It's easy to think there's nothing good in the world these days. What's hard is to see how much good there really is.
Because that takes work.
Being cynical takes exactly no work. Just turn on the TV or scroll Facebook on your phone. There's a lot of bad news out there to feed your need to post I told you so.
If you're one of the rare people who still like to read something longer than a paragraph, there's plenty of people happy to write about how bad things are in a thousand words or less.
Like me.
It's easy to write about the bad stuff. It practically writes itself. What's hard is to write about the good stuff.
Which brings me to a funeral. I told you it wasn't easy.
But sometimes it takes a funeral to crystalize for you just how much there is to celebrate. Some say if you can make a positive difference in one other person's life, you've done well. What is it if you've made that kind of difference in hundreds of lives?
The life we mourned was an educator, loving wife, a devoted great grandmother, a devout Christian, and a true force of nature. Not a hurricane or other destructive force.
She was the cooling breeze on a sweltering day, the drizzling rain on a parched garden, the rising sun on a troubled night. If you knew Carol Ison, you knew love.
Carol Ann Fields Ison was born at Scuttle Hole Gap on Cowan Creek in Letcher County, the youngest of nine children. She lost her father to a coal mining accident at two and contracted polio in junior high.
Junior high was actually a one room schoolhouse by the creek. It was where she met the love of her life and it was where the two of them would first teach. It was in the ashes of that old school she, her husband, and several others built a community center that today, well over fifty years later, is recognized nationally for programs and services that improve the conditions of their remote community and all of eastern Kentucky.
Carol never forgot the kindness that was shown to her as a child. From the much older siblings who cared for her to the schoolteacher who drove her from to head of the holler to the tiny schoolhouse every day because there was no need for the bus to pick up polio victims for school.
She understood and applied pay it forward long before it was a social media meme.
I met Carol a little over twenty years ago after I'd began seeing her daughter. From the beginning, she treated me like family. I soon realized I wasn't special because she treated everyone like family.
But over the years, I felt more like a son. It's amazing to gain a mentor and role-model after you've hit your 40s, but I got that blessing. There was never a time she didn't put me at ease, didn't say just the right thing even when she didn't know what troubled me.
So when she passed this weekend, gracefully in her sleep, it did not take long for the tributes to begin rolling in. The lines in the church at her visitation and funeral looked more like those for a revered national dignitary than for a once poor girl with polio from the deep hills of east Kentucky.
There is so much good in the world. There are so many people working every day to make things better for their neighbor. Carol and her partner Kendall planted thousands of seeds over the years.
It only took a funeral to see just how much fruit those seeds truly bore.