Lessons from Apollo 13 and My Mom

This Easter/Passover weekend has significance for me beyond religion in a couple of ways.

This is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 13.  Even those too young to remember the event have likely seen the Tom Hanks portrayal of astronaut Jim Lovell during a space excursion that was supposed to culminate in a moon landing.  Instead, they faced a crisis that threatened to leave them lost in space forever.  They never gave up, and neither did the Houston team responsible for getting them home.  The astronauts came up with inventive solutions to an explosion causing oxygen deprivation and declining power.  They battled isolation and depression and propped each other up.  They refused to despair or accept that theirs was a lost cause.  Ultimately, they landed safely.

This is also the 57th anniversary of my father’s death.  He was killed in a freak accident while piloting a helicopter, leaving my 37-year-old mother widowed with three young children to raise.  I was the oldest at 12.   She was devastated, but she rolled up her proverbial shirtsleeves and got on with life, going back to work and putting on a brave face for us.  Years later, her now-93-year-old best friend told me how she had been there for my mom during that challenging time, and how my mother had reciprocated later on.  My mother worked hard to find hope in her heart, and she passed that on to my brothers and me.   She taught us that anything is possible, and I believe we all have that inner strength if we summon it, with the help of our family and friends.

Today we find ourselves in a different kind of crisis, but the common thread is overwhelming adversity and how we deal with it.

I was on a Zoom call yesterday with two good friends in Italy and was struck by their positive mindset, not unlike that of the Apollo 13 crew and my mother.   This spirit is evident in so many others who are the true leaders in our midst…health care workers, truck drivers, delivery people, billionaires funding the acceleration of a game-changing vaccine, companies pivoting to manufacture ventilators and masks,  government leaders struggling to balance overselling or underselling the danger, brokers and coaches and other experts sharing important data and even more important encouragement, agents using this re-set time to improve skills and reach out to clients “just because,” and the friends who check on us to make sure we’re OK.

In truth, we live in a world that, on balance, has been kinder to us than we admit.  Yes, there are always challenges, but in general, we haven’t had to plumb the depths of suffering of foregoing generations.  As some have pointed out recently: “Our grandparents were asked to go to war; most of us are asked to sit on the couch.”

But even then, isolation and economic stress and depression can be real for anyone in this environment.  How do we get past that?  We muster our courage and determination and rediscover our moxie.  We practice on-the-spot ingenuity.  We pump each other up when we’re down.  We help others with fewer resources.  We teach our children and grandchildren the history and civics missing in today’s schools.  We fix the problems now and have the political debate later.  And we try to be kinder.  Or as someone I heard say, “Taste your words before you spit them out.”  Especially on social media.

We live in the most amazing country in the world, with the greatest opportunities despite very real obstacles.  We owe it to America, to the world, and to each other to reach inside and grab what it takes to land safely.  And the beautiful thing is that we always do.  We always do.