In December I wrote our list of Christmas cards was shrinking each year. Often this was because a friend had passed away. Our card would come back with a yellow USPS sticker saying it was undeliverable and the person’s address unknown.
Each time it was a grim feeling. Pat would do some searching and eventually learn the person had died almost a year ago, sometimes longer than that. It was disheartening to know someone else was gone and we had never heard about it.
“I want you to promise,” Pat told me one day, “if I go first, you will take our Christmas card list, write a letter and let people know.” I said I would. As Robert Service wrote in the poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” “A promise made is a debt unpaid.”
All too soon, the time came to honor that promise, days after she passed away at the end of last month. The letter was written, copied and put in the mail.
There is nothing easy about doing that sort of work, but I hope you will consider how important it is to do it.
The passing of a loved one leaves a hole in our lives, maybe in most of humanity. Sometimes it almost feels easier to avoid letting other people know. Each retelling of the tale is another wound to the heart and soul.
Yet to shirk this duty is to mean their passing goes unnoticed, and that never makes things better, only worse.
Those letters are also our chance to write something meaningful about our loved one or friend who died. In our fractured and often angry world, people need to be inspired by good news and examples, something inspiring and encouraging, in the lives of others.
It is important remembering to take advantage of every moment we can spend with people, because hours and minutes are not infinite. One day we run out of those them.
Once, when I lived in Canada, I ran across a retired Regimental Sergeant Major from the nearby airbase. We talked for a few minutes, leaning against his truck in the grocery store parking lot, before he got back behind the wheel.
I assumed we’d see each other in a few days. Instead, he drove straight into a light pole. He had suffered a heart attack and died with his foot on the accelerator.
Other times we are blest to have more time and even a long goodbye. Or they have that with us. We never really do know, except that there is a finite number.
Life comes to an end, and when it happens to us the world will keep working without our supervision. Even with it still ticking along more or less as usual, people still need to know an old friend isn’t around.
The writer of such letters benefits as well. By committing thoughts and feelings to paper, they can better appreciate the person they have lost.
At least thinking about that letter I hope you don’t write for a long time, might enhance your relationship with the person who shares your life.
Getting started on that letter might enhance the relationship you share with your best bud, main squeeze,or spouse. You might find it helpful to care even more for family and friends.
I watch people, often as not to give me ideas for my writing. I’ve seen many couples who forget or ignore these messages about staying connected with people, especially with each other. You have seen them too.
It is not the couple who are delightedly talking with each other and sharing laughs. It might not be the couple that is having a spat because they will soon kiss and make up. Maybe.
The most tragic are the couples who are bored with each other. From across a room, you can see the apathy and boredom in their faces.
Nothing kills a relationship quicker and more effectively than apathy. In time, the relationship might come to an end, and they’ll have to live with the consequences of their not caring hard enough to make it work.
There are a lot of “what ifs” in that situation. What if I had said yes to going out more often? What if we had worked harder at having fun? What if we had just gotten off the couch to go for a walk? What if we had worked harder at taking an interest in each other?
One widow told me what meant the most to her was her late husband always had something fun or interesting to tell her about his day.
“One day,” she said, “I saw his car in the driveway, but no him. A few minutes later he explained that his day was pretty boring, so he chose to walk around the block hoping to come up with something that might make me laugh.”
Time runs out, so before you have to sit down to write that letter, get to work on creating good memories. That is our life’s performance art at its best.
