Sarah with an "H"

My life didn’t get off to the best start. Born two months premature in the Spring of 1941 to starry-eyed teenaged lovers and made fatherless by my first birthday because of the War, I didn’t know just how badly the odds were stacked against me.

My name is Sarah Elizabeth MacKenzie. My mom called me SarahMac. I once had a theatre teacher in High School call me MacBeth. But I prefer Sarah - with an “h”.

“It’s you and me Sarah - but that’s enough, we will be just fine,” was the oft repeated encouraging word spoke by my ever-hopeful mother. No matter what happened in life, we had each other. Being widowed at such a young age, it’s truly remarkable all that she did for me. Even as a toddler, I knew that I could count on her to come through. “It’s you and me Sarah - but that’s enough, we will be just fine.”

Mom died when I was five, she was only 23. She had a rare form of leukemia. Her last words to me were: “Sarah, it’s just you now - but that’s enough, you’ll be just fine!”

That was over 20 years ago and I can still hear her fighting to get those words out, even as her body was surrendering to that horrible disease. I took to heart those words and have built my life on them. “It’s just me now - but that’s enough, I’ll be just fine.” It was too painful to love, to let people in, so I isolated, I withdrew. I adopted a ‘me against the world’ attitude.

I chose to excel at academics and graduated number one in my High School without ever attending a football game, a sleep over, or a dance. “On top” but completely alone. University was a breeze - completely funded with scholarships - but without any real friends. In four years I had nine different roommates - with all but the last one requesting a room transfer. The whispers in the dorms were painful but I kept up a tough external appearance, all the time dying inside. I began to see that this was just the way things were going to be for me. After all, they say ‘it’s lonely at the top,’ so I just figured that was my lot in life.

And now, I’m working in my chosen field. Doing well, advancing. A good reputation. Making plenty of money. I am rewarded on all fronts for my expertise, my competence, my work ethic and ultimately for what I contribute to the bottom line. But I am not ‘just fine’. I am miserable. I’m great at what I do, but I’m not great at who I am - I am lost, I am lonely and I just can’t take it any longer.

I’ve sat down to pen these words, so that hopefully someone will read them and they’ll come to know how very lost, how completely lonely, how totally empty I felt. I wanted someone to know why I’m making this choice. I didn’t want to be thought of as crazy or nuts, I didn’t see any other options.

I realize that you cannot know that I arrived early and stayed late at work because my apartment was empty. Sure it was furnished, quite nicely in fact, but it was empty of that which makes a home - life, laughter - dare I say it: love? I heard you share your stories of weekend trips, romantic dinners, home improvement projects, vacations and family reunions - I didn’t begrudge you your joy, I just didn’t have any sense that I could ever possess what you have. And the ache grew. It gnawed at me day after day and especially night after night. So when I finally went ‘home’ at the end of the day it was to a barren place filled with constant reminders of the walls that I’d built between myself and all others. I was alone. No one got in. I was self-sufficient. I could handle it. I was enough. I was not enough. I couldn’t handle it. I was not okay.

And strangely enough, I wanted someone to know. When they asked with shocked tones: “Why did she do it?” for once in my life I wanted people to know something about me. Maybe it was too late, but better late than never, they say.

Hope is a odd word. Odd because at the end of what little hope I possessed, I suddenly discovered that I was too much of a coward to do what I had planned. And at that point, ‘something’ or ‘someone’ caused me to remember another message my long dead mother had given me - something long forgotten, buried deep in my unconscious mind, something that in my pain and in my aloneness I had blocked and buried, long forgotten. But when I remembered it, I knew it to be true.

What came to my memory was the look on my dying mother’s face as she lay in her hospital bed. Her beautiful and unforgettable face was filled with two powerful things: absolute love for me and a knowing anguish that she would not be there for me. Oh, God, how could I have forgotten that look? How could my memories have been so clouded?

In my heartbreak of remembrance, I saw something for the first time ever, in the midst of my self-imposed darkness, a new light of truth appeared: The most important message she tried to give me, I had missed because of my pain! I was blind to what was right in front of me. And that message was this: I had never loved another human being like she had loved me. She loved me without question, and with great sacrifice. In her deepest sorrow and pain, she still knew how to love. But my pain, sorrow and grief caused me to selfishly dig deep foxholes of so-called protection around my heart. I tried to protect myself by going inward and all I did, really, was hurt myself! Suddenly it became clear to me - I not only pushed people away from me, but I pushed me away from them!

What I could finally see was that my biggest problem wasn’t that I had lost so much, but that I’d had never chosen to risk loving another human being. I had never reached beyond myself to another, I never opened my heart to let another person in.

Could I change? After being so self-sufficient, was I even able to love like my mother loved? Did I even know where to start? Could I let another person in? It seemed like too much. I had lived this way for a long, long time.

One thing I knew for sure, was that I couldn’t keep going the way I’d been going.

So what was my choice? What was the decision that I reached?

It’s been three years now since that great remembrance, but on that day Love reached down and gave me the courage to look past myself and my pain and to make a choice to love others. Since that day, so much has changed.

I’d love to tell you more, but my husband needs some help with the baby. My name is Sarah - with an “h” for ‘hope-filled’!