Living A Loved Life. Dawna Markova, PhD

      “

      “It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble now because we do not have a good story. The Old Story sustained us for a long period of time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purpose, energized action. It consecrated suffering, integrated knowledge, guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children. We could identify crime, punish criminals. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. It did not make men good or make for unfailing warmth in human association. But it did provide a context in which life could function in a meaningful manner. Now we are between stories.”

      —Thomas Berry

How Do I Live a Loved Life?

      The coauthor of this book is a ghost. My grandmother was a midwife and healer. She sat with people as they entered the world and as they left it. She never set foot in a school and could neither read nor write. I haven’t included her name on the title page because I never really knew what it was. I just called her “Grandma.” Others called her “Ma” or “Dora,” or by her husband’s name, “Michael’s wife,” as if she were his possession.

      As I am writing about her to you, she becomes alive again: a tiny woman with a fierce will. In the late 1800s, she ran across Russian potato fields to escape Cossack soldiers who had killed her first two children and brother during a pogrom, an attack on Jewish villages. She and my grandfather escaped to New York by boat, traveling in steerage. Driven by that indomitable will to foster life, she gave birth to eight more children in a two-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of an old brick tenement in Hell’s Kitchen.

      One of her feet was planted on the spiritual side and the other on the pragmatic. But to talk about her in terms of one side or the other is inaccurate, because Grandma was always braiding together people, their resources, and the challenges of their lives so that they would be inspired to love their existence. Her prayers went something like this: “May Willie’s ability to make money help Sammy, who has to sleep in a cold car because he can’t afford to pay his rent. May they both love the life they are living. May they each live the life they love.”

      On the day when I am writing these words, the whole world seems to be teetering on a knife edge between right/wrong, either/or, us/them. I have been asking myself several evocative questions for the past two years. They have midwifed the pages you are now reading: How do I find a way to live a life I can love? How do I help make it possible for those who will come after me to do the same? What do I need to remember, as in “re-member,” to bring together all that has been torn in two? How do I re-collect the wisdom earned through my own and others’ challenges? What is the most effective way to pass it on? Is there a place inside me and between us where vanished wisdom secretly gathers?

      My grandmother gave me one of the greatest gifts one person can give to another: she helped me to discover how my life matters. She told me that the moment I was born, Life made a Promise to the world that only I could fulfill. She inspired my search for what this could be by telling me stories of her own experiences and by asking me wide-open questions that would lead me to live a life I would love.

      When people don’t believe their lives really matter, they shrug, feel impotent, and disconnect from one another, slowly declining into what they most despise. Grandma used to kiss the unique marks at the very ends of my fingertips, calling them “promise prints.” She said they prove that never before and never again will there be another such as me.

      Understanding how each of us does

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