Read the full transcript of Laura Formentini’s talk titled “Love in Action” at TEDxBellarmineU 2023 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
A Tragic Phone Call
LAURA FORMENTINI: It’s a bright morning in August 2019. I am in Africa, in rural Ethiopia, just south of Addis Ababa, the capital, collecting stories from some of the locals for my work. Suddenly, my phone rings. It’s my older son, Shane, calling from the States.
“Mom, please sit down. I have to tell you something.” I freeze. My gut says that whatever that something is, it will be awful. His next words are something a mother never wants to hear. “They found Blaze in a park. He killed himself.” Blaze was my youngest son. He was only 21 years old. It found him 8,300 miles away from me on the other side of the world. Suddenly, everything went dark.
The Aftermath
I felt like I was going to faint. On that day, I found out that my son had taken his life. One of the Ethiopians I was working with grabbed my arm and guided me to sit down. I was speechless.
I started crying and just couldn’t stop. I was so shaken that I felt like I was going to lose my mind. But I didn’t have time to lose my mind because I knew I had to get back immediately to the States, which was an impossible task.
It took us about an hour to drive from the rural area where we were to Addis Ababa, the capital, to find a travel agency. It took another two hours for me to find my itinerary. I’d fly by myself from Addis Ababa to Dublin, Ireland, to Boston, Massachusetts, and finally to Denver, Colorado. It would be a total of 42 hours by myself. By now, I am mentally and emotionally utterly exhausted.
My first flight wouldn’t leave for another 10 hours. How would I ever make it? How? By myself.
An Unexpected Angel
By now, there were about six farmers from Ethiopia left in my group. Soon they all had to leave because of their own obligations. They were still trying to take care of me, making phone calls and talking amongst themselves. I wasn’t even functioning.
All I could think of was my son was dead. I was still reeling from the news that he killed himself. It was such a blur. But all I know is what came next impacted me in such a powerful way that it changed the course of the next four years of my life.
A stranger, a friend of the group whom I didn’t know, had volunteered to stay with me that day. Over the next 10 hours, I shared my personal history and the news that my son had taken his life with a stranger, as he held my hand and consoled me. He took me to lunch, to an archaeological museum, and even showed me the building where he and his family lived. For over 10 hours, this man I hadn’t known held my hand almost the entire time.
When it came time for him to leave, I had one question. “Why did you do all of that for me? You have no idea who I am.” His answer struck me to my core.
“I didn’t do anything special, Laura. I am your brother, and you are my sister. It was my human responsibility.”
Human Responsibility
Now, how do we define human responsibility?
You won’t find it in the Webster Dictionary. You won’t find it in an encyclopedia. But what you will find is that on September 1, 1997, the Interaction Council, which is an organization of 30 former heads of state and prime ministers, proposed a universal declaration of human responsibility. This declaration was founded on the idea that when people fulfill their obligations to one another, and to the local, regional, national, and international communities, human rights will be better safeguarded or secured.
After these past few years, I have come to realize that human responsibility stems from us, right here and right now. We have an obligation to each other because we are all human beings sharing the same planet.
The Power of Kindness
Back to this angel who materialized out of the blue that day my son died. What his actions did helped me when I couldn’t help myself, when I wanted to fall to my knees and not take another step.
What I know with every fiber of my being is that I would have never made it on those flights without the presence of the stranger on that day. If you ask him, he’d say, he hadn’t done anything special. He believed that. But if you ask me, he saved my life.
In the weeks following my son’s passing, I tried to make sense of how my grief had shifted. And ultimately, I came to understand that it was something that came from the stranger. My grief had actually started dissipating with the stranger’s kindness. I also realized that there was a universal theme about grief.
When we are grieving and suffering, it’s simply the energy of love that is stuck inside of us with nowhere to go. Love in action unleashes that energy and unlocks our grief. This love in action is something that I discovered with the stranger’s kindness. This encounter with one stranger’s random act of kindness is what I came to understand as love in action.
Love in Action
Love in action can be done anywhere with anyone. But it must be done out in the world, far enough away from our known proximity for us to genuinely touch one another. Whether it’s a random act of kindness, volunteering in our neighborhood, or acting worldwide. I didn’t realize it, but I have been practicing love in action for the past 20 years.
During that time, I have sponsored more than 50 children, traversed the world as a non-profit photographer, fundraised for children’s homes and animal welfare organizations, created an animal sanctuary, and funded college tuition for disadvantaged high schoolers.