Once I asked my mother what it was like to live through really hard times, like Pearl Harbor and WWII. Mom was a young woman in nursing school when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mom told me that they gathered around, listening to radios… She said it was hard to believe it had happened, that it didn’t seem real. A colleague of hers had a brother stationed at Pearl Harbor and they had no way of knowing if he was dead or alive. (Eventually they found out he was alive.)

After Pearl Harbor, both my mother’s brothers went off to war, along with most of the young men she’d grown up with. At home, they lived through years of uncertainty and fear.  What would happen to those they loved? Would they even win this war they had entered late, and for which their nation was so unprepared?

“How do you deal with something like that?” I asked my mother.

“You just get through it,” she answered.

Our country is under attack again, this time from within, with actions that trample on our American values of honesty, fair play and lending a hand to the less fortunate. There are those who fear our democracy will not survive.

I choose to live in hope.

I choose to believe that we will get through this, that these difficult times will become history that someday my great-grandchildren will ask me about.

I want to be able to tell my great-grandchildren that, like my mother’s generation with Pearl Harbor, I felt shock, fear and sadness. That I felt powerless. I also want to be able to tell them that as a citizen I spoke up as I could, changed what I could, and contacted and spoke plainly to those in power. That I worked hard at trusting God that we would get through this.

But there is one final, very important thing that I want to be able to tell my great-grandchildren.

My mother and I talked, another time, about the hardest time of her personal life. It was after my father died. Late one night she came home alone, tired, after visiting family, to a dark and empty house.

“That night was my hardest time ever, after he died,” she said. “But in the morning, I got up and got going.”

After my mother chose to “get up and get going”, she lived twenty more years of giving and caring. Attending her grandchildren’s school events and baseball games. Bringing her homemade pumpkin pie to family get-togethers. Sending so many cards and letters to family and friends that the postman said that half the letters that came to her retirement community were for her. Re-inventing herself by deciding that she could be “an encourager of others” and doing that until she died.

I want to be like my mother. After my dark nights of doubt and fear and worry for the future of my country, I want to get up and get going. To love those in my life. To use my gifts, however large or small, to heal the world around me.

The most important thing I want to be able to tell my great-grandchildren is that I spent this time giving extra love and compassion to those around me. That I did good things with my days. That into a world talking loudly of hatred and division, I sent forth love, empathy and kindness.