and you would give me the response of how much better off I was than the rest of the world; how foolishly I dismissed that suggestion. Me, me, me. How tirelessly I worked to build upon the foundation that you and so many others like you had laid out for me, all the while being so utterly childish and arrogant as to claim that it was "my hard work" that put me in my current situation of success. Not your driving 100 miles round trip, week after week, to go to work so that I could have the material comforts that you never knew growing up. Not you providing me with my own library of books so that I could learn to read and enjoy comforts that so many other worthy children were never aware of. Not you, all by yourself, working yourself into the ground as a single parent to ensure that my childhood would be better than what you experienced 40 years.
And how amazing it is that so much of this never registered with me during many of my teenage years. How ungrateful was I, looking in derision upon your choices to live where you live, worship how you worshipped, and explore the career paths that you explored. The snippy little comments that I made as a teenager that must have troubled you so deeply, though you were such a strong woman that you never once let me see you cry in front of me. The malicious ways in which I tried to push you away when you wanted to do nothing more than look after me in a troubled, hateful world. How in many cases, I often seemed to stick up for everybody else except for you. And yet, none of this ever once altered your commitment to my life. Not once.
Selfless love, it was something that in my immature and inexcusable selfishness I could not even begin to comprehend. As I read my disgusting little Ayn Rand novels and spouted off vitriol about how the world was against the high achievers, never paying attention to you working yourself so thin, all by yourself, to ensure the comforts that I enjoyed. To understand that my life meant more to you than even your own life and well-being. What did I do to merit such recognition, such caring? Next to nothing. I simply capitalized on the opportunities that you enabled for me and took credit for myself; regardless, you supported me tirelessly at each and every step of the way, even when all I could do was badmouth you for never "doing enough."
Come unemployment, come debt, come hell and high water, you never strayed from your vision of using your own blessings and good fortune to make the world around you a better place. I, meanwhile, never strayed from using the opportunities that you and so many others laid out before me to claim that "racism is dead" and that down and out people on welfare were "simply lazy bums." But this never altered your love for me. Not matter how little I gave you the proper credit, you supported me more and more as the years went on.
And what have I, blessed with so much more than you, dared to dream of? I am embarrassed - as I should be - to even answer that question when I consider your life. To consider my complaints about things such as salary when compared to the life of a woman referred to as a 'nigger' for simply attending schools in the early phases of integration.
I am so fortunate that much of that teenage and prepubescent ignorance melted off during my undergraduate years, and I can only hope that I expressed to you enough while you were here just exactly what you did for me - namely, everything. I can only hope that you knew how special that you were to me and how dearly I loved you. But most of all, I hope that you understand how in my youth, I am still utterly incapable of understanding how someone could love as you did - how someone could put their own self-interest last before the self-interest of others, even those - like me - who frankly did not deserve it much of the time. And there is no question, not even the most minuscule and undetectable trace of doubt, that I could have achieved nothing that I have today without your tireless dedication. That is the debt that I can never hope to repay - even if you had lived, as you deserved, into your old age and I had bestowed upon you the most resplendent, fabulous sums of wealth - for it is the debt of my life and happiness itself.
All that I can do is live my life as I know you would have wanted - happily, peacefully, and with my own self-interest never being the sole determinant of my courses of action, my choices, and ultimately my fate. Even in doing this, I fully understand that I can never repay the debt that you laid down before me. But I can at least live out your wishes vicariously, as I know you would have wanted to see them realized, in this perennially and increasingly troubled world.
And that, mom, is the burden that I will happily carry with me to my grave - the burden of using my own life to make sure that those around me have a brighter future than I did, just as you so selflessly gave for most of your life to ensure that I would have opportunities that you never dreamed of. And that is a promise from which I will never be separated, so long as I live.
I love you, forever and always.
Marsha Harpool: 1955 - 2008
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