Forty Years Later
I was 12 years old on July 20, 1969. My parents woke me up in the night to watch the landing on the moon. I still remember that so well — the awe, the national pride, the sense that we can conquer anything.
I’m sure that for people older and younger than I am, there are other landmarks from your youth that you’ll never forget. What are they?
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This strikes me as an insightful piece.
Here is a description of the sessions offered to cancer patients who are trying to find meaning in their lives:
Ms. Wilker was too sick from chemotherapy last September to attend the first session, which introduced the group members to each other and to Frankl’s book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” about his years in Nazi concentration camps.
The second session focused on identity “BC and AD”—before cancer and after diagnosis. Ms. Wilker came in sweat clothes, with no makeup, unsure that she would return. “In a very thoughtful way, they made us think about our past and what cancer had taken away from us,” she recalls. “For me, it was everything. I was morphing into somebody I didn’t recognize.”
Most of the other patients in her group had been diagnosed with cancer years before and were facing its return. They talked about loving the theater or cycling and finding ways they could still enjoy them. “I thought, ‘I am looking at such courage here. I’ve got to pull myself together,’” Ms. Wilker says.
Sessions three and four focus on historical sources of meaning. Group members were asked to reflect on their families, the eras they grew up in—even the origins of their names.
Some of the women said they hadn’t gotten enough love when they were children, so they had worked hard to make their children feel loved.
“I was the youngest of six and had a glorious childhood” on New York’s Long Island, Ms. Wilker says. “My father would take me to church and we’d always stop at the bakery for anything I wanted, and enough for my friends. … And my mother was the greatest advocate you could ever want. But if you were faced with a problems, she’d want you to figure it out.”
Ms. Wilker also remembered times when she had been brave. She bucked IBM convention to give a newly promoted subordinate a top rating. Earlier in her career, she confronted the commander of a military base where she was working to demand a promotion, and got it. “If what you are looking for is courage, it helps to recognize that you’ve done some courageous things in the past,” she says.
Session five focuses on encountering life’s limitations, and Frankl’s message that even when everything else has been stripped away, people can still choose their attitude toward a situation and the meaning they take from it. Discussion questions include: what would be a meaningful death?
“By now, all the cards were out on the table. You had to be honest with yourself and think, ‘what could live on beyond yourself?’?” Ms. Wilker recalls. “For me, it’s letting everyone know to get a colonoscopy.”
“We tread lightly here; this is not supposed to be a scary session,” says Shannon Poppito, clinical psychologist who led many of the sessions. She says that what troubles many cancer patients most is not the fear of death, but unresolved issues from the past. It’s never too late to resolve them, says Dr. Breitbart, who notes that in Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” the main character becomes the person he wants to be in the last five minutes of his life.
The next two sessions focus on ways to transcend the limits imposed by cancer. “You are not dying of cancer—you are living with cancer until you pass. You can make it meaningful, even if all you can do is lie in bed,” says Dr. Poppito. Sometimes patients lament that they’ve always wanted to paint or write and will never have a chance. “You can find creative ways to realize the essence of those dreams,” she says. “You can be a writer by writing letters to your children.”
And simply experiencing life can be meaningful. For session seven, patients are asked to list things they love or find beautiful. Ms. Wilker talked about her husband and her 28 nieces and nephews and 62 grandnieces and grandnephews. She also talked about the view from her apartment that she was enjoying again and the Greek statue of Winged Victory that she had seen in her 20s in the Louvre.
“I realized that I didn’t have to work so hard to find the meaning of life,” she says. “It was being handed to me everywhere I looked.”
In the final session, group members present a “legacy project” that symbolizes the meaning they’ve found and want to pass on. One woman who loved New York City started writing a book about its sights and sound, Dr. Poppito recalls. Another who had always wanted to see Italy finally bought plane tickets. And a man who had alcoholic, abusive parents had recalled watching his father make woodcuttings—one of the few times they bonded. For his legacy project, he carved a woodcut of a Celtic Trinity intertwined with a heart. “He said, ‘This is what I will teach my children—that there is eternal love and that I will be there for them, far beyond my passing,’” says Dr. Poppito.
In Ms. Wilker’s group, a woman brought in a family recipe. Her identity involved carrying on family traditions had despaired because she could no longer use her arm to cook. She realized that her daughter could help and learn the traditions too.
Do you think we would have gone to the moon if JFK hadn’t been assassinated? Was that one way the country kept his memory alive, in spite of the costs of the program? Or did the Cold War/Space Race with the Russians play a large part in that as well, plus other factors?
John F. Kennedy
I was in elementary school. I vividly remember an announcement over the school speaker system announcing that our President had been shot. I sat in the second row, third seat back. No one spoke a word. That is quite a feat for a classroom full of elementary boys and girls. Our teacher had started crying, and was trying to quickly wipe away the tears. We were stunned but we had no idea how serious this was.
School was dismissed and I walked/ran home since I live a few blocks away.
I was glued to the TV. (Yes, you younger folks, we DID have TV then) When it was announced by Walter Cronkrite, “From Dallas Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 PM central standard time” He was visibly choked up and I had never seen emotion on a newscaster before – My parents weren’t home at that time and I just sat there, frozen.
I will never forget that moment. Kennedy’s election coverage was the first I had ever watched and I viewed him as a very great man.
I continued watching the news coverage every spare moment and I was again left speechless when Jack Ruby shot Oswald on live TV! (Note: This was the era before violence became commonplace on TV)
January 28, 1986 – I was a sophomore in high school when the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster took place. It was perhaps the most solemn moment in my public school memory.
Novermber 9, 1989 – It was just a little over a year after I had graduated high school when they started tearing down the Berlin Wall, and I remember someone saying how history books will be rewritten.
April 19, 1995 – I was living in Albuquerque, NM, and remember watching TV when the news broke in about the Oklahoma City Bombing. I called my Mom at work and we talked for about an hour as I updated her and she relayed it to people around her.
April 20, 1999 – I could not believe what I was watching… Columbine School Shooting
September 11, 2001 – I was living in Bel Air, MD. I had just transfered to a small Christian College there and had just finished a class. One of the students in the group that was waiting to enter the building said, “a plane just hit the Pentagon.” Little did we realize that by the time we would arrive back to the dorm that just an hour south and three hours north of our campus, tremendous loss and chaos was taking place. The campus was just 15 miles away from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, where a great deal of the militaries weapons and vehicles are tested. The next year of class was rarely filled with an open window as the noise of ammunition being tested rose exponentially.
Reagan assassination attempt: I can even remember the classroom I was sitting in when a teacher poked their head in and said, “President Reagan has been shot.”
Space Shuttle: Same teacher. We were in Music History class when the principal stuck his head in and said, “The space shuttle has exploded.” We stopped class and went to watch.
Berlin Wall: I was sitting at my grandmother’s house, nursing my first baby, and watching TV when they broke in with early reports. I remember thinking, “Oh my goodness. They’re going to come out here and kill all of those people on international television.” I couldn’t even comprehend a world where the Berlin Wall wasn’t a symbol of death.
Columbine: I was driving across town with a van full of children, listening to the radio and hurting for every child in the world. It was horrible.
September 11: I was getting ready to go to a community Bible study when my husband called and told me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center and to turn on the TV to see if I could learn more. I pictured a little John Denver kind of plane, but turned everything on just in time to see the second plane crash into the second tower. It was a surreal experience. I’m not much of a television watcher, but I was glued for two days before making myself turn it off.
As a military family, we lived in Germany for over 3 years. My husband received official permission for us to drive nonstop to Berlin, through East Germany (then Communist for you younger readers) to divided Berlin – British, American and Russian zones. Our car tags indicated our US military status, and we followed protocol by not stopping at Checkpoint Charlie, manned by the Russians, but drive to the head of the line and proceed on through. We took a U. S. military bus tour of East Berlin, behind the Berlin Wall maintained by armed soldiers. It’s easy to forget the wall was built to keep the East Germans in.
When the Wall came down 24 years later I was in Rio de Janiero. My daughter and I had parked the car at the bottom of a steep hill to walk into the favela (slum) to visit a church member. When we walked in their TV was showing the Wall being knocked down. What a dramatic ending to the Cold War.
I have very vivid memories of the Challenger explosion even though I was only 10 at the time. Back then, the Space Shuttle was still new and fascinating and they would show the launches on TV. My mom would record them on the VCR so I could watch in the afternoon after coming home from school. That was a significant launch because they were going to take a teacher up. Our teacher had told us about it the year before because she had applied for the position, but she obviously didn’t get it. We were lining up to come in from morning recess when whispers started going down the line that the space shuttle had blown up. When I got home from school, my mom allowed me to watch the tape and I remember wathing it over and over and I remember Reagan’s speech that night when talked about those astronauts reaching out to touch the face of God.
It is interesting that this anniversary and your post are occurring in the wake of Walter Cronkite’s death. Others have mentioned events like Oklahoma City, Columbine and 9/11 as similar events. I wonder though if the generations behind me (born in 1975) will have such events. The advent of the 24/7 news cycle and the cable news channel have altered how we view the news. We are constantly bombarded with information and every single event is blown up to larger than life proportions so that the news cycle can keep running. Witness such recent stories as Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith, Casey Anthony and yes, even Mary Winkler. The younger generations are so used to tuning out the noise, you wonder if they would notice something like the moon landing today. To capture their memories in the same way, an event has to be on the scale 9/11 or even greater for them to acknowledge it and have their consciousness affected by it.
Mine, but not necessarily in chronological order:
First – December 7, 1941 – two days before my birthday and as a very young child I was terribly upset that the Japanese had interrupted my birthday celebration.
Also, the euphoria nationwide -”we’ll beat ‘em in a year.” “They’ll wish they’d ever touched the States!!” and our surprise and sorrow to hear of all the loss of life and wondering if the war would ever end and our loved ones come home? We also wondered when we’d be able to buy a new pair of shoes and have a cake for birthday celebrations. Shoe leather was needed for our troops and sugar for their diets, so these two items along with a long list of others were rationed.
Then – announcement of FDR’s death. I was walking home from school with a school mate/friend. We leaned against a wall of shrubs, crying our eyes out. I don’t even remember getting home.
JFK, MLK, BFK assassinations – student riots, Viet Nam war, my brother off to that war flying helicopters – holding my breath until he came home from 2nd and final tour.
Birth of my first child and a year, seventeen days later, birth of the second girl – first hand experience with sense of defeat brought on by failed marriage and divorce, which to my shame initiated a long separation of intimacy with my LORD.
“Mister Gorbachov, tear down this wall!!!” and its subsequent destruction.
November 3, 1986 – announcement in baptism of my reconciliation to my LORD and God. Hallelujah! This is the most important of all other memories!!!! o/
John Glenn’s words on his first orbital flight and JKF’s responding question about the little specks that circled the vehicle – ” What did they say to you, John?” LOL
Landing and walking on the moon!!!!
Deaths of three astronauts in a fire.
My grandmother’s call shortly after her 103rd birthday, announcing she was going home to Jesus that night and doing just that! And you wonder where my determination comes from??
My father’s death.
9/11 – Ever since that morning, I still experience a nanosecond of fear before turning on the radio first thing in the morning – what will be today’s tragedy and then a quick prayer of thanksgiving when the news is filled with the banality of daily weather & news. PTL!! o/
And not to be overlooked, the day I learned the difference between hair conditioner and body moisturizer. [Couldn't help myself, Mike. That tweet was just too funny to let go by unrecognized. LOL ]
Long life brings long list of remembrances. Thank You, LORD for those events and memories, both sad and joyful!! o/
I have no insight on the first walk on the moon, too young to remember. But I did love the piece you linked on cancer. “Living with cancer until you pass, not dying of cancer.” I have been blessed to be around so many people whose lives become even more full and meaningful when diagnosed. An illness like cancer brings an appreciation of life and the moments within that were taken for granted beforehand. Thanks for that link. I think I wrote once on my blog that as much as I wish my son had not been diagnosed with cancer, the gifts that came along with it were invaluable. God works all things for the good.
JFK was assassinated during my first year of teaching. We did not have a TV in the classroom; and I so remember our principal, a very scholarly gentleman near retirement, coming into the classroom and telling the students what had happened. A few minutes later, I looked out the window as the flag slowly slid down the flagpole.
9/11 Standing in chapel at Arlington Christian School and one of the teachers coming into the cafeteria and telling us about the first crash. Being near the Atlanta airport, the rest of the day was filled with fear of what might happen next. I had become a children’s librarian by then and spent the afternoon reading to children who had no idea how the world had changed.
I thought I watched the first moonwalk at a reasonable hour? I was 8 and at my aunt’s house just down the street, but I know I had a bed time.
When the lunar landing was broadcast live I was asleep, but I watched the replay with my dad the next day. I knew nothing about the space program – I was seven years old and more interested in playing in the water sprinkler outside. As we watched the replay, I saw my dad wipe tears away from his face for the first time in my life. I asked him why he was crying and he said that he was just extremely proud.
Well, Kent, it was a reasonable hour — unless you were a kid who always liked to go to bed early. My mom always says that one thing they never had to do with me was tell me to go to bed. My whole life I’ve liked to go to bed before most people and get up before most people!
My memories of watching the astronauts land on the moon is in the full daylight hours—–like late morning to early afternoon sometime. Is the ‘memory card’ in my head wrong?
Being born in 1970, my memories start with some previously mentioned: the Reagan assassination attempt, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11.
I’ll throw in a couple of others. I remember being in the Rialto in Searcy when I heard about the earthquake stopping the World Series in October 1989.
I remember holding my two-year-old son to watch Cal Ripken break Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games played streak on September 6, 1995. Lou Gehrig had been one of my favorite ballplayers to read about when I was growing up and I used to not want his streak to be broken. But I thought there was no finer person to break it than Cal Ripken. If there is an unbreakable record, Ripken’s may be it.
It looks like they landed around 3:30 in the afternoon, but they didn’t do the actual moonwalk until around 10 pm, which was definitely past your bedtime. I remember watching them land in the afternoon, but what really sticks out in my memory is that I was at Grandma Mitts’ house and she would not watch it – she said, “if God had wanted us to go to the moon, he would have given us wings.”
Challenger – Was home from school sick (probably faking) and watched it live on TV. I was 9 (almost 10) years old.
Columbine – I had been out of college for a year and was just about to be married.
9/11 – Panic. My wife was teaching in Manhattan that morning. Some of the kids in her school lost their parents that day. I knew she was alright, but it was a logistical nightmare to get her out of Manhattan and back home.
Thanks for the clarification, Randy. I knew that I had been swimming on a vacation in Idaho, & we hurried back on a beautiful day in the great NW to go inside & watch the TV. While it was so exciting to see men land on the moon, us kids were a little bummed about having to leave the fun of the Boise River! And, thanks for jogging our memory of the moonwalk being later that night—-Mike’s post made sense, after all.
I’m old enough, barely, to remember the first moon landing. I was at Camp Manatawny in Pennsylvania. Wasn’t old enough to be a camper, but when your mom and dad volunteer for the week you get to go too. That night, I didn’t understand why all those adults were crowded around such a little TV. Seems like one of the older kids tried to explain it to me. The fireflies were much more interesting.
Years later, I looked up and read some of the news coverage of the event. The worldwide euphoria just afterwards was way off the charts. President Nixon said it was the greatest event in the history of the world since the Creation. And Golda Meir suggested that the event might usher in the new era foretold by the prophets of ancient Israel.
Those kinds of reactions reflected our over-the-top confidence in science and technology. The world has since changed.
From the poor dirt roads of NE Arkansas to flying the Himalayans in an unarmed transport, my father used to brag that he had an eighth grade education. Yet he could do calculus in his head and worked on the space program at McDonald Aircraft in St. Louis. So of course, we were glued to the little black and white TV in the den. I’m sorry that I can’t remember his actual reaction to the touchdown and walk, but I can only imagine being a small part of history being made.
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was primitive at best, using the earliest form of this technology. It’s curious to note how this feat was accomplished using such limited code, as the average digital watch, I-pod, 1998 Taurus or IBM 8086 PC had much more capabilities that all of this spacecraft. Yet on the other hand, it’s kind of sad that I now have so much power in my laptop, but choose to use it playing or just spell checking my letters.
My dad watched the first Saturn rocket test fire so we were all around the TV for every launch. The moon landing was so incredible to this junior high kid and moved my dad enough that he bought a rather expensive Super8 copy of the footage as soon as it was available. I watched it several times and took it to school at least once. But even clearer in my memory banks is the Christmas reading of the Creation by the astronauts of Apollo 8 and the prayers for days for the crew of Apollo 13.
On September 11, 2001, my daughter broke her ankle in her high school p.e. class moments after the second plane hit. We and all of the hospital staff cried for the people who so desperately needed help and there we were in an empty ER.
A less historic milestone memory: Roy Acuff, the Opry star, was the person who told me Elvis Presley had died.
Being born in 1964, I don’t remember the first moon landing. But I remember later ones, and was always fascinated by them. I remember watching some of the coverage of Apollo 13.
Nixon’s resignation.
When Reagan was shot. I heard it on the radio while driving home from high school. I broke the news to my Mom when I got home, and watched the coverage on TV.
Watched the coverage of the Challenger explosion in the Harding student center.
Obviously not growing up in the US, my marker moments are different.
But let me share anyway. I remember in 1990 (I was 23)in South Africa, I looked up and saw breaking news on TV — Nelson Mandela had been released from prison. Wow – a moment of such huge magnitude it took my breath away. I remember voting for him in the first democratic election South Africa had ever seen. I remember the pride and emotion as he was elected. Truly, one of the last great statesmen of the world.
I remember watching Kerri Strug stick that vault landing with a sprained ankle in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. We all stood in the living room staring at the TV, and my dad said, “You’re watching history here, girls.”
I was 15 when the Columbine shootings happened – that was a dark week at our school.
And 9/11 happened four days before my 18th birthday. We hardly did any work in school that week – just watched news coverage for hours. I did decide to go ahead and have my birthday party, and I’m glad I did. But we all knew our lives would never be the same.
Ok – thanks Mike and Randy – 10 pm was pretty late for me as an 8 year old – I guess parents were in a giving mood that night.
For me personally, I remember all the details surrounding 9/11. As for the moon walk…. you will need to ask my parents…. let’s put it this way…. I will turn 40 in exactly nine months….. hmmmmmm….
I will turn 40 in a few months, so I have heard many stories of my mother resting her very-pregnant belly on the couch while watching the amazing event.
A child of a teacher, and a student at a small school who befriended many of the teachers, the Challenger explosion was HUGE to me in January of 1986. I was a junior in high school. My mother had applied to be the teacher aboard. My math teacher (a favorite) had applied to be the teacher aboard. I grieved with the students of Christa McAuliffe who watched their beloved teacher be lost forever.
Yes, of course, 9/11. My children were small — my oldest was 3 weeks into kindergarten. I felt so completely out of control as a mother (as if I ever am!) and had to truly learn to surrender all to His power at that moment.