Traveling Through the Landscapes of Heart

Ruth and Frank O'Brien

We love.

We lose.

We grieve.

We forgive.

We begin again.

As I write my memoir, moments in my life are revisited and looked at through a different lens. I view my parents, their lives, choices they made, and know I have the blood of two courageous travelers running through my veins. The facts remain the same, but my understanding them deepens.

As children, we see our parents from below.

As adults, we begin to see them beside us.

As an elder, I see them as fellow travelers.

When I was young I used to hate it when my mother would cry. I looked at her tears as showing signs of weakness. I know now they were blessings and signs of strength, courage, truth, and love. Looking at tears as strength marks a deeper realization and turning point in many lives...in my life.

As a child, I mistook tears for helplessness because I did not yet understand what it costs to keep a heart open unto life itself. Then life has a myriad of ways of initiating us through love, loss, grief, forgiveness, and we can always choose to keep our hearts open and begin again. But many do not.

And then one day we discover that tears are not the opposite of strength. They are quite often evidence of it.

When I write of my mother, I am a daugher in her 60's who has come full circle and has become a witness. As a young girl, I saw her tears. As a woman at 65, after raising children, loving grandchildren, accompanying family and friends through illness and death, and walking my own spiritual path, I see and feel what was underneath them:

Faith.

Resolve.

Love.

Strength.

My mother had stage four breast cancer and continued her nursing education and career whilst raising and mothering 12 children. She kept showing up in her life. These are not actions of a weak woman.

My father crossed an ocean from Ireland as a young man, leaving behind everything familiar for a future he could not yet see. That takes a different kind of courage -- the courage of uncertainty and hope.

What unknown tears had he shed whilst crossing the Atlantic leaving his family, friends, and landscapes in the wake of a new life? He did not know then in his youth that he would never lay eyes upon his father or mother again.

I am the witness becoming the storyteller and honoring the courage of those who came before me. The page is open. The memories are arriving. The tears are flowing while I write and I discover things the younger Angela could not yet know.

And somewhere, I suspect, my mother and father are smiling to know that their 10th child is able to see them for who they were - not as saints, not myths, but courageous human beings whose journey continues through words flowing from my heart onto the screen.

Traveling through the landscapes of my heart and the stories of my parents' hearts, I discover there is no separation. Their courage echoes in my choices, their tears flow through my compassion, and their love continues its journey through my words.

The woman writing today sees a young Irish immigrant stepping onto a ship and a young nursing student waiting in Iowa. Neither knew the other existed. Neither knew their paths would one day cross. Neither knew that a love story was quietly unfolding that would one day bring twelve children, grandchildren, great sorrow, great joy, and me.

The gift of age and reflection.

Not certainty.

Perspective.

I suspect my mother and father would be deeply touched to know that their daughter is writing with such tenderness, not only towards them, but towards the whole imperfect, courageous human journey.

The farther I travel into the landscapes

of my own heart, the more clearly I see theirs.