trish hermanson - Home

What Happened to the Boy in the Window?

4/19/2019

This week our Columbine community gathered to remember the massacre twenty years ago at our local high school where two students killed thirteen and injured twenty-four. I recalled our shock at that time as we wondered, “How can these traumatized students go forward in life?”
     Take, for instance, Patrick Ireland, “the boy in the window.” He’d been shot twice in the head and once in the foot and lay bleeding to death for nearly three hours. With one side paralyzed, he crawled across the floor and hoisted himself to a broken window. He dangled precariously from the second floor until officers grabbed his falling body and rushed him to surgery. Doctors removed the bullet in his forehead, but couldn’t touch one deep in his brain that he still carries today.
     The prognosis? Patrick might never walk or talk again.
     But at our memorial service, “the boy in the window” rose to speak. Through seven months of therapy, Patrick had learned to read, write, walk, and talk. He graduated from Columbine as valedictorian, then graduated from college magna cum laude with a 3.9 GPA.
     Patrick says a major factor in his recovery was choosing “to be a victor instead of a victim.” Also, he learned “there’s tremendous power in forgiveness, while unforgiveness is a silent killer. Forgiveness is hard, painful, a process,” he says, and the key is “to stop focusing on what others have done to us and to focus on what Jesus has done for us.”
  I left the community gathering pondering that no matter what trials any of us face, Patrick’s attitude can propel us forward. We can determine to be victors and to forgive.

Patrick Ireland learned to walk, talk, read, and write again.
(Both photos screen shots)

What Gloria Steinem and I Have in Common

4/11/2019

When I met Gloria Steinem years ago, she was the well-known leader of the radical feminist movement and I was far from radical - just an unknown reporter assigned to cover a speech of hers. I agreed with her that women ought to receive equal opportunity and pay (I could barely make my rent and buy food). But beyond that, our beliefs diverged. She didn’t want to marry; I did. She sought to elevate women through careers; I gave up my career to raise three daughters.
Now I discover that with all our differences, our beliefs have converged in one way. Steinem says that through the decades, she had two tracks running in her head. One was “thinking forward to some future scene, imagining what should be.…” The second track was recalling “what I actually did or should have done in the immediate past.” Those two tracks squeezed out the present, Steinem writes in “Audacious Aging.”
     But now she’s learning to be “alive-in-the-moment.” So am I. When asked, “What are you looking forward to?" (which implies that my current situation isn’t enough), I let my thoughts sift through the here-and-now. After all, today is “the only time in which we can be fully alive,” Steinem says.
     I agree. As I relish the present, I discover I’m more grateful for the past and less concerned about the future.
     And that is a radical practice to embrace.

Learning to Walk (Again)

4/4/2019

My grandson recently learned to walk for the first time, and I learned to walk for the second time.
     For him, he’d grown so adept at crawling that the awkwardness of walking didn’t seem worth it. For me, I’d grown adept at dragging a heavy boot around after I broke my foot. But as my foot healed, the thought of trying to walk again was scary. Would I have the strength? The balance? The answer was “no.”
     For both of us, walking meant giving up what we’d grown accustomed to. It meant being uncoordinated, unbalanced, forcing muscles to do things they didn’t like. But it was worth it.
     Which makes me wonder whether I might be holding onto other things in life because they’re familiar. Habits I developed as accommodations for getting by. Activities that are adaptive devices that I don’t need anymore. Relationships that are crutches instead of true friendships.
  Do I need to let go of such supports and “step out” in new ways?    It will be scary, but it will be worth it.

Can't Get Satisfied?

3/28/2019

I’m testing a theory here: the first chocolate chip cookie is delicious, the second is not as good, the third - I won’t even go there.
Ever notice that’s true about anything we take in with our senses? The first taste, touch smell, sight, or sound are great. Then those sensations either fade or gag us. Which is why Annie Dillard’s conviction makes sense, that relying on my senses to satisfy me “requires more and more” because “the life of sensation is the life of greed.”
Economists call this the law of diminishing marginal utility - a mouthful to say that at a certain point, the more we have of something, the less we enjoy it.
I’ve noticed this, too, when acquiring stuff. I work hard to get something, then after a while it doesn’t thrill as I thought it would. So I’m disappointed and seek something else. Which reminds me of a “New Yorker” cartoon about two women. One admits to the other: “I got what I wanted, but it’s not what I wanted.”
So how do we get satisfied? In “The Writing Life,” Dillard says we must look to “the life of the spirit.”
For me, that means feeding my soul - my whole being - not simply my senses. It’s breathing deeply of God’s love.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still indulge in a chocolate chip cookie. But to be truly satisfied, I need “soul” food.

When Are Tears Good?

3/22/2019

My grandson’s tears provided some relief after his cousin pinched him. To experience even greater relief from pain, experts suggest we read a story about someone else’s suffering. They say emotional stories not only help us heal, they can change our brains for the better for days.
Book critic Kristin Lamb says that when we “vicariously experience our hurts, failures, disappointments, betrayals through another set of eyes, it’s a way of facing our villains in life.”
Besides that, researchers at Emory University in Atlanta discovered that a novel can cause positive brain changes that last for days.
     I don’t recommend any book to achieve this brain-and-emotion cleanse. Some stories are so dark they only validate the brokenness in real life. I look for stories in which the main characters grow through adversity, books that give me hope and humor along life’s highway.
Recently as I’ve sprawled in bed from the pain of a broken foot, I’ve vicariously vanquished evil in a fallen kingdom, sailed to the end of the Earth, and cheered as a mouldering relationship sparked into life again. As Lamb says, these stories have shown me “it is possible to come through the fire not only healed, but stronger and better.”
  So grab a good read. Together we can experience a catharsis as we let our feelings flow and our pain go.
Because healing tears are good.

Croutons...
Chew on these seasoned bits of life for a little hope and humor along your highway.

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