You can’t outgrow hope

by Annie Hardison-Moody

For a lot of reasons, I’ve been thinking this week about hope. Key among those reasons is a piece that Monica Coleman posted on her beautiful mind blog, Ordinary Saints.  There, she writes about pregnancy loss and the trenches of grief that often surround us when we try to find hope or joy or life in the midst of loss.  It’s difficult (and feels, at times, impossible) to see life where you only know death.  But, she writes, there are saints among us who show us that hope is possible, even when we can’t find it.

With my colleague, Dara Bloom, I’m working on a project with the women’s committee at the Islamic Association of Raleigh (IAR). Maryam Funmilayo, a gifted and passionate nutrition educator, has been holding classes with immigrant and refugee women there through our Faithful Families Eating Smart and Moving More program (which I direct), to connect spiritual and physical health in an effort to help faith communities have access to healthier foods and physical activity.  Through that project, we learned that the women at the IAR wanted greater access to fruits and vegetables that they grew or ate in their home countries. We started out with Maryam offering tours at the local farmer’s market, but the project has evolved into working on a community and school garden, and doing some container garden workshops so that women can grow food from their home countries here in the U.S.  Dara and I have loved working with this group of women – when we show up on a Friday night for a meeting, the room is always filled with smiles, good food, hugs, and such care and concern for us.  The project has been a model, for me, of what academic and community partnerships should look like.

So you can imagine how we felt when we learned that the three students who were killed in Chapel Hill this week were members at the IAR, and they grew up going to the Al-Iman school, where we are working with Cooperative Extension to revitalize the garden.  The funeral was yesterday.  It was across the street from the school, the site where soon we hope to watch the garden come alive again.

Yesterday at the service, Monica’s post kept coming back to me.  Her words echoed as I saw them carry the three coffins away: “I want my babies back.”

I feel like all I write about on this blog is loss.  But it is so hard to talk about, and so I write, hoping that in doing so I can better understand grief.  But it’s incomprehensible.  I try to imagine what might be going through the minds of the parents of these young people – Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha.  I hear Monica’s words again: “I want my babies back.”

The father of the two women who died, Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, spoke at the funeral, encouraging all of us who were there to learn about Deah, Yusor, and Razan.  He urged us to learn about the example that they set for others in the world – the way they cared for their communities, the way they honored God with their works.

The hope they had for a better world, where does (did) it go?

Their former teacher, Mussarut Jabeen, spoke to NPR this week, to follow-up on the beautiful Story Corps piece she recorded with Yusor in 2014.  In it, Jabeen recalls their bright smiles, their caring hearts, and the hope that Yusor had for a world where we could show love instead of hate:

Jabeen remembers when Deah was growing up, he was getting so tall that he started to outgrow her.

“And because I’m a short person, he would stand behind me and put his hand over my head,” she said. “And I just told him, ‘Deah, you can never outgrow my heart.’ “

“You can never outgrow my heart.”  Is that hope?  If so, it’s still here, even if we can’t feel it right now.

 

 

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