On days like today I feel the sorrow and emptiness that comes after losing someone who is close to you. So I do what I always do. I stay active. I do pull ups.
I do lat pulls.
I get in 12,000 steps.
As long as I exist, I want to live as Becky would have wanted -- hopefully, serenely, and as productive as possible.
Today, as I ran, I thought about how Becky had been raised in Ethiopia. This makes her a TCK -- a third culture kid.
This term refers to children raised in a culture different from the one their parents were raised in. A TCK has 3 cultures -- the culture of their parents' home country, the culture of the country they were raised in, and a third distinct identity that arises from the interactions between cultures.
Becky always believed that being raised as a TCK brought her certain advantages. TCKs have a tendency to have a high level of multiculturalism -- a global perspective if you will. This tends to make them more internationalized than other kids. Becky had qualities of both cultures that she adopted. She was always quick to point out how privileged she felt to have grown up cross-culturally and internationally. I believe that experience made it easier for her to find familiarity in most corners of the world. Psychologists call this "cross-cultural competence," or the capacity to function effectively across national and ethnic lines. Certainly this was true of our years in Basel as well as the many visits we made to Ethiopia (14 trips for her, 17 for me). Moreover, TCKs are highly linguistically adept. Indeed, Becky was speaking German within a few months of our arrival in Basel. Moreover, the most common professions for TCKs are medicine, business, and self-employment. Becky was a highly successful ICU nurse as well as an award-winning financial planner with Waddell and Reed.
Of course, as with everything in life, there are benefits and deficits. But in the end, I believe being raised in Ethiopia made Becky's life more enjoyable and a lot more effective for the kingdom. In my mind, she will always remain a global citizen with a colorful existence.