Daily Word Count: 0
Cumulative Words Written: 59,414
Total Words Discarded: 14,500
Total Chapters Drafted: 24
Time Spent Writing Today: 0 hours
A postcard to Lillian.
I spent my 40th birthday at Grand Canyon because of you. You sent kindergarten me a postcard. I still have it, stuffed in an aging photo album. At the time, I ran chubby fingers over the glossy surface, convinced you’d visited another planet.
I was obsessed with seeing that planet, too.
I don’t know how many postcards you sent me over the years. Unfortunately, I didn’t save them all. I always looked forward to your perfect penmanship, the way you retraced words when you got stuck on a thought. You made me curious about the world, igniting a sense of adventure and a love of travel that is granular to who I am.
Expectations were for other people. You broke every mold, dashed any rulebook, lived on your terms.
You also taught me the importance of saying thank you.
And not in person, by phone or text or social media. When I was five years old, you sent me a birthday card with a dollar tucked inside. I failed to send a handwritten thank you note. Well, you called my mother and asked her what sort of ungrateful sot she was raising.
To this day, I write thank you notes in an age when most people say, “Why bother?” But you taught me how much it means to hear how a gift altered one’s life. The dinner paired with a gift of wine. A book selected to tickle the recipient’s curiosity and wonder. How money was spent on something that will always recall the giver.
I’ll send a postcard, too, for your long rest. But I want you to know how grateful I am for the time you spent writing to me. As I sift through your long life for nuggets of awesome, I have a hard time settling on a few. I still don’t understand why you gave me so much of your time. We were related, yes, but I’ve learned how tenuous blood is. You had thousands and thousands of students over the years, eager souls who surely gave you more immediate gratification than I ever did.
Thank you for inspiring me, for seeing an adventurous little girl inside a smothered shell, for giving her the means to set herself free.
Given that writing anchored our relationship, it’s fitting that yours is my first written obituary. I spent so much time on it yesterday, more than is my usual wont, because I knew time was short. You were ready to leave.
I managed to work several of your sayings into the text, but I share a few more here.
“We have to learn to turn scars to stars.”
“Bullies act the way they do because they’re unhappy. I learned that teaching students, and I see it so much in this world today.”
“I taught every phase of life. For thirty years, I taught first and second graders. Then I taught foreigners English. And I finished at nursing homes.”
“The smiley face is my credo.”
“Have I told you about the boy I taught fifty years ago? (At least 200 times.) Well, he came to school one morning and told me his dog had puppies because his daddy breaded her.”
“When I was a little girl, doctors told my parents I wouldn’t live to reach puberty. (She showed them.)”
“Sir, would you like to hold my smiley face baby? (A smiley face doll she took everywhere.) And he looked at me and said, ‘Is its diaper wet?'”
Lillian Evelyn Watkins Wilson
1927 – 2019
Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you’re bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings.
RUMI
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