What makes this Granny remarkable?

Here is a remarkable Granny. She looks nice doesn't she but the remarkableness is in her story and she has said that I can tell it to you here.  She is South African and clearly she is a white South African.  South Africa is a country which has been divided right in it's heart by the idea of colour.  She married and had two children, a daughter and a son and they lived right there in South Africa under the sun which warms both the white and the black people.  As all stories go, all went well until the terrible thing happened, the unthinkable thing.  16 years ago her son was shot and died 5 weeks later in hospital with his grieving father and loving mother beside him.  She said to me that she couldn't have imagined a pain worse than this, the pain of watching her son die from such a ghastly act.  She and her husband wanted to bury their son with all the dignity they could and asked to bring his body home.  But the doctors couldn't allow it, there had to be an autopsy.  She could hardly bear the idea but they said…"Ma'am, this is the law, a murder has been committed and we have to send your son's body to be examined". " But surely not" she said, "we have never had to think of murder in our family, it is outside our thinking".  "We are not that kind of people".  Well, they had to do as the law decreed and his body had to be taken to the city mortuary where it would wait for 8 weeks before examination and release for burial.  Her husband was broken by this, she said he never recovered but what happened to her which allowed her to survive and not only survive but to make something beautiful and reasonable out of something so violent and ugly?  The act which took her son and destroyed the peace of mind which her husband had was transformed through her remarkable way of thinking.  

This is the process she described to me and out of which she made her way from grief to understanding and compassion.  Her brother had to identify the body and he told her that in the mortuary, the bodies were so numerous that they were piled up in a pyramid with just a label on the big toe with a name.  This was because there were so many murders in South Africa at the time, so many that the queue for autopsy was weeks and weeks of waiting.  In the waiting and in the space within her self, she said that she realised from the description that she was just one of many mothers in South Africa, mothers both white and black who had lost a beloved son and that this connected her with the great sadness and despair that was engulfing the whole country, a despair borne of difference.  

Now, you will wonder what she has done since and I can tell you.  She has held a hope in her heart for the people of South Africa, for the people of her city as well.  Two days a week she works in a school in Durban which fosters just this same vision.  

I might just have seen a friendly lady from South Africa and not heard her story.  Then I might never have known about the bright light of hope she has and how it came about.  You will be wondering if she meditates won't you?  And of course she does and what is more, she was a meditator then, when the thing which seems so terrible happened to her.