Do we still have the courage she had?
Recently when I was in hospital I had a 90+ year old woman as a roommate for a few days. She had some kind of Alzheimers — couldn’t remember where she was or why she was in hospital. It was difficult to have a conversation with her. But knowing that Alzheimers patients can often remember events long past even if they can’t remember yesterday, I asked her about her history — how did she come to live in Canada?
She told me her story.
Turns out that she grew up in Latvia. She was working there in a factory in 1940. One day she arrived at work and nobody else was there. A co-worker came along and told her the Russians were invading and “We all have to get out”.
Then and there, with the clothes on her back and the money in her purse, she walked with that co-worker to the train station and they caught the last train out to Germany.
From there, she kept travelling and eventually joined her brother, who was already in Canada. Then she married a farmer and raised her family on their Saskatchewan farm. So instead of suffering through 50 or 60 years of Russian occupation, she built for herself a happy and fulfilling life.
What a story my innocuous question had revealed. And I wondered, would I have had the courage to do something like this? Just give up everything I had ever known — family, friends, job, home — so quickly and without hesitation, and have so much faith in myself that I could leap into the future?
I do have the feeling now that, with Trump, a lot of people will now have the same choice — we will all have to find out how courageous we can be.