Reposting an old blog that is on my mind

This is not a new blog. I posted this a couple of years ago I think on MySpace. I just decided to share it again as this is part of what I think about during the Christmas holidays.


MY THOUGHTS (Feb 2009?)

My mother, even with her faults, did try to make holidays special. She definitely gets a lot of the credit for what I do enjoy about the holidays.

My mother’s last Valentine's Day she wrote the family a letter and put it in a card for each of us, just months before her death in October. There was speculation after she died that this might have been her way of saying goodbye and that she knew how sick she was way earlier than we did. We knew she had been sick and going to the doctor (see my October 10, 2008 blog) but it was literally only days before she passed that we knew what was really going on. Whether it was months or days, I have mixed feelings about that as I feel like I was robbed of the opportunity to say goodbye to her, even though I was the only one with her when she did pass. As an adult, I am trying to see that as an honor and a gift to have been there for her but as a 17 year old, ugh, not easy.

This letter was read at her funeral as an example of the person she was, who many outsiders new, the better side of her. I have not shared it with anyone since but decided I needed to process why I have mixed feelings about Valentine’s Day and to share a beautiful letter with some of the people I care about. I’m mostly sad that this is the person that she could be but too often was not. I do get angry for the same reason but the sadness is bigger.


HER LETTER AS WRITTEN (1986)

“Thoughts For Valentine’s Day

As the years have gone by, I have come to realize that when I buy a gift for someone I love, what I am really trying to purchase is a pleasant experience for that person – for example, in purchasing a sweater or a bathrobe, I imagine the pleasure of being cozy and warm on a chilly day. Sometimes I think of a gift that person might like my inventorying our human senses – find something that smells/feels/tastes/sounds/looks good, and will give pleasure to the person I have in mind, whom I love.

This past Christmas, as I was thinking in this way, I began to think “What have been the most pleasurable experiences of my life?” to help me think of gifts that would provide similar experiences for each of you. What I learned, and want to share with you now, is that the very most pleasurable experience of my whole life up to now has been the experience of loving. Being loved is pretty nice, too, but runs a distant second.

A lot of people have made this discovery before me, such as St. Paul as he tells us in chapter 13 of the 1st Corinthians; St. Francis of Assissi, who prayed “grant that I many not so much seek…..to be loved as to love…” (I put myself into pretty fancy company, don’t I) and a lot of others, perhaps including you. It was a wonderful feeling to become aware of this fact, and in sharing my awareness I’m hoping that each of you will discover, if you haven’t already, that this is true for you, too, and also experience the wonderful joy I felt when I realized that this was true for me.

Each of you has helped me, in different ways, to arrive at this realization. When I have experienced fear for you futures, or guilt about my own imperfections that have made life less that ideal (by my definition) for you, these negative emotions have had positive results in that they increased my awareness of the intensity of my love for you.

I am painfully aware that I haven’t always “been there” for you whenever you needed me to be, due to the fact that I am an imperfect human being. So, while I am sharing some of my thoughts and feelings with you, let me share this too – I have learned that there really is a perfect being, whom some call God, who is always “there” for every one of us. This is hardly an original discovery either, but I mention it hoping that, if you had full confidence in the prior sources of this information, you will have greater confidence that this is true because it’s me telling you.

If he created the world to be pain- and trouble-free, how would we ever be able to learn something like this? Perhaps what we see as “negative” in the world is part of His gift to us, so that each of us can have the beautiful experience of becoming aware of the intensity of our love for one another!

Thank you for being there for me to love.”