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By Teri Rizvi

Instead of sitting in a crowded New York Yankees’ stadium, we hung out in our family room more than 600 miles away and watched the pomp and circumstance of Ali’s graduation from NYU’s Silver School of Social Work play out on the TV screen.

Perched on the couch, our son wore his NYU graduation cap and high school gown, coincidentally the perfect hue of purple. My eyes glistened with unexpected tears.

Dean Neil B. Guterman’s words to the graduating class felt prophetic: “Out of crisis are the seeds of change, the seeds of transformation, the seeds of growth, the seeds of healing and advancing compassion and social justice. That’s what social work is all about. It’s taking the most difficult situation and finding the opportunity for elevation.”

The pandemic has forced us to up our game, dipping into a well of resiliency, vulnerability and courage in the face of an unknown, but now more hopeful future with vaccines slowly being rolled out. For all we’ve lost during these lost days, we’ve gained in wisdom.

And, for Ali, wisdom beyond a piece of parchment.

“I’m going back to New York in a week. You don’t understand, I’m in a relationship,” he told me when he arrived home for spring break in March, unaware that it would not be safe enough to return until after Father’s Day.

With airlines grounded and New York in lockdown, his last semester of graduate classes moved to Zoom rooms. In the silhouette of his childhood bedroom window, I watched him from the patio as he donned headphones and participated in remote classes. His emotionally challenging fieldwork as a mental health counselor at Riker’s Island fell to the wayside and his licensing exam postponed, like all of his plans on the journey to graduation.

Meanwhile, in his adopted city, hospitals arranged temporary morgues, set to the incongruous soundtrack of wailing ambulance sirens and New Yorkers singing The Beatles “The Yellow Submarine” and other nightly songs with one another from their apartment windows. In despair, always hope.

Still, life, forever a mystery, had thrown a curve ball to my son. Time stretched out like an endless country road slicked with rain, begging him to slow down. Like a contemporary Thoreau, he retreated to the woods behind our house to learn the lessons not found in a textbook.

The cold March air filled with the whirring of a chainsaw as he cut through a quarter of a century of neglect with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker. He hooked a wagon to the riding mower and brought the hewn logs out of the crevices of the woods and carefully stacked them for firewood. He burned the brush and cut a path through the weed-choked four acres, creating a natural oasis of tranquility.

By night, he experimented in the kitchen, throwing a medley of spices in a rice, tofu and vegetable dish as we shared recipes and conversed about his dreams. He arranged a Zoom cooking date with his girlfriend quarantining with her family in Florida, went on socially distanced walks with a friend, taught himself to embroider and flew a kite in the outstretched front yard. Part of the colorful kite and tail remain stuck on a high tree branch, gently blowing in the distance in a symbolic dance. These days, like the tree’s boughs, will eventually release their grasp.

March turned into April, then into May. A black man died under the knee of a white police officer, sparking the greatest civil unrest since the 1960s. A president downplayed a pandemic that has now taken hundreds of thousands of lives, disproportionately the elderly and the poor. A deeply divided, broken nation turned on one another, reminding us how fragile life can be in the face of uncertainty and fear.

Against this cacophony, Ali planted sunflowers, blueberry bushes, tomatoes — and 50 tiny fir trees deep in the woods. Planting a tree is a show of faith in the future.

Now back in Brooklyn, he’s carved out a new life counseling HIV-positive adults, many who have faced homelessness. Always a gardener, he’s scattering seeds of healing and transformation.

With every seed, the promise of new life.

— Teri Rizvi

Teri Rizvi is the founder and director of the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop at the University of Dayton, where she serves as executive director of strategic communications.