Sommerfeld: Give the gift of eight words
December 20, 2010
Lorraine Sommerfeld
You are probably reading this column amidst article after article about what to buy for those you love this year. If you need it, I hope you find inspiration in those lists. They can be helpful; gift-giving can be awkward, onerous, stressful.
Maybe you’re lucky, and someone else does all the shopping and planning, and writes your name on the card. That’s always nice. Everybody knows how it works — my father used to look at a sweater I was holding up and say how pretty it was. I would tell him he gave it to me. We were both seeing it for the first time.
There is a better way. Many of you are experiencing some form of loss this holiday season. Gaping, aching loss that will leak if you touch it. It might be the first time, but it won’t be the last, which is why I want you to consider another form of gift this year. There is nothing better you can give someone you care about than your words. You don’t have to be Shakespeare, or a Bronte, or Churchill, or Eminem. You just have to be honest.
My mother’s last words to me are embedded in my brain: “Always order dessert, and never buy cheap carpet.” Layered within that line are a multitude of meanings. My mother spent her life on a diet, only to struggle to keep weight on in the end as cancer carved her up. When she and my father argued over when to replace the carpet, she went ahead and got lousy stuff to spite him. It was a mistake; he never said “I told you so.”
Eight words. Use that as your measure. Write them on a card, paint them on a tile, send them in a text, hang them from a tree. Use sticks, use stones, take a picture, make a video, sing them, say them, mean them. Create an extraordinary keepsake for your daughter, your grandfather, your wife, your brother. Tell her you love her freckles, tell him his guidance has meant the world, remind her why she matters, say what you don’t say enough.
This sentence — or just eight loose words — is your gift. There is nothing to reciprocate, no answer to wait for. When one of you are no longer here, when that place at the table sits empty while taking up so much space, it is what you want to remember, and to be remembered for.
My father was not the demonstrative type. If I got a “you done good, kid” once a year, I was overjoyed. My most cherished scrap of paper? One on which he’d shakily written “Rainey” and my phone number at the top during his final days in the nursing home. It broke my heart that he could no longer remember it. But when I see that, I can hear his voice. He’s been gone 14 years, yet I can still know that the man who was always there for me knew I would always be there for him. There is comfort in this small creased note.
There will be tiny scrolls on my tree this year, each containing eight words. I don’t know what I’m going to write. I think I’m just going to go with something I know each of them needs to hear from me, something I would be distraught about if I had left it unsaid, unwritten, unshared.
Life moves by so quickly, sometimes you need to gather it up and hold onto it, even for just a moment.
Or eight.
Lorraine Sommerfeld appears Mondays in Living and Saturdays in Wheels. Reach her at www.lorraineonline.ca