Contest Speech…

On Wednesday, March 10^th, I deliver the following speech in the second level of the Toastmaster's International speech contest, having won my own club contest on February 22^nd. Wish me luck!!

 

Salvation Through Tragedy

What is the pinnacle of every new toastmaster's goal? The achievement of their Competent Communicator designation. On September 21^st of last year I was poised for that achievement. I was as nervous as a bride but I was ready – or at least I thought I was! Madame Contest Chair and most honoured judges – nothing could have prepared me for the tragedy that would shortly see my world fall apart.
With minutes to go before the meeting I turned off my cell phone and any stray thoughts of children and work, blissfully ignorant of events that had just unfolded. Then, beckoned by our president, I found myself face to face with a police officer. In a moment macabre and surreal I listened to him deliver the dreaded speech of every mother's nightmare, "your son, Kyle, has been in a car accident!" By this time, my sister, Janis, was at my side. She clutched my arm and ordered, "Kyle is ok! You have to stay calm so you can see him!" "Stay Calm".... "See Kyle" - inward hysteria, outward calm – a walking contradiction!

 In his novel, Victory, Joseph Conrad declares "nothing is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that lacerate our intelligence and our feelings." That evening held a life time's worth of painful contradictions. At the hospital, I scooped my 10 year old Kyle, into my arms and held on tightly as he sobbed into my ear his affirmation of life, "I love you mom!" I looked over his shoulder at his friend, Mark among whose family Kyle had stayed that evening. Mark was in shock; unable to come to terms with the accident he and Kyle had survived but which had claimed the life of their driver, Paul Tavares, the wonderful man who would have become Mark's step-father; then, the most striking image of all, my friend, Mandy – Mark's mother, standing against the wall, eyes fixed and wide. In one horrific moment I perceived the insane battle being waged for dominance over her senses – soaring joy that her only son was alive and abject grief that the love of her life was no more.


Then, proving that even young minds need to tame chaos with logic, Kyle begged me through his tears; "why did this happen to me?" I tried to collect my thoughts before answering.
My beliefs – vaguely defined and lightly considered came crashing down around me as I reeled in the face of disaster.
Disaster brought about by a cataclysmic confluence of cosmic fate and shameful, human perfidy. Paul's car had been hit by a drunk driver coming home from celebrating the return that very day of his driver's license from a prior drunk driving charge.
Faced with a world he now realized could turn nightmarish in a second; Kyle felt terrified. He needed to have restored some measure of hope and empowerment. So I chose my words carefully. I told him the story of how special he was; how during my pregnancy with him the MS symptoms that had plagued me for months magically disappeared. I told him how the nurse came to me immediately after he was born and said; "this baby is blessed" then showed me his umbilical cord! It was tied in a knot! I told him that he had a gift for caring and because of this experience he could help others by telling them about the importance of seatbelts and the evils of drinking and driving. My words did not work magic but they gave Kyle a positive framework of reference from which to reconstruct his shattered view of the world.
I couldn't sort out my own feelings until the day after Paul's funeral when alone, I found myself at the crash site. Signs of horror were everywhere - flattened grass, a broken fence, glass and debris. I sat down on a tree stump and released my pain in a torrent of tears. I mourned the loss of innocence in 2 young boys who were no longer immortal; boys who had acquired terrible knowledge that burdened their minds and invaded their dreams – knowledge of what it feels like to roll over and over in a car, what broken windshield glass looks like, what the last 2 unrepeatable words were that might escape from a man's mouth before he dies.
But is this the end of the story? Do pain and suffering have the final word? NO! They do not!
Socrates, the father of western philosophy, told us that "the unexamined life is not worth living." In the aftermath of this tragedy I examined my life and learned some valuable lessons.

• I learned that life is too precious to lead half-awake. I do not want to squander my time here on earth. I want to live consciously, emphatically and deliberately.
• I learned that life can change or expire in an instant and that life and love should never be taken for granted.
• I learned that a mother's love cannot always protect her child but for its power of healing and softening the blow, there is no substitute.
• Lastly, I learned that when life gives us a test that challenges our faith we better know what our beliefs are because only that knowledge will see us through the darkness.

These lessons provide the cornerstone upon which to build a life of greater joy and deeper meaning. At the end of a week of painful contradictions, these lessons came as a welcomed blessing of hope and healing and, in a miraculous twist of fate, turned my TRAGEDY into my SALVATION.
...Madame Contest Chair!