From Grief, Goodness

“She said her son was a beautiful soul, and something good will come of this.”

That’s a sentence from President Biden’s State of the Union speech, referring to what RowVaughn Wells said about the brutal death of her son, Tyre Nichols. If we can act collectively and responsibly to bring about the kind of policing reforms that will prevent this from happening again, then that will be the “something good.”

For this young man’s mother, who has just begun her own process of grieving, to be able even to imagine goodness of any kind right now — to encourage us to imagine it, too — is both amazing and imperative.

Sometimes the only activity that can allow us to keep slogging through our own devastating loss is helping to generate positive movement on the side of life, not death; to be constructive rather than destructive.

A Life Lost, A Project Born

Jenn Deware, a woman who works in the Special Education department at the high school where I also work, understands this dichotomy because she’s living with it every day.

A few years ago, she never dreamed that she would be managing (along with her ex-husband) a non-profit organization called “The Jake Deware Kindness Project.” That’s because she lost her son Jake, who had graduated from high school the previous June, in a dirt bike accident in early November, 2020. https://www.concordmonitor.com/Hometown-Heroes-After-tragedy-Jake-Deware-was-not-forgotten-37417154

A few months after the tragedy, sparked by an idea that came first from Jake’s colleagues at the plumbing company where he’d already made a deep impression, a number of people decided there might be a way for them to try to keep Jake’s habit of spreading kindness, everywhere he went, alive. How about starting a project that was all about giving back to the community, especially to the things that Jake was most passionate about? When you look at the photo above, showing a sign that was put out at a basketball game recently, you’ll see a partial list of recipients that the Project supports.

This is the cover of the brochure that spreads the word about the JDKP. Jake loved adventures of all kinds, so the main logo captures that. And here’s the Mission Statement:

I love that image of a “kindess ripple.” Understanding that I didn’t have the opportunity of knowing Jake myself, Jenn Deware explained, “He had so much good in him, and I don’t want that good to die.” She took the grief that was like lead in her heart, threatening to sink her, and she instructed it to start a kind of fire that would warm the community.

Turns Out, There’s a National Need for Kindness

Coming right up, on the heels of Valentine’s Day, is “National Random Acts of Kindness Day.” (Yes, it’s true that things are getting a little crowded on the calendar; I guess we all choose a stance on this and notice when our attention seems warranted. National School Counselors week just went by with very little fanfare, and chances are you didn’t make a big deal of National Pizza Pie Day either. That’s really OK.)

But did you know that there’s a whole foundation dedicated to this mission, of kindness? Read about it here. Maybe there’s a general feeling in our culture that we can’t just assume kids will be raised to become kind human beings: they need to be taught, nudged even. A big part of this process, too, is for them to be on the receiving end of kindnesses, large and small. And that includes being kind to themselves, too. We’re spelling it all out more often than we used to, not taking anything for granted.

In our school, on the wall opposite the band room, there’s now a Kindness Tree with leaves/sticky notes holding suggestions for things to do. I’m not sure yet whether these are just general suggestions, or whether students have already reported doing them…..but what’s especially interesting to me is that the activities are a mix of “do for others” and “do for yourself.”

Probably — and I’ll check back with Jenn on this — there’s a direct connection between the tree and the within-our-school program recently launched (by the JDKP) that involves the distribution of tokens, which look something like poker chips.

Last week, teachers and other staff received two of these in their mailboxes. We are being asked to observe students going through their regular days, noting moments of random kindness, and then offering tokens to those students — who will be surprised by the gift, because they were just caught being themselves: maybe giving a compliment to another student, helping to clean something up, greeting people cheerfully. After a certain period of time, maybe at the end of “Random Acts of Kindness” week, certain students will be recognized for how their various actions added up. And this will have nothing to do with their academic grades.

If you’d like to learn more about the Jake Deware Kindness Project, you can check out their Facebook page here.

Ways of Keeping Going

It’s not as if the grief that follows a devastating loss goes away with the launching a new initiative for positive action. But that new initiative, and working alongside other people with a common purpose, does provide an avenue for channeling that enormous grief, for re-directing it, in a way.

Have you witnessed any similar examples recently of people who have shown tremendous courage and heart in creating something new and beautiful after suffering great pain?

After “National Random Acts of Kindness Week,” by the way, comes Lent, and that lasts considerably longer. Hmm…