Make a Memorandum

When Everything Started Happening, I found I needed to remember more, much more, than I had brain space for. I was mercifully helped by remembering to follow my mom’s lifelong advice: get a fresh pad of paper and a nice, sharp pencil, and write, write, write.

Or, to return to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland for a minute:

“That moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!”

“You will, though,” the Queen said, “unless you make a memorandum of it.”

So I got a number of small legal pads from my office, and starting making lists with my nice, sharp pencils. People to call, errands to run, decisions to make, ideas for writing, lessons I am learning, stories I hear that I’d like to tell you some day — it was helpful to help myself be specific.

I thought you might like to read the list of how people reached out to us. The ideas were creative, generous, thoughtful. They came by mail, by phone, in person, via the internet. It was like receiving an armload of wildflowers, one by one — each plant distinct from the others, accompanied by ferns, maybe twigs or baby’s breath — all adding to the magnificence that became the whole.

Thank you for gifts of time and imparted strength: organizing Jack’s memorial service, making banking decisions, transporting me to and from the train station, cleaning my home, eating my dust. Thank you for regular prayerful intercession on our behalf.

Thank you for your company: for your emails, e-cards, and photos of Jack. For playing games with me. For having dinner with me, treating me to the Athena, taking me to a concert, inviting me to your birthday parties and Christmas dinners and Passover seders. For texting me at midnight. And rearranging your lives on short notice so you could sit with our family and stand in a very long line to talk to us at Jack’s service. Weeping with me, laughing with me, praying with me. Turns out being with other human beings is of lasting significance.

What about food, glorious food? Thank you for gift certificates to purchase food at my favorite stomping grounds, and quiet dinners out, and meals delivered to my door. Thank you for food baskets, bursting with fruit and chocolates and cookies and wine and cheese. Thank you for bottles of wine and Iron Hill Reserve. Thank you for perfect pears from Harry and David.

Laughter makes life sweet: thank you for the goofy cards, impromptu Bananagrams competitions, and a night of skee ball and basketball at Chuck E. Cheese which breathed all kinds of wind into my sails.

There are gifts of skill (preaching, music-making, gardening, videography, photography, carpentry, repair) and gifts of knowledge (car care, medical insight, grieving advice) and gifts of resource (a truck, an envelope of cash, compassionate skilled help filling out COBRA health insurance forms). Each met specific needs specifically. The one who gardens may not also drive the truck or preach the sermon or take the photos or enclose the cash, yet each arrived at the right time filling particular needs. Such a relief.

There have been symbolic and creative gifts, which link the past to my present and future: like calendars of VW bugs (which Jack and I drove in our early years) and Greece (where I was sent for my 50th birthday), bicycles to help missionaries in Cuba (Jack rode a bike to work for years in Chattanooga), flash cards of history (his favorite subject), a bar stool from Iron Hill (where he hung out with one of his two most favorite bartenders, son #1), rare family photos, and amaryllis bulbs to plant in the dead of winter, as a reminder that spring will come. (As it has at long last. I am writing in shorts, not a snow shovel in sight.)

Books, helpful books, and music, healing music, have been brought to my door and introduced like old friends. They have made themselves at home in my kitchen, by my bedside, in my front room. And with every interaction, they reorient my thinking and infuse me with courage to believe and trust God.

There’s a bumper sticker that says, “Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.” With each passing year, when I remember to, I affirm that truth. Therefore another category of gift is the powerful gift of memory. There was the CD Jack’s friend and coworker made, set to jazz, Jack’s favorite, which showcased dozens of staircases the two of them created. My sister-in-law took pictures of the service and our family time afterwards. A dear friend took video of people at the service. My brother recorded our family worship service by Jack’s bedside and the phone messages I had saved on my phone. These are technical gifts which keep on giving. I look and listen to these memories time after time, and am helped.

Finally, I would like to mention gifts of beauty. In a way, all the gifts I’ve mentioned are gifts of beauty, aren’t they? But the bouquets of flowers that filled my home for weeks last winter were delicious in their own right. They refreshed and delighted on every level, perfectly arranged, no two alike. They smelled of hope, an extravagant acknowledgement of the value of one irreplaceable life.

Gifts of beauty also help people celebrate when they might not otherwise, when they are running on fumes, lacking the heart, strength or resources to generate anything resembling a party. The elves who secretly swooped into my home that first solo Christmas, transforming it into a cheery, twinkling place of hope, I will never, EVER forget as long as I live.