“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” Ann Voskamp, The Broken Way
This is a season of remembering for me. When spring and summer roll around looking at my calendar, I see empty space surrounding dates that once held joy and promise. To anyone else, the numbers that line up in perfect calendar order are just that, numbers and days waiting for plans to be made and events noted.
I have scribbles all over my yearly paperback calendar and would be in big trouble if I lost it. I don’t trust myself using only the electronic version of noting my dates, I need to flip the worn pages of my spiral-bound calendar and see one month on a full page. I’m a long way from being a millennial, and I know it. What I really need to do is write my dates using my erasable pen, as the designated spot allowed for each day is quite scribbled and marked up. As a side note, don’t write checks using your erasable pen, ask me I know why.
It’s remarkable how months and numbers have meaning that jumps off the page and can choke us around the neck. My wedding anniversary is one. May 29 is just a day to most, but to me, my life changed forever as I stood next to my husband and made the promise for better or worse, for sickness and health. I didn’t know at the time I would be held accountable to those words. I made the promise, and was called to pay the price. Cancer was waiting for the time and place to show up, and it did. A battle ensued, and was lost.
No matter how many years pass, that day holds a tender spot for me and presses tears to my eyes; remembering. How can our brains hold so heavy the box we store moments of destiny? These plastic tubs of memory that line our neurons are a gift from God that makes us human. We don’t have the capacity to remember every single thing in life, our heads would surely explode. The memories that make it into our storage-box are the ones that have our emotions attached. Love, joy, bitterness, anger, resentment, wonder, surprise, humor, or laughter nestle their way into rows and rows of memory sticks in our mind and heart.
Each May I remember the 29th day and let my mind rummage around the box of stored memories. They are still happy even though time is fading the corners and taking its toll. I will always have that special day, I was made a better version of myself for it, and made braver for losing that day.
What are the Rememberings you have that are packed away waiting for you to sit for awhile and page through days and times past? No matter how difficult or joyful, giving those times and seasons space to bloom again, even for a moment, helps cement them into places they need to be.
Writing Prompt: Look at your calendar and pick a day in the past that changed you. A vacation, a birth, a loss, a celebration, a heartbreak, a promotion, a retirement….these kind of events have anniversaries, even if we don’t celebrate them.
Start with, I remember…