Survival Guilt is Easy

It is easy to have survivor guilt. Missed your plane connections - and the plane goes down and you weren't on it. Skipped work - and there is a gasline explosion down the street. A tornado mows a destructive swath across your town - and you were outside its path with no damage to your house. Born with a desired skin-color and get a good education - while less fortunate folks live in poverty. Canceled that trip to Europe at the last minute and a volcano blows in Iceland - stranding people in airports by the thousands.Sometimes you breathe a sigh of relief and consider yourself lucky. But at others times when you think of people caught in tragedy that you barely escaped, the guilt can seep in.

Here, at the Nagel household, the two of us move forward in our house-remodeling projects. Fortunate to have the income and the skills to make a beautiful house even more beautiful. While a half mile away, folks are still clearing trees downed by the tornado a week ago, filing insurance claims for damage to their homes, and grieving the loss of shade-trees that have sheltered their homes for years.

A few more miles away in north Minneapolis, people's misfortune is far greater. Forty percent if them are renters with less than responsible landlords even in good times. Now they wait and live in temporary shelters or with friends and family, unsure if their landlords will make repairs. Other houses are beyond repair - and people who had little before the tornado now have nothing.

In Joplin, it is difficult to imagine how anyone in the path of a far more destructive tornado could had survived. It looks as though everything was ground up into little pieces and spit out. As our favorite weatherman says, other natural weather disasters give warning. When a hurricane is moving toward land, there is time enough to board up windows and leave. A snowstorm heading your way - time enough to stock up the pantry and wait it out. But tornados are different, he says. There is no predicting when they will form - and people often have only minutes to seek shelter.

Meanwhile, we are painting the walls in the bathroom. A lovely color called Cancun Sand. We will go to bed tonite in our nice home, with the satisfaction of one more step done toward completion of ourenovation. And not indulge in guilt, because there are people who have no homes and whose future is most uncertain.

What does a person do with the goodness that life bestows, when others suffer? When we were younger we would be helping the cleanup after the tornado. Chainsaw in hand, we would clear damaged trees and offer our support to people who survived the terror of the howling wind. We would have organized work parties to go to Joplin this summer. And we would have let people know that we cared about what happened to them - because sometimes that is the most important thing to give. Doing is a good antidote for survivor guilt.

Growing older sets some unwanted physical limits for us. A chainsaw in my hands would be a dangerous thing! Our respectives calls to be of service to people in need has been replaced by a call to write - in the hope that our writing will make a difference to someone. Just as the books we have read by others all our lives have been a source of wisdom and inspiration for us. Writing is a different kind of giving back than showing up with a chainsaw - and takes some getting used to. And our careful management of money means we have more to give to others than when we were educationg ourselves and our children.

The thing with survivor guilt is that it serves no good purpose - even when it prods a person to "do something."  How much better to have gratitude for all of what we have at the moment.