Message in a Bottle: Virtual Notes From Mom

Not being morbid, but I've done a lot of thinking - and some writing - about leaving something of myself behind no matter when it is that I die. I have cancer, let's face it. It turned out to be the invasive kind so it could appear in some new spot next year or in ten years, it's still worth thinking about if it's twenty years from now.

It would be worth thinking about if I were 30 and might get hit by a bus - or lightening - tomorrow too.

When the kids were little - mine are 22 to 37 now - I kept a jar with slips of paper in it on the dining room table & sometimes the kitchen table - sometimes even plastic easter eggs held strips of paper. I was heavily into paper.

At one time the jar had chores written on the strips, and sometimes there were surprises or rewards on the strips, but most often the jar held questions, ideas, seeds of thoughts. Often at dinner one or more of them would pull a strip of paper and talk about the question.

They were things like:

• What’s the most important thing you ever learned?
• What do you like about your toes?
• What was it like when was your grandfather was a little kid?

Funny or bonding or just designed to get them talking.

So a few years down the road - in this age of electronic everything -  there should be SOME way to get my kids a virtual version of short notes from the glass jar when they need one.  Adult kids and even grandchildren should be able to do something when they need to feel connected to me, that would get them a message - a little note - containing something I'd say to them if I were around.

You never ever know when they need one.

• Waiting in the ER for their kid's broken arm to get casted.
• After losing out on a dream job.

They just need mom - anything mom can say - not about the specific situation they face but just something she wrote for them.

Oh I could just start writing messages on slips of paper and sticking them in jars or boxes or someplace to be divided up later.. but that makes the container the symbol, not the message. So I don't want to do that.

Then comes the question of what to say.

Since I don’t know when they’ll need me, and it will have to be a system where they pull one out when needed - not one where I have something all ready for the day after their husband cheats on them - I think it would work if I could just keep the messages focused on memories of them, hopes for them, love for them, tossed in with some good old mom sayings that might make them cry or laugh or roll their eyes but will make me seem close by.

Maybe eerily so, but I hope not. Because I look at this as a project of love that could be done by anybody, at any time. I'd love to have little notes available from my grandmother to me, even now when I'm a grandmother!

But now's the time I need to call on technology. If we don’t have a magic dispenser dude to open a jar and hand the kidlets a slip of paper - and they are spread out over the US like my four - is there a virtual way to get them what we want them to have - and what they probably really need? . . I hope so.

I'll be looking for it. In fact I think it sounds like fun,

Comments

[marnie webb]

First, I want to say thanks for this post. It really touched me. My partner was diagnosed w/ breast cancer two years ago. Our daughter was one. The cancer is out -- at least for now and we hope for good. But it left me thinking about how we be able to be there for Lucy in the future. When she needed us or just wanted us.

And I remember my own grandmother. The week she died, we were all in the hospital room. Kids, grandkids, great grandkids. Her one surviving sibling. Her husband. Anyone, at one point, I saw my grandmother looking at my mom, her oldest daughter. And she was looking so hard. And I asked if she needed something, she said that she was just trying to memorize her kids.

So, those things come together for me. The need to memorize each other and then to be surprised in good (and sometimes sad) ways about the memories. It happens for me when I cook from my grandmothers co-book and see a note from her.

And then this post. How do combine that stuff that we gather through a lifetime and then put them into a jar. A text message that someone could send a note to and get a note back. Emails set to be delivered in the future.

I don't know but I'm trying to figure out how to do it with my daughter. To build it into things -- like my grandma's cookbooks -- that I hope will mean something to her in the future. But also to be able to be more explicit about it.

I think I've broken almost every rule I have about posting comments here. But thanks for this post and these thoughts.

[Susan Reynolds]

Marnie, wow, that was a powerful comment. And if you broke rules could you do it more often? Because I'd love to hear more of this kind of insight.

And if there's ever someone I'd like to have on my team giving me feedback it's you because you've been there. In the hospital with your grandmother. With your partner during breast cancer. Looking at your own child wondering how to make sure you're both there for her. It gives you a perspective many don't have.

And it really touched me deeply. I'd love to hear from you more often if the rules allow :)

[Marnie Webb]

Thanks, Susan. And I should have been less cryptic about "rules." I meant only the length of the comment, dashing it off at work when I couldn't review it, dashing it off at work when I was writing something personal. Those kinds of rules.

This post has stuck in my head all day. You wrote about not wanting to leave the messages in the jar because the container becomes the symbol -- and not the message.

But I think often stuff is the symbol. So, to use my grandmother as an example, her cookbooks, her canning equipment. Those are magical items that contain secret messages because she used them, casually, and that use filled them with a day-to-day meaning and because when I think about her cooking I think about the fact that she had to follow a recipe exactly and I think about the ways that I am like that.

But there are still the times when I wish that I'd better memorized her. That I could call up, with more certainty, the ways she reacted or laughed or made me shake my head at her habits.

She died when my daughter was 3 months old. We barely made it there for the two of them to meet and I try and tell my daughter stories to make this woman come alive in some small way. And then is when I really miss the jar of memories or words that you wrote about. When I'm trying to pull from my memory to pass on this person I loved.

And during the year when my partner was sick and the fatigue that you wrote about was so much a part of her life I thought a lot, secretly, about the ways I'd keep her alive if I had to. I couldn't talk about it then and barely can now but I realize that I was making the jar you wrote about then.

And I come back to, in both instances, that there is just no way to it. But day-by-day and touch-by-touch.

And, when in the midst of something that can lead to these thoughts, to not concentrate on leaving something behind. Not yet, but to concentrate on continuing to build the day to day things.

I'm wort of relentlessly optimistic in a way that only a 5th generation Californian can be. But really it may be the only way. To believe in the best possible outcome until proven otherwise. And to try to spend time touching the things and people that mean the most to build up relationships, and memories maybe, but not for a while.

And I'm signed up to be on your team.