Before the beginning

Musings on love, hope, and the future of mankind

The picture is like so many millions of others: Three women smiling as they stand together on a warm spring day. One of them, a pretty young brunette in a pink dress, is very obviously pregnant.

But for me, this one is different. The woman on my left is my mother’s sister, Joanne McDaniel, whom I called “Jojo.” The one in the middle is my grandmother, Florence Elliott Wommack, named “Granmonce” by her grandchildren.

And the third woman, the pregnant one in the pink dress, is my mother, Peggy Wommack Murphy.

I discovered the picture inside a box of random family photos a month or so ago. An inscription on the obverse, written in pencil in a familiar script, dates it as May 1962.

And that makes it the first photo I had ever seen of my mother pregnant with me.

The picture was taken at my grandparents’ house on Old Holton Road in Macon, Georgia. Mama was 25, Jojo 27, and Granmonce 54. My parents were just getting started with their lives. Daddy, an aspiring surgeon, was just about to begin his senior year of medical school in Augusta. My mother, a high school French and English teacher, would never return to the classroom after I was born. My entire life—indeed, my whole identity as a person—was still an enigma wrapped inside a mystery. Everything in my universe was an aggregation of raw potential, with far more questions than answers.

To give a little historical context, it was around that time that Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” to John F. Kennedy. Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was hanged that month in Israel. The first Target store opened in Minnesota. The Beatles signed their first recording contract with EMI. Douglas MacArthur delivered his famous “Duty, Honor, Country” speech to the cadets at West Point. The Space Race was just getting started. The Rolling Stones were coalescing in England and would have their first public performance on July 12, 1962, about a week before I was born. “Lawrence of Arabia” was the Oscar winner for best picture that year, and “The Music Man” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” also made their debuts. Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, both published in 1962, would later be made into notable films. William Faulkner’s novel The Reivers won the Pulitzer Prize; he would soon die of a heart attack on July 6, 1962. After the cataclysmic armed conflicts of World War II and the Korean War, the world seemed to have entered a peaceful interlude, a time when the future seemed brighter and less fraught with conflict. That peaceful interlude was an illusion, of course. The festering boil of centuries of civil rights injustices was about to be lanced, at long last. The Vietnam War, in its earliest stages at that time, would escalate into a prolonged, painful misadventure that few could have anticipated at that point. The next decade would be filled with riots, assassinations, cultural change, and doubts about the viability of the American dream, a very human alchemy mixing disparate elements of war and peace, love and hate, vitriol and vindication, igniting a firestorm of change that would utterly transform this country and the world.

But on that fall afternoon, for those three women, the world was filled with hope.

In T.H. White’s novel The Once and Future King, the wizard Merlin lives his life backwards, aging from the future into the past. His understanding of what is to come is therefore both profound and sad, encompassing both impending tragedy and his inability to prevent it. I feel a bit like Merlin when I gaze upon my pregnant mother in that pink dress. Now, as a man of 63 years, I know far too much—and that knowledge is bittersweet.

I was blessed with wonderful parents. They were not perfect; no one is. But they loved me, my sister Jennifer, and brother Andy unconditionally, giving us all the capacity to love others in the same manner. We were protected and nurtured, encouraged and disciplined. Raised to be tolerant and forgiving, we were taught to treat others with respect. We learned courtesy to others, deference to our elders, the value of hard work, and the honor of service to others.

My mother would die far too soon, at age 50. Felled in her sleep by the rupture of an aortic aneurysm she never knew she had, she would never see her grandchildren grow up. Still, she gave me so much that I am grateful for. As a parent, and now as a grandparent, I have always tried to emulate my mother’s compassion, goodness, generous spirit, and loving heart, because those things were her lasting gift to me, molding me into the man I am today. If I can pass those values along to my children and grandchildren, a small part of my mother lives on inside of each of them—a temporal manifestation of the immortal soul of Peggy Murphy.

Mama has been dead for 38 years now. That truly seems impossible. Still, looking at her here, in this photograph, I see her youth and vitality, her optimism and her hope. It’s oddly contagious, echoing over the many decades hence, transmitted through years of memory and experience even as I plow through the vast uncharted waters of my own life.

The truth is, I’m no Merlin. I have no insight into what is to come. The news we see each day is certainly troubling. Hatred seems to have gained favor over compassion. Democracy is under assault. War is everywhere. There seems to be a pervasive darkness in the world, a suffusion of doubt and uncertainty that clouds everything, obscuring the horizon. If this were Middle-earth, Sauron would be gathering his army of orcs in Mordor, planning to end the reign of men.

But there have been dark times before. And when I look upon my mother’s face, her eyes filled with love, I have confidence that when all is said and done, good ultimately triumphs over evil.

Why do I believe this? Perhaps I am a Pollyanna, a perpetual glass-half-full sort of person, but I do believe in love. And I know that there are billions of others all over the world with the same perspective, billions who understand that love is more powerful than hatred, more vital than political influence or monetary gain, and more fundamental to the viability of humanity as a species than any other quality.

Martin Luther King once said that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Let’s all try to remember that—if not for ourselves, then for our mothers, who taught us all how to love.

Because that is how we save the future.