Story – Page 5 – Laura Stavoe

June 5, 2020July 16, 2020

Speaking Names

Tending to Endings (twenty-three)

Much of this week for me has been about listening and weeping and witnessing and reading and very little cohesive writing. But I do want to share a few personal reflections that seem relevant during this collective loss, and also, a few resources in case you find them helpful.

Boise held a vigil on Tuesday evening to mourn the killing of George Floyd and a long list of other Black lives taken by state sponsored violence. Five thousand attended at the steps of the Capitol. I watched over livestream and wished I was there in person. The Black leaders who organized the vigil helped us channel anger and despair into story and silence and song. And then we said the names, thirty minutes of names, each one followed by fifteen seconds of silence. Some were familiar to me: Tamir Rice, Eric Gardner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Emmett Till, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. Far too many were not.

I’ve thought a lot recently about how difficult it is to speak the name of those who have died even when the death is not untimely or brutal or tragic. Bringing up the name of a loved one who is gone sometimes brings uncomfortable things into the conversation–sadness, the need to console, new questions, the reminder that we are mortal.

When the death is one that is marred by tragedy or wrongdoing or violence, when I am uncertain of my own responsibility, when innocent people get hurt, it is even harder.

At times in my own life, I have felt the pull to avoid reckoning and grief. When my kids were young, for instance, and I was going through a divorce, it was tempting to avoid stories about their past that included their father. Divorce with young children was excruciating and I felt a great deal of guilt and anger and uncertainty and sadness. I didn’t want more hurt to arise for them or me. It was tempting to try to start from where we were in our new parallel co-parenting lives.

But one afternoon while my sons and I snuggled on the couch for story time, one of them asked me to tell the story of when they were born. I hesitated, thinking, no way can I tell that one. And then I took a deep breath and dove in to the story they had heard many times before. The telling was healing for me and important for my sons. It was their origin story and evidence that they come from great love.

That moment of hesitation gave me awareness, and it was the beginning of me learning to not step around any of our stories. It took practice and a willingness to be very uncomfortable and, for me, lots of therapy. I needed to talk through all the painful stories with wise adults so that I could be present for my sons as they worked through their own hard journey. That work brought me to a point where I could talk about their daddy as they did, with ease and enthusiasm and kindness.

This has come to mind lately, not because it compares in scope or scale (it doesn’t), but because guides me as I grapple with the question of my own role in the painful story of racism our country. That moment of hesitation still informs me.

For instance, saying Black lives matter shouldn’t be any more complicated for me than saying the lives of the elderly matter. Both of those statements are true and needed and both have implications for policy and politics. I believe both deeply. But only one feels like it takes a bit of bravery for me to say. I suspect this is because I have not fully integrated our collective past with our current story.

I believe much of my own anti-racism work begins with making space for that larger story. In my experience, stories are essential for healing, not because they provide closure, but because they offer a path to connection and belonging. It’s human to want to skip over the hard part, but I don’t think we get anywhere good without it.

More Resources

These are just some of my favorites that speak to the healing power of story, particularly stories that have been excluded or left behind

In this ten minute episode of Poetry Unbound, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s A Poem for Keeping Memory Alive. Pádraig Ó Tuama introduces the poem:

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poem calls readers to pay attention to the fact that remembering is a moral act; it is a courageous act, and to remember the ways in which our people may have participated in massacre mobs and to remember that mourning is an ongoing muscle that we need to recognize and that we need to practice;

Isabel Wilkerson is a masterful storyteller and historian and The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America’s Great Migration is one of the best books I’ve read in recent years on the topic of American history.

Our US Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo writes often of indigenous stories that have been silenced in her newest book, An American Sunrise. The poem, “Washing My Mother’s Body,” is a particularly visceral account of reconnecting with story through memory and ritual:

I never got to wash my mother’s body when she died./ I return to take care of her in memory./ That’s how I make peace when things are left undone./ I go back and open the door./ I step in to make my ritual. To do what should have been done,…

I used to incorporate Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk: The Danger of a Single Story into my writing classes, and it has been coming to mind a lot lately:

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.

The Facebook Page of the Idaho Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence includes links to the video of the Boise vigil held on Tuesday. I have also been participating in their Collective Thriving Story Circles that they are facilitating this year which may be of particular interest to those living in the Treasure Valley area.

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Thank you and Love.

May 22, 2020June 14, 2020

Hearing Voices

Tending to Endings (twenty-one)

The truck was overheating and I only had minutes. The A/C pump froze and now I’m trying to make Banner Summit so I can coast to where it’s a few degrees warmer and within hiking distance of a phone. It’s ten below and the Eve of New Year’s Eve, December 30, almost midnight and there hasn’t been a single car since Stanley. When I finally crest, I turn off the engine and hope I haven’t ruined the motor. I remember there is a flat spot a couple miles down. I keep hoping to get past it, closer to Grand Jean. But it’s cold and there’s black ice so I can only go so fast. Then the road flattens and the truck comes to a stop. It won’t start. It’s toast. I sit there and the world is as quiet as you’ve ever heard.

My husband, John, is telling the story which begins with the divorce and the ill-fated elk hunting trip and eventually leads to him building a house in the mountains, a project that takes eight years. The story of Elkhaven is family lore and any one his kids could chime in with details about how he raised the walls himself by riggin’ ropes and pulleys, or about George, the grouse who kept him company. I’ve heard the story many times, and I eventually lived in that house for six years before the boys hit driving age and we moved back to town.

Only this time, I have promised to write it down and so I’m sitting on the couch of our living room during quarantine time with the voice memo feature of my iPhone on. Also, I’m hearing the story as a woman who has recently lost her mother. Which means, I’m hearing the story with the ears of his grown children and I am so grateful I hit the record button. Because what really will matter to them someday when we are both gone, is not so much the story but the way that John tells it.

One of the hardest things for me to accept about my mom’s Alzheimer’s was that her voice changed. She became quieter, less certain about whatever she had to say. She stopped calling me. When I called her, she wanted to get off the phone quickly.

I eventually learned more about the disease and found ways to be close to my mom throughout the changes. But at first, all I could notice was what was gone.

One of the first times I noticed the change in her voice was when we were heading to my nephew’s football game. I made some joke about how she ended up with a grandson who played football, and she said, “It’s so nice, isn’t it?”

I looked to see if she was being facetious. She wasn’t. Instead, my mom who was not a fan of competition and especially not violent sports was quietly following my dad up to the bleachers.

My mom loved her grandchildren beyond measure. She may well have gone to that game pre-Alzheimer’s, but it would not have been without comment or without laughing at herself for ending up at a football game for her grandson.

I missed my mom’s edginess. The way she made sure we knew how she saw the world.

Voices are how I remember people most. I do not know if this is a weird Laura thing, or whether this is true for others as well. But the tone and the rhythm of a person’s voice is much of what I miss when they are gone. The way words lift on certain syllables and fall on others. Where they land the funny parts. Where their voice cracks with sadness or anger or truth or glee.

I remember how my friend Pat, who died in February of 2015, would say my name on a voice message, “Laura!” drawing out the two syllables like some enthusiastic song. “I’m so sorry I missed your call!” In one short message, I could feel her love.

I still have my friend Susan’s last voicemail she left in April of 2016 while she was waiting to learn whether she was going to return to the Children’s School, a job she subsequently got, but did not begin because she died that summer from a brain aneurysm. I saved it not because of the content, but because of the Susan-ness I hear in her voice.

Yeah this has been an interesting process and maybe I’ll get my old job back and maybe I won’t. And if I don’t, that will be ok, too. But, still uncertain. And I’m fine. And, I’m going to be hatching chicks this month so that’s going on and life is good! And so, happy Friday dear, thanks for thinking of me today. Take care. Bye.

Mostly, I don’t need the recordings. Voice contains so much of us. It carries with it the places we are from and the quirks from our own parents and traces of books we have read. Voice is breath shaped by thoughts and experience and larynx and lungs.

A friend in Boise once introduced me to her friend, a man in his sixties visiting from Brooklyn. As soon as the man started telling a story, I heard my grandfather. I realized only then that the voice I knew so well as my Grandpa’s was heavily rooted in the place he was born.

I can still hear my grandmother’s voice as she read Madeline to me, my favorite book as a child. I remember the cadence and the tone and the way she would speed up the pace when Miss Clavel, afraid of a disaster, ran fast and faster. And something else in her voice, too, that I know now (but didn’t know then) was irony. She knew what was coming.

I knew many things about my grandma. She cooked our favorite meals but didn’t eat much. She was a worrier. She loved being a grandma. She volunteered at the hospital so she could carry newborns to car when it came time for them to go home.

But today when I think of my grandma, it is her intelligence I recognize first in her voice. My grandma saw flaws inherent in the human condition and she was drawn satire and wit. She talked about books and politics and words and people.

Though I was a child when my grandma was alive (she died when I was 18), I somehow feel closer to her now than I did then, and I believe this is because as I have grown I have understood her more, something that is only possible because I remember her voice.

It was last fall when a friend of mine asked me to write the story of her two daughters, born after a long series of trials and losses and then, finally, two beautiful births. In the past I had always taken notes by hand when writing a story. But I had recently discovered how easy it was to use the voice memo feature on my phone.

Once Darcy’s husband Mike started talking, I was so glad I had done that. I never would’ve remembered his wording exactly:

I think the story starts on our first date. Where we ended up at the fricken’ animal hospital. Dog ate a bottle of the Boxer’s pee pills. But at the end of that night, we drove up to the top of Quail Ridge and were looking at Christmas lights in Boise. That’s when Darcy said, “Just so you know. I want a kid.”

As soon as I got home and listened to the recording, I knew I was going to write the story in their voices. It would not just be what happened, but how their parents would tell the story that would matter someday to those girls.

In May of 2018, I received a message over FaceBook from a stranger that I almost deleted but then read.

“I live in a house you used to live in on Devonwood. I found a box of your things up in the crawl space. Memorabilia you might want, like photos and poetry.”

Devonwood was where I lived before John and I moved up to Elkhaven. It had been fifteen years since I lived there. Curious, I drove over to pick up the box.

I rifled through papers while still parked outside that house where my sons had spent their first years of life. There were high school year books and binders full of poetry from my teenage years. I could’ve lived without all of it.

Until I found envelopes in my mother’s handwriting, letters she wrote when I moved to California. One written just after I started graduate school:

I hope that someday you have more of what I have, the joy of reading and learning for the joy of reading and learning. This fall, however, excess time would only allow you to pay more attention to the Presidential elections and they aren’t much fun. I will cast my vote (for Dukakis) but beyond that I believe whoever get in, the people are going to begin to prevail. I’m going to encourage everyone to write the President often with feedback, suggestions, demands, etc.

I held the packet of letters to my chest. There it was, my mother’s voice.

It is memorial day weekend, and many will be remembering the stories of those who are gone. I’ve been thinking lately about how often we focus on the stories we haven’t heard yet. The war stories that someone might take to the grave. The things parents didn’t tell us about their own childhood. And those stories no doubt have great value.

But lately I’ve been thinking too, about the stories I’ve heard over and over. Maybe I have even had the thought, not this one again. Only these days, I may reach for a pen or ask if I can turn on the recorder. These days, I’m more apt to listen. Maybe at first because I recognize this person could be gone. But then, then, because they are here.

More Resources

Normally I’ve been including links here, but this week I want to recommend the voice memo feature that comes standard on most phones if you haven’t already found it it. On the iPhone it is usually grouped with utilities like the calculator.

It makes for a very easy way to collect family stories whether people are apart or together. Just push one button and you can audio record a short or long story that will be saved in an audio file to your phone and can be sent to loved ones via email or text attachment.

For inspiration listen to Story Corp podcasts.

Grandma Jean holding her newest grandchild, Ryan, and with new mom, my Aunt Gail.

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May 8, 2020June 14, 2020

Not Knowing

Tending to Endings (nineteen)

It’s been strange these past couple months because while on one hand I have been reeling with everyone else with the rapid fire pace of Covid-19 and how it has dismantled much of everyday life, on the other hand, some of it feels familiar and like an extension of what started for me on November 6, 2018 when I took leave from my very busy job at a community college to go to Chicago to help my dad care for my mom.

Now that I have perspective on the arc of that story, I tend to forget that I saw my trip as fairly defined when I left Idaho for Chicago. Mom’s health was deteriorating due to Alzheimer’s, and she had painful wounds from radiation after her second bout with vulvar cancer. My dad and my sisters had taken her to specialists and the wounds still were not healing. She had even ended up at the emergency room. Also, my dad was recovering from hip replacement surgery.

My plan was to stay with my parents until they were both well enough to travel to their winter home in Maui, and then I’d help them get settled there and return home. I had a goal and twelve weeks of family medical leave if needed.

Just before I arrived, a doctor recommended a hyperbaric oxygen therapy for my mom that sometimes helps treat radiation wounds. I arrived just in time. My assignment involved waking up at 5:15 each morning and driving to the hospital and talking a woman with Alzheimer’s into sitting in a large metal tube for two hours. The therapy would take 20-30 sessions, depending.

My dad and I do well with goals, and we proceeded like we were training for a marathon. We marked each treatment on the calendar and sent each other high-five emojis from the hospital when Mom was safely in the chamber, the oxygen hissing into the capsule.

We overcame obstacles. An early snowstorm and icy roads closed the schools and kept all of the other patients and many hospital staff home one morning. But we made it, and waited for plows to free the chamber’s exhaust system from piles of snow so my mom could get her treatment. One morning my mom who was in pain didn’t want to get out of the tub, and my dad and I pleaded and bargained with her at the door until she finally said, “Fine, I know how important this is to the two of you.” And I helped her into her green scrubs while my dad brought the car around to the front of their condo building so we could make it just in the nick of time.

Weekend mornings we would stand over the calendar and calculate our progress. One day we saw were on target for making it to Maui before Christmas.

Only, my Mom’s pain wasn’t going away. Recently it had begun to seem worse. Her doctor prescribed stronger pain medication. Then, twenty-three treatments in and just after Thanksgiving, we took her to another specialist where we learned the cancer was back. My dad and I were deflated, defeated.

I’ve been thinking a lot about an essay I read recently by Elizabeth Outka published in the Paris Review about the literature of pandemics and particularly Kathrine Anne Porter’s, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, set during World War I and the influenza pandemic of 1918. The essay grapples with the questions of uncertainty the characters face in an ever changing situation. Outka writes,

The past is always another country, but the speed at which knowledge becomes outdated, naivete turns to realization, and basic truths change is dizzying during a pandemic. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Porter wove her own paradigm-altering experience into a broader meditation on the vertigo induced by such shifts…
One’s reality doesn’t simply shift in a pandemic; it becomes radically uncertain—indeed, uncertainty is the reality. The unpredictability of the COVID-19 virus and all we don’t know about it means we have no idea where we are in the story or even what story we are in. Is this the first wave of something even deadlier to come? Have we reached the top of the curve? What’s the scope of the tragedy? Is the economy the real story? What do we think we know now that may prove fatally wrong? The narrative of uncertainty causes many of us to turn to genre fiction and predictable movies (even if they are about disaster)—they allow us to pull down another story like a shade and sit in a place where we already know the ending.

I don’t know if being a writer makes me more prone to wanting to figure out the whole story when I’m still in the middle, or whether it is just being human. Caregiving it seems is particularly prone to this state of not knowing. And my tendency in the middle of it all is to grasp at meaning, to try and see the whole picture, as though in figuring out the story, I will know how I will be able to stand it.

My mom’s story shifted many times over the next six months, and mine did too. I remember for a while after we had made it to Hawaii and my mom was on hospice care, there was a stretch of time when she was not sleeping well. She would wake up in the middle of the night and feel like she couldn’t get air. The nurse brought an oxygen machine and ordered anti-anxiety medication and Dad and I took turns staying up, walking around the condo with my mom holding her so she wouldn’t fall. None of it felt ok and we were low on sleep and we didn’t know if she would ever be able to rest again.

“It is not like a marathon,” I told my dad, “because in a marathon you always know what mile you are on.”

Caregiving is more like being in an open water ocean swim with no shore in sight. It is disorienting to not know how far you have to swim or how to pace yourself. You can’t even hope for the shore to come into view because when that happens, it also means, you will no longer have your mother.

One thing that helped me then and helps me now is admitting that my current job is not to try to figure out the whole story. It’s not, as my mind always initially tells me, to fix the catastrophe, whether it is a pandemic or cancer or Alzheimer’s. Maybe that should be obvious, but as soon as I am afraid for someone or something I love, old habits tend to rear their head.

Sometimes I think humility is the sleeper of superpowers. When I let go of the thing I cannot control and give into the reality of not knowing, I can ask the question: Ok, I guess my role here isn’t to fix or even to steer the whole global situation, so what is it?

Always I find something in front of me I can do with my particular skills and sphere of influence. Invariably, it feels too small for the conditions. Still, I can begin. Finding purpose buoys me, and I can swim.

I think now about my mom and I during one of those sleepless nights. It was 3:11 am when I awoke to the safety alarm and found her standing next to her bed, too agitated to sit much less sleep. She wasn’t having any of my reassurances. She wanted to go home (she was home). She wanted me to let her put on her shoes (we did, then undid). We leaned against each other, walking like two drunks around the condo, her balance gone due to dementia and me, groggy, and exhausted, but the more sober friend, holding her up.

I talked about the ocean and the moon. I rattled off stories from her childhood and hoped the medication would kick in. She asked me again and again to take her home. It was almost dawn when she was willing to sit on my bed and we talked about the house she grew up in, each adding details about the different rooms until finally, we slept.

That night, I was there for her to lean against. For that small thing.

More Resources:

Comfortable with Uncertainty, by Pema Chodran

Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter

“How Pandemics Seep into Literature,” Elizabeth Outka, Paris Review, April 8, 2020.

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February 7, 2020June 14, 2020

I Hear You

Everyone likes to hear a good listener–Ron Stavoe

Tending to Endings (six)

One summer afternoon, my dad returned home to get ready for his summer job at the Pepsi-cola company. He was between his junior and senior year in high school. His sister Jeannine met him at the door and told him their mom died. The news caught him completely off guard.

My dad knew his mom was sick. She had been going to doctors since he was in the eighth grade. But no one had told him the illness was cancer, and always, always she was going to get better.

“I was a teenager and should’ve been smart enough to figure it out,” dad says, “My mom kept losing weight. She was sleeping in a cot in the living room because she was too weak to make it up the stairs”

I would describe my relationship with my dad as very close. And yet, it is December 2019 when my dad tells me about that day in 1956 that changed his life. I knew the fact of his mom’s death before that, but not the story. From the way my father reaches for details—”I came home from school…no, it was summer…I must’ve been out with friends.”—I don’t think he has told it often.

The degree of silence in my dad’s home was in part due to an era. But, even today there are not many places where it feels natural to launch into a conversation about someone who is about to die or someone who has. Counseling sessions and Death Cafes are two. Most celebrations of life, some funerals.

I was with a group of friends a few weeks after my mom died. I had just returned to Boise. It was a potluck for some occasion, a sunny spring afternoon. It felt good to be home and among friends after five months away. But I also felt that strange distance that trauma and loss can carve. I had been through something that was hard to explain even to myself. On any given day, I felt many things: grief, gratitude, relief, hurt, rawness, love, peace, exhaustion, numb.

My friend Kathy came up to me holding her cup of ginger tea, her blue eyes smiling and said, “Would you have time to meet for coffee sometime soon? I would love to hear more about your mom.”

What I felt then was a wave of relief. Pretty much all I could think about was my mom and all we’d been through over the past five months. I had been meting out small pieces of story to friends and anyone who would listen in order to not overwhelm any one person.

Often our reticence about death is good intentioned. We don’t tell because we don’t want to burden others with loss that feels heavy and disorganized and raw. We don’t ask because we don’t want to overstep or to awaken pain. I didn’t ask my father about his mother because I knew it would make him sad.

But how much else do we leave unsaid when we sidestep the whole story. As I’ve begun to make room for more of these stories in my own life–both the telling and the listening–I’m realizing quite a lot. Stories of death are, after all, actually stories about life. It’s the only part of death we actually know anything about.

Now, Kathy’s question seems perfect to me. Do you have time for coffee? I would love to hear the story. It did not feel intrusive, it felt like an invitation. We met the next week and I sat in my sunny living room and told her about my mom. It was a gift to be able to walk through that time again with someone listening.

In January I attended something called a Story Circle that was held downtown Boise in the Linen building and hosted by Idaho Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence. The topic of the circle was about heritage and we shared stories about the origin of our names and stories of our people.

One of the biggest gifts of the evening was feeling connected to people in my community who I had never met, and this happened for me, not so much through telling my story as through listening. Regardless of our ethnic or geographic background, as each person shared, I found those soft familiar places, those points of connection.

Last Christmas I finally asked my dad to tell me the story of my grandmother. And he did get teary, though mostly when explaining to me things about his mom that made him proud. She was active in local politics and president of the PTA and the leader of a kitchen band. “She was never angry, but she was always involved,” he says. “As soon as my dad came home, she would hand off responsibility of all of us to him and head out to some gathering or public meeting.”

“She influenced people,”he adds, “She would get my dad involved with things, saying, Art, why don’t you go talk to the kids at school about what you do at Crane Company. And he would.”

And I realize now that in this way, grandma was a lot like my mom. And dad and I talk about that rare quality some people have of being able to draw people to them, not with promises or persuasion or anything other than their own way of being in the world.

My mom would collect quotes she loved whenever she read–Henry David Thoreau and Marian Wright Edelman and Anna Quindlen and Wendell Berry. But one of her favorite quotes of all time was something my father said back when I was still in grade school, Everyone likes to hear a good listener.

And this seems ironic now, and like it has taken me a very long time to hear my father. When he finishes telling me about my grandmother I ask him to tell me about his father and I listen and I listen and I listen.

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January 24, 2020June 14, 2020

Love in the Room

Tending to Endings (four)

I am no expert on death. I am the new traveler reporting on unexpected discoveries, not the one writing the guidebook. For that, there are people who have worked in this field for decades and who know so much more than I do.

Even so, I feel compelled to share things that made a difference if for no other reason than I could’ve so easily missed them. There is so much we cannot control about death, namely, the loss itself as it barrels on towards us. Sometimes that loss is so big it seems like nothing we do could possibly matter.

In the summer of 2016, I arrived in Portland to visit my friend Susan when there was no longer any chance of her recovering from a brain aneurysm. The family was waiting to remove life support until the following evening when more loved ones would arrive.

I felt privileged to be in that room, but not all that helpful. I mostly wandered from the chair by her bed to the window to the bathroom to the coffee cart and back by Susan’s side. The loss of my friend was already palpable.

Friends began texting me things to tell Susan. I would sit by her and read them. This felt like one small, good thing: reading love aloud and then replying to the sender that I had done so. Days before I had been the one pacing in Boise and my friends Lori and Mary were reading my messages. It mattered.

Not everyone can be in the room. Whether because of distance or timing or because the person needs calm or wants privacy or because most of us collect more friends over a lifetime than can fit around a deathbed.

After the texts I moved on to the messages left on Susan’s Facebook page. A friend dressed in purple wrote “I finally listened to the podcast you sent me about Prince!” Her first-graders held up artwork of birds and messages of love. College friends recounted funny memories. Those of us in the room were reminded of how big Susan’s circle was, how colorful and full her life.

Susan (left) in the Sawtooths with friends Donna and Theresa

Last January, a few weeks after my mom went on hospice care, I was struggling to find ways to bring more relationship into our days. Conversations, even with close friends were stressful for Mom due to the progression of Alzheimer’s. She knew she wasn’t thinking clearly and so she largely avoided social interaction. This was not my mom’s nature, but rather, a symptom of her disease. Mom had a huge circle of close friends, and in her regular state of mind, she would never back away from them.

Mom’s 80th birthday was coming up in August. I talked with my sisters and dad about an idea for an early gift. My mom had often created photo/story books for her grandchildren. Whenever my sons would visit Chicago or Maui or when she would visit Idaho, she would buy a three ring binder and slip photos with a story about their adventures into plastic sleeves.

I asked friends to email a photo of themselves along with one thing they learned from Jane. I included that she was living with Alzheimer’s and cancer and we felt this early gift would be good medicine. I said, short was best as mom could not process a great deal of text, but that her sense of humor was intact. Mostly, I wanted her to see their smiling faces.

It took less than a day for friends to begin sending responses.

Once messages began arriving I saw what a gift this was for all of us. My dad and sisters and I knew my mom’s life was rich, but we had been so focused on the day-to-day. Their words reminded me of my mom’s whole story and helped me to feel connected to her wider community.

Marilyn and Sherm Loken (above); Mom at her every-Tuesday peace vigil (below)

Entries came from former students and fellow peace activists and and grandchildren and bridge group members and college friends and a refugee family my mom had helped resettle. We ended up needing a second binder.

Mom’s response was more than I could’ve hoped. She pored over the photos of friends. She asked me to read entries to her over and over. She smiled.

Eventually she laughed, and said, “These are so nice. If I keep reading them I’ll get a big head.” She began referring to them as her big head books. She wanted me to tell all of her friends that they each deserved a book just like it.

This of course is not a new idea. People create videos and quilts and playlists and piles of greeting cards. But, I am newly aware of how this small thing turned out to be a big thing. Not only for my mom who recognized her life in all those smiling faces. Not only for the family. But for all of us who knew three months later–when Jane Stavoe was no longer on the planet–that we had expressed our love.

In August, Dad asked my nephew Sam to create a digital version and we sent out a link of Mom’s Big Head Book to family and friends on her birthday, the day she would’ve turned 80.

This morning, reminded of all this, I pulled up a YouTube video my friend Susan’s coworker sent to the hospital when Susan first fell ill. Students sit in the grass and tell their favorite things about their teacher: she is creative and kind and funny. She teaches them about birds. She teaches songs. And then they sing “Alligator Pie”. Mostly they say they love her and they want her to get better. One first-grader says, “Mrs. Gardner is almost the best teacher I’ve ever had in my whole life,” and I know Susan is laughing.

Not everyone can be in the room. But you can always squeeze in more love.

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