I've been home a week now

I don't have myself as much together as I had so smugly thought I would. Days are fine. I occupy myself with mundane tasks of life and they seem appropriately mundane. I have often said that my life is typically blissfully uneventful. At night, however, I seem to often have semi-nightmares that involve being cold, frightened, dependant, and alone. I am sometimes back in Kenya. It's interesting because I seldom, if ever, recall dreams. Hmmmmmmmm.

I pretty much avoid the news and found myself almost sneaking in and out of my office Tuesday when I went in to retrieve a forgotten item. I havn't fully developed my three sentence response to "How was Africa?" and I didn't really want anybody to ask that question quite yet. I have to prepare myself because I go back to work next Thursday.

"How was Africa?"

Let's see. Africa was beautiful, filthy, friendly, frightening, throbbing, charming, moving, disturbing, thrilling, loving, creative, slow, intelligent, forward looking, backward, exotic, comfortable, hot, occasionally boring, amazing, smelly, glorious, eager, simple, defensive, fast-moving, scenic, distastful, different, exquisite, industrious, dark, inconvenient, cold, brilliant, complex, familiar, the very face of God...........Hey, I can say all these things about the USA. And all the world. Now that I've said all that I am more confused than ever.

Somehow this reminds me of a talk I had with my counselor, Joan, in the months after my Thea died. In my grief I had complained that Thea was and was going to be everthing that I had always wanted to be. The counselor asked me what she was that I wanted to be. When I had listed out all of her wonderfulness Joan asked me to list them again. She then said, "Name just one of those things that you are not now already." I really couldn't think of any. It was at that point that I realized that I could not expect to live my life through my daughter and that I didn't need to. Thea's life was about her and my life was about me. Although we had shared a path for a while our paths had now diverged. I could not take her place on her path for her nor could I expect my daughter to somehow walk mine for me, even if she had lived. That realization helped me to refocus my life on making my life the best it could be rather than thinking that everything was about my almost adult children.

Perhaps it is so with Americans and Kenyans. Maybe we need to do what we need to do as Americans such as clean up our own air, and water, and garbage dumps. We need to help American families feed their children and get health care for them. Kenyans will have to do those things for Kenyans. Americans can not do what Kenyans must do for themselves. Certainly we can support them and share resources but we must be very careful not to think that we know what is best for Kenya and Kenyans.

I'm not thinking isolationism here. It is a principle that I will have to think more about in order to determine what I can do to put it into practice.

Why did I wait until I was 65 years old to allow this to happen to myself?

Damn! I still don't have that three sentence response worked out.