Sonia Booker, Dorchester
The How We Got Through project connects elders with younger members of the community for recorded phone conversations during the pandemic about life and how the elders got through tough times.
In this first interview, Sonia Booker, an 87-year-old retired teacher, talks with Abigayle Cooper, a student at New Mission High School, about the joy of growing up with her grandparents, getting through cancer with God’s help, how to remember the names of the Great Lakes, and a highlight of her life: graduating college as a young mother.
Below is an excerpt from the edited version of their conversation.
Abigayle: What advice can you give someone now who’s suffering because of Covid, or just life?
Sonia: Hebrews 11 chapter, the first verse: Faith!
You’ve got to have faith that things will be alright. And they will be alright.
Abigayle: They will.
Sonia: You can’t sit and lament and cry over things.
Honey, I am legally blind. I have to wear hearing aides and everything else. You think I let that bother me?
Abigayle: No, obviously not!
Sonia: Don’t. Let. Things. Get you down.
There’s a lot of things that happen in life, in people’s lives. When you think you got it bad, somebody else has it worse.
Abigayle: That’s true.
Sonia: Now I lost two children in 1988.
Abigayle: Oh, wow.
Sonia: I lost two of my children- my oldest and my youngest- six months apart. And when I lost the first one, that was my youngest son, he was 21 years old.
It was Father's Day, and we had just come out of church, and he left me, he said, “Ma, I’ll be right back.” And I never seen him alive. (He was shot and killed later that day.)
That was my youngest son. I was going through that, and December 12, six months later, my daughter died in her sleep- my oldest child. She had a stroke.
And you know, you cry tears.
Abigayle: I mean you have to. You have to mourn, right?
Sonia: You have to cry, yeah, but you know what? You say, "Help me, Lord. Help me through this."
And he helped me through it. The tears dried up, and all I could think of was the good times we had and the bad times we had.
Everybody goes through these things. But if you can’t go through it with your Heavenly Father, you’re in trouble.
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Special thanks to our partners on this interview: Brinda Tahiliani, a history teacher at New Mission High School who integrated this project into her curriculum shortly after the pandemic began, and Cheryl Harding, Senior Advisor to Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell, who connected us with Sonia Booker and other elders.
