Resilience Read Online Free Page B

each have hardships that are more difficultthan we imagined we could ever face. I have cancer. It consumes my life in ways I cannot control. Long after my initial treatments, my hands and feet are still numb, the general numbness disturbed only by a tight and constant tingling. My hair, once perhaps the most reliable of my features, is thin and sparse, and I see no real prospect of that changing. My schedule is now and always will be determined by infusion appointments and MRIs. Every Christmas is my last well Christmas, or it could be.

    When the Maytag plant closed in Newton, Iowa, in October 2007, the last of the four thousand workers who had once worked for Maytag in Newton, whose parents and grandparents had worked for Maytag, left the plant that had been the center of life in Newton for 114 years. The plant was known as a place where everyone was family. When there was a death or a divorce, they all shared the pain. When someone's son went off to war, all their sons were leaving and they grieved and worried as one. And when there were good days, they would play softball or have water fights in the summer or work all night when they were snowed in, as they were in the winter of 1973. So ingrained was their job withtheir community and their sense of being that they called themselves Maytagers. It was who they were, and then, because of global economic forces or because of the notion of an executive who did not know them or the willingness of someone half a world away to work for wages that could not feed you in Newton, Iowa, it all ended. Some of them could see it coming, like a malignancy, but they didn't know when it would kill the Maytager in them. All they knew is that one day it would and there was nothing they could do about it.
    That last day, some of the Maytagers unlaced their work boots, placed them neatly side by side, and walked to their cars in their socks, their boots symbolizing what they were leaving behind, the part that could not come with them on the next part of their journey. The boots would be now—and for as long as Maytag could stand the image—lined up together by the plant door as the Maytagers once had been. It was, in a sense, like they had left the map of what their life was supposed to be at the place where the map no longer comported with the ground. The gesture was sad and angry and beautiful. The Maytagers mostly got other jobs, some better, some worse, but maybe none with the magic of history and familythey had once had. And Newton got a racetrack and other employers, and now living in Newton is still good, but it is different. The longer a Maytager sat pining for what he had lost, the more lost he became. Sometimes we have to give ourselves space to grieve what we have lost: a person, a way of life, a dream. But at some point we have to stand up and say, this is my new life and in this life I need a new job.
    I suppose that in real life, we have to distinguish between those catastrophes we can repair and those that require us to face a new reality. John and I used to be “fixers.” If there was a problem, we would put all our energy behind fixing it, for ourselves or our families or friends, even for children who played on the sports teams we coached. No problem was too small or too large. If you work hard enough you can fix anything—or so we thought. And not just “could”—we had to. We were, we believed, obligated to right things, and so we did. And then Wade died, and we could not control the very most important thing in our lives. Accepting that this catastrophe was not vulnerable to our will was nearly impossible. Finding ways to make the erasure of this boy not so complete was all we could accomplishnow. A new reality, considerably less good than the one we had before he died.
    Eight years later, I had arranged my life around my new story. It would always be a central fact of my life that I was the mother of a dead boy, but it was not the only fact. My husband was in the