2 min read
ByJeanne Pepper, Jeanne Pepper
Six months ago, university student Blaze Bernstein was killed in a California park. His mother reflects on his legacy.
June 8, 2018 10:02In America, we celebrated Mother’s Day last month for the first time in twenty years without my son Blaze Bernstein with us.
Yes, I am sad and devastated. To lose a child to violence and horror could certainly make us cynical people, looking at the world through the lens of bitterness and contempt.
But I learned from this nightmare that how I react to what happened to our family and my son is my choice. I can choose life, or I can choose something much less.
I know now that it doesn’t have to be the last good chapter in the story of my life: it can be the impetus for the greatest acts of kindness that people can perform.
Since Blaze’s death, my family was thrust into a nationwide spotlight as we chose acts of loving kindness as a response to the hate and intolerance that formed a backdrop for his murder.
How did my husband and I turn to philanthropy and tikun olam — the practice of loving people and of repairing our world — as a response to the loss and devastation that we experienced? How is it that we have been able to inspire people around the world to do amazing things in their communities to improve the human condition and make kindness a normal part of life?
I am often asked this. I always think to myself that, given the opportunity, the natural response to trauma is to fight back, to neutralise the threat, to repair the devastation and, above all else, to survive.
I am a survivor — never a victim. At 13 years of age, I survived a violent attack in my home from a stranger who woke me in the darkness of night with a gun to my head. I repeatedly told the man that if my father heard me screaming, he would come with a shotgun and finish him. When my screams began, he hopped back out the window and I lived.
I was told that I probably would have been kidnapped or killed, had it not been for my quick thinking.
That morning, after spending the rest of the night in the police department being interviewed by law enforcement, I was sent to school. I will never forget my mother saying: “if you go to school, no one will know it was you when the story is reported in the paper today.”
Traumatised and confused, I went to school and we never spoke of it again. No therapists, no excuses; no problems in my life did I ever associate with or blame upon this. But how?
Maybe it was then that I learned you can be a victim or you can be a survivor — that it is your choice.
Survivors don’t let the evil of others hold us back. We celebrate our strengths and we use them to show our detractors, the people that would see us destroyed or annihilated, that we cannot be defeated.
We let them know that we will fight hate with love. We will not become haters, criminals or animals in response to our losses. We won’t seek revenge for Blaze’s murder. We will seek a better world. They will not win. That is what we do.
The inspiration to encourage others to join in doing good for my son’s legacy, came to me as a choice after Blaze was found murdered. I could use the media platform we were given to go on a rampage, screaming for justice and revenge.
But my husband and I made a choice to use our platform to encourage everyone to stand up to hate, intolerance and bigotry, to do the things that my son would have done had he survived, to do good for Blaze.
Apparently, the world was ready to hear this message and over 17,000 people have heard the call. They are doing great things every day and reporting it on the Blaze It Forward Facebook group.
We like to think this is Blaze’s legacy and we know that it will be our legacy too: we leave behind a better, kinder world.
