View From a Prairie Home

by Hege Hernfindahl, Columnist

I woke up this morning with a true physical pain in my heart. I knew it wasn’t a heart attack. I knew what it was. It was a physical manifestation of grief. I don’t know if that has ever happened to you, but I presume it has. If you have lived a long life, you will have encountered hard days. Hopefully, you will not have lost a child. But you may have lost someone else you loved or experienced financial ruin or divorce. I could enumerate other calamities, but I don’t want to presume, so I’ll just let you fill in the blanks of what your heart-shattering tragedy has been. And we can’t compare grief or tragedy and decide which one of us has had it the worst. We just have to be open with ourselves and honest and feel truly what is going on. And if we are lucky, we can make a choice.

My choice today is to get out of bed. To drink coffee. Talk to my dear husband. To light a candle in memory of our beloved son. To write this article and hope it will truly reach other people. And later, I will choose to go skiing. Not alone. But with a dear friend who has stood by me, faithfully, through darkness and light.

Choice. The concept of choice has always fascinated me from the time I fell in love with philosophy and started studying existentialism, which really is the study of taking responsibility for your own choices in life. To live truly, according to Jean Paul Sartre, the French existentialist, is to be conscious of choices you make. And to realize that your choices define your life. And to understand that not to choose is also a choice.

Many of the biggest choices we make are done while we are young. I often tried to tell this to my high school students. If you don’t study…if you do drugs…if you drive too fast… I also told them that they should follow their passion. If you love music, study music. It you love building things, think of all you could do. You could change the world with your choices.

But as I am writing this, I think of all the people who are not free to choose their own destiny. Think of Afghanistan. Here, the Taliban is in control. And they don’t want girls to be educated, because educated girls will become educated women who will not raise boys that are susceptible to the Taliban’s propaganda. A person choosing to go against the Taliban runs the risk of prison or even death for both themselves and maybe even their family. And the danger of choosing to go against a regime is not only an Afghan phenomenon. It is the reality in many countries in this world. What choices do they really have?

I had the choice to immigrate with my husband and young child. It was an easy choice for me, because I wanted to raise my kids on a farm on the prairie. But that was a privilege. A choice I was free to make because I lived in a democracy and was moving to another democracy. And even though Grant and I were not affluent, we had enough money to take the big step.

But what about a person living under a regime where their lives are in danger and they are not allowed to leave and they are not allowed to enter the US, because they haven’t gone through the proper channel due to lack of opportunities. They are trapped. And what about all the people who live in a war zone? Their choices are also severely limited.

Thinking about the lack of freedom to choose makes my heart ache even more. So I just write a puny article. Because I cannot stop war or dictatorships. I am just an old woman grieving my youngest son. I am sad. But I am glad I can choose to write what I want without being scared.