There is a picture of my daughter holding two pumpkins with an angry look on her face because she has just heard she can’t have both of them.
She is about three-years-old and it is one of my favorite pictures of her.
It is just to the left of where I am writing this post and when I look at it I remember thinking that wouldn’t be the last time I’d see that look.
Sixteen years later, within a couple of hairs of her birthday I can attest to having been correct, I have seen that expression more than once since then.
These days it belongs to a young woman who would be irate if I picked her up and carried her to room as I once used to.
As I sat here thinking back upon the past something triggered a memory of walking into a department store and noticing a little boy who seemed to be on his own.
I asked him if he was lost and he said no and asked if I knew the L’Oreal lady.
He pointed at a woman and said “that is my mom.”
I saw her notice me and glance at her son.
“Nope, I can’t say that I do. Hope you have fun.”
He looked at me and said that he was bored and I nodded but kept going.
The man in the picture on the tombstone is my great-great grandfather and there is no one left alive who knew him in person.
You can’t ask my mother or her first cousins or any of the other cousins of their generation because even the oldest were born a chunk of years after our grandfather died.
I am already older than he was when he died leaving my great-great grandmother in a precarious financial position.
My mom says she remembers her mother saying that her memories of our grandmother consisted of her asking my great-grandmother for help supporting her and some younger siblings that still lived with her at home.
Thought about it a bit because in the near future we’ll hit the official fifth anniversary of my father’s death and it occurred to me that in a hundred years he could be in the same situation as my great-great grandfather.
I don’t think that would bother my father much. His concern was focused on mom, my sisters and his grandchildren.
He’d want to know they were all taken care of and looked after and if they remembered him that was fine. I could probably extend that out and say he would want any great-grandchildren and those beyond to be taken care of and looked after too.
But beyond that, it wouldn’t have mattered much.
If you ask me today to share my thoughts I’d say that I would want the people that are important to me to remember me as having made a positive difference in their lives.
I’d say that it would be good if people remembered me helping to make the world a better place in whatever measure I could, be it big or small.
But I don’t think I care if a hundred years from now people don’t know much if anything about me. In concept these words may impact that, but ultimately it probably doesn’t matter much.
What matters is the important people know I will walk through the fire with or for them. They need to know that I can give them that big hug they probably need more than they recognize.
To me that is more significant, probably because I see it as having an immediate impact as well as one that can act like a ripple in a pond.
****
The younger Mr. Wilner and I were talking about his final goodbye with his grandfather and I told him again how impressed I was by it.
I think I might have written about it here so this might be repetition, but it is something I lived and have relived multiple times and will again.
They said I love you and goodbye to each other never breaking eye contact.
That is not an easy thing for adults to do and my son was only 17.5 at the time. I reminded him of that when we discussed it and said to remember moments like that are life lessons.
I said they can be challenging, painful and sensitive but they also serve as markers we can look back upon of experiences that provide a foundation for overcoming challenges.
Not all growth requires painful experiences but you’ll never avoid pain in all situations and circumstances so if you can try and get something positive out of it that helps a bit.
Maybe not as much as we would like, but sometimes you take what you can get and go from there.
