Promises We Keep to the People We Love
For centuries, people have worked to ensure one basic thing — that the next generation would have a better life than they did. I learned this from my dying mother, and a debt I can never repay.
“…the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says ‘We shall give our children better than we ourselves had’.”
— Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing
“I’m going to be gone soon,” she said, slowly, visibly frustrated by her halting, labored speech. “I’m ready to die.”
“But I’m not finished. I’m not done with you. I’m not done being your mother. And I’m sorry. I can’t be there for you anymore.”
“So you need to promise me something. You have to promise me that you’ll be the best you can be. You’ll do your best for the world.”
I promised. It was the last conversation we ever had.
At the time, I didn’t know that my mother would be dead within days. But she did.
She was trying to tell me that, after years of agony, ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease) was going to take her soon. And she needed to have one last conversation with her youngest child. A child who turned 17 two weeks earlier, and whose father had disappeared into a bottle — trapped in a maelstrom of his own grief and alcoholism.
She had one last act of good parenting to do. She used her final moments to help her son set a course. A future. A goal.
It’s been over 30 years now, but I still think about that promise. Sometimes it terrifies me, especially when I’m not sure I can always live up to it. But mostly I see it as a gift, and it helps give me a sense of purpose and direction.
Maybe it would help to understand the back story. I was born with a severe bacterial infection that covered my entire body, and I wasn’t expected to live through the night. The doctors, my father, everyone told her to just let me go. But my mother refused to accept that, and she took me home to take care of me, knowing that leaving me at the hospital was a death sentence.
She went without sleep for days, popped every blister on my skin, gave me ice baths to lower my fevers, boiled every scrap of fabric that touched my skin, and she managed to keep the infection at bay. I lived, obviously. For years afterward, doctors told her that she saved my life. Without her determination, there was no chance that I would have survived.
She did something that a lot of our parents and grandparents did. She stood up when the chips were down and gave everything she had for someone else. Me. And I grew up knowing that I owed my life to my mother.
Everyone loves their mother, of course. But I owed her everything. And it was cruelly ironic that I could only stand by when she was being ravaged by a painful, degenerative illness. That sense of powerlessness, unable to help someone I loved, still haunts me. I couldn’t do a damn thing for her then.
But I can try now. I can dedicate my life to trying to make the world a little bit better, when and where I can, and honor the promise I made her when she was dying. That’s how I’ll repay her.
The summer after she died, I went to college to study physics, and pursue a career in astronomy. But after a while, I started thinking about the promise I made. What was I going to do with a physics degree? How could I help the world as an astronomer?
That’s when another gift from my mother came back to me: a deep love and appreciation of the natural world.
I began to realize that we are living in a unique, terrifying, and powerful moment in human history. It’s a time when we’re crashing past planetary limits, causing widespread climate change, ecological destruction, and depletion of natural resources — which, unchecked, will burden and impoverish future generations. And we maybe had a few decades to shift course, or the planet we know and love would be doomed.
After seeing everything my mother had done for me, how could I sit back and watch my generation leave a wrecked planet to our children?
I suddenly knew what I was supposed to do. I found my life’s work. I changed the course of my education and started pursuing a career in climate and environmental science.
My mother had given me a final, posthumous gift.
I was lucky. My darkest moments were tempered by an incredible gift. My mother somehow turned her death — the hardest, cruelest, most vexing thing I’ve ever experienced — into a moment of power and clarity, something that will guide the rest of my life.
And this has only become important to me, as a father of two amazing young women, and a new grandfather. The promises we make each other, across generations, are ultimately what drives us to be our best.
It’s my North Star, my guardrail, and the standard against which I measure the value of a day’s work. Or a life.
My story isn’t unique, of course. We all have remarkable people in our family tree, people who sacrificed to make sure the next generation would have a better life.
When things became difficult, those ancestors didn’t give up. They didn’t wallow in their sadness or self-pity. They rolled up their sleeves and did something for those around them, and for those that would live long after them. In short, they lived good lives, and they gave something to the future.
What did these people — in your family and mine — all have in common? They all lived according to a dream — something we used to call the “American Dream”.
Unlike the current so-called American Dream — which seems to be about getting rich quick, without working very hard, or being particularly ethical — the old American Dream is about building a better future for our families and our community.
It’s a dream that I still believe in, not out of some dopey sense of patriotism, but out of a sense of awe.
It’s a dream that says we should work hard, play by the rules, give something back to our community.
It’s a dream that says creating a better future is more important than living comfortably in the present.
It’s a dream of a better future for our children, and all the people that come after us.
It’s a dream where we give a gift to people we may never meet.
It’s a dream that isn’t uniquely American, of course. Many people and cultures around the world share the values of hard work and building a better future. But it’s the dream that built much of this country.
But lately many of us seem to have forgotten that dream. Our leaders certainly don’t embody it — and we have fallen from the heights of John F. Kennedy, asking us to think of our country over ourselves, to the abysmal lows of Donald Trump, a cartoon narcissist and reality TV president.
And even ordinary Americans seem to have forgotten this dream. What do we do to ensure we leave a better world behind? Why are we obsessed with short-term material goods, rather than genuine human experiences? We even hear people say that we should try to live “in the moment” — as if that’s the secret to a meaningful life.
But it’s not.
The lesson our ancestors taught us is that the most meaningful life is not the one lived for ourselves, but it is the one lived for others. People you might not even live to see.
Why have we forgotten this important lesson? And what would it take for us to remember? I don’t know.
Maybe we need to reconnect ourselves to a higher purpose. Finding a deep, human connection to each other, to the world around us, and to the people who we will never meet.
I feel it every day. I feel a connection to the world, to the whales offshore, to the redwoods nearby, and to people all over. I feel for all of it. Worry about it. Hope for it.
And I ask: How can we help others find that connection? What would it take? How can we offer a better narrative to the world, one that brings us together around a more noble purpose, and reawaken us to the need to build a better world for our descendants?
In the meantime, I’m going to try to keep remembering the promise I made so many years ago. And I’ll try to keep it.
Dr. Jonathan Foley (@GlobalEcoGuy) is a climate & environmental scientist, writer, and speaker. He is also the Executive Director of Project Drawdown, the world’s leading resource for climate solutions.
These views are his own.
Copyright © 2015–2020, Jonathan Foley. All rights reserved.
