Left Behind

My aunt Sue wore my grandma's dress to my brother's wedding in July. "I thought she'd want me to," she whispered to my dad as we waited for the wedding.

My aunt Kathleen brought the quilt---"The last Grandma pieced," she confided while we stood outside the temple after the ceremony.

I wore Grandma's shoes.

I wear them whenever I'm in the temple. I wore them again last night, tugged them on in the ten-minute pre-session frenzy wrought by my feeding the missionaries the moment we should have embarked for Cardston. To exacerbate my stress, I'd spent the thirty-five minute drive with Jared concocting Christmas. "Four jean quilts," I'd tried to convince him. "I've got scraps. Maybe Sheila could coach me." Short of stamping my forehead, "CRAZY," he shook his head. "It's not worth it," he moved; and I knew he meant my strain, not the project's expense. The last word as we dashed from the van to the temple was Jared's resolute, "It's just stuff. You can't take it with you."

No. But you can leave it behind.

Almost every Christmas, Grandma and Grandpa gave us books. Just books, but they were one way Grandma and Grandpa made thinkers, leaders, producers, entrepreneurs, and educators out of so many of their thirty-three grandchildren. Christmas after Christmas, those books instilled in us Grandma and Grandpa's value of great education. And they didn't just give books; they received and they read books, too---often several at a time.

After their death, they left their books behind. One of them came to me: Go Forward with Faith, Sheri Dew's biography of Gordon B. Hinckley. A Post-It marked one page quoting President Hinckley's philosophy on reading:

From the reading of 'good books' there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way. It is not enough to read newspapers. . . . But to become acquainted with real nobility as it walks the pages of history and science and literature is to strengthen character and develop life in its finer meanings. (72-73)

Beneath this assertion, which could have been Grandma's own, Grandma had underlined Robert Browning's aphorism: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp." She had scrawled her own version on the page-marking Post-It: "Reach further than before." And she left it behind for me.

Grandma gave books; but sometimes, for Christmas, she gave gifts she created herself. One year she cross-stitched mugs in intricate floral patterns for each of her grandchildren. Another year she cross-stitched Christmas tree ornaments: not simple-stitch initials, like she'd helped me construct as a ten-year-old, but vintage circuitous Santa scenes, shaded and nuanced, every tiny square within the ornament frame etched in floss. Just stuff. We can't take it with us. But whenever I touch it, she touches me back, and she teaches me with the excellence of her work.

Then there were the quilts---not for Christmas, but for weddings. She let us choose any pattern. When I was engaged, she pulled out her books. But one was missing. I knew because I'd picked my pattern from it when I was twelve: the double wedding ring, in pastel pink and forest green. I was bold enough to ask for it, and Grandma produced it . . . with slight hesitation. Only after she'd finished the masterpiece did a cousin confess Grandma's resolution, sworn years before my marriage: "Never again," she'd vowed, after the serpentine production of an older cousin's double wedding ring. Why she reneged for me, I couldn't guess.

As a child, I felt sure she disliked me. She loved me, of course; but somewhere between Rule 23: Clean-Socks-On-The-White-Plush-Carpet and Rule 439: No-Unaccompanied-Children-In-The-Formal-Living-And-Dining-Rooms, I formed the vague impression of myself and my kind as a nuisance. I was a twenty-four-year-old mother of two, tip-toeing into the mortuary where Grandma awaited Grandpa's viewing, when I first knew beyond a doubt that Grandma loved me. I threw one arm around her---the one not holding my baby. "Oh, Sheralee. Bless your heart," Grandma wept. We cried together. That's when I knew.

What I didn't know---what I never knew until Grandma's funeral---was that Grandma lived most of her life in chronic pain. Doubtless her silent suffering must have amplified my childhood misdemeanours. She nursed her health with work, her personal panacea, and she expected us to follow suit. As an elementary principal or a senior Swedish missionary, a vegetable gardener, a pianist, or an Idaho Falls Temple worker, she lived by the maxim, "Work will win when wishy-washy wishing won't." Her work baked bread, froze  jam, bottled peaches, sewed dresses, crocheted blankets, molded lives. Her work built readers, writers, teachers, artists, musicians, moms, and dads. Even in her final years, after Grandpa left her widowed, dying in his sleep two nights after Christmas 2005, Grandma worked. "I still have quilts to make," she resolved as we left Grandpa's funeral. Just stuff, those quilts, and all that work. She didn't take it with her. But she left it behind.

My uncle Conrad said her death was peaceful, like passing through the temple's veil. He was consoling me as I wept over Grandma's casket in 2009. "Roseanne was there," he reassured me---she was my Uncle Jim's wife, long deceased---"and Grandpa, and Grandma's parents." He didn't say it, but I imagined Uncle Conrad's son Joseph there, too. "This is good for Grandma," he attested.

I didn't get to say good-bye. I'd phoned her one week earlier, to wish her a happy birthday. She was too sick to talk on the phone. I left a message, but I forgot to say, "I love you." I never even wrote her a thank-you card for the double wedding ring quilt.

She left her pristine living room. After her funeral, the white plush carpet still squished beneath my clean-stockinged feet. She left her books and her sewing machine and her cross-stitch. She left her bread pans and her freezer jam recipe. She left unfinished quilt tops for my devoted aunts to complete, and she left Aunt Sue her temple dress. She took with her God's promise that binds us beyond death; she'll always be my grandma, and my cousins', and our children's.

The rest she left behind.

To me, she left a turkey roaster, an amethyst necklace, a couple of jewelry pins, and books. She left me a queen-size double wedding ring quilt and a lifetime to live my gratitude. She left me her shoes, and she left me behind to continue the work she commenced in them.

The Change The World Needs Most

Wednesday night. Seven o'clock and all's well. The troops have devoured the chicken and rice and fast re-manned their rubber-band catapult: hundreds of elastics tied together in a ten-foot chain, each end secured to a piano bench leg. Belting Johnny Horton's, "Sink the Bismarck," Seth pulls the catapult's centre taut and on Ammon's command launches the missile: a flannel  beanbag that grazes Baby Benson, oblivious of danger, absorbed in  his blocks. Cheers erupt. Spencer and Lorrin unsheathe their cardboard daggers from duct tape scabbards and brandish them, hurrahing. Only little Dalen objects. He glares from beneath his red plastic fire hat,  his hands groping out from the blue plastic fire coat that droops to his boot-tops. He aims a threatening fire hose (two interlocked toy train tracks) at Major General Ammon and Lieutenant General Seth. "You guys!" he demands, in Benson's defence. "Go to school!" His brothers just laugh.

I should be putting them to bed. Instead I'm chewing a pen, drumming a notebook (the old paper kind), and fumbling for inspiration for my most audacious essay ever: "The Change the World Needs Most and How to Achieve It," the culminating assignment of my current events course. What business a stay-at-home mother of six has with a current events course still eludes me. I can't quite defend the difference it makes to my six boys in Raymond who governs Egypt or which weapons belong to Syria or why I even care to grasp the cycles of history.

"If we're worried about the world, let's look to the upbringing of our children," my husband suggests---and he's right. I know he's right.

That's why I'm taking the course.

That's why I'm devouring Oliver DeMille, Strauss and Howe, Orrin Woodward, and John Naisbitt like my six little boys scarf down chicken and rice---all simultaneously, six books at once, with audios while I wash dishes and the next-to-read list ever-growing. I rarely scan more than a page or two between diaper changes,  Mother Goose readings, Band-Aid-ing, and bottomless pit control; yet every glance I steal harasses my heart's conflict: is this worth it?

It is, insist my insides.

The boys waging beanbag warfare today may tomorrow man weapons more deadly---unless I bring them up to change the world some other way.

Intermingled with "The Bismarck," a counter-melody ensues: Spencer is singing his school song. His kindergarten teacher, Sue Olsen, composed it:

We are the rising generation, we're the future of our world.

We are children making life a little better on this earth. . . . 

We are the future, with help from you . . . 

And in his sweet soprano,  I've struck the answer to my question. My quest to grasp world issues, to distill cycles and events to their essence, to write audacious essays is not only worth it, it's essential. Because, as egocentric as it sounds, the change the world needs most is me.

The world needs me to nurture sons into statesmen and saints so it won't need so many soldiers.

The world needs me to build what opposition strives to break: families, friendships, future, faith.

The world needs me to produce, not simply to consume.

The world needs me to transform my home from a hermitage into a hospice---for the living as well as the dying; for foreigners as well as for family; for the body, the mind, and the spirit of every soul I can possibly reach.

The world needs me to forget myself, remember my Maker, and do as He directs---not just in the moments when the world is watching, but in every invisible choice and interaction in between. This is the change that changes the world---one heart at a time.

On Monday, I'll bustle my boy troop to the Cenotaph down our street. My husband will bugle "Last Post," and we'll struggle for two minutes of silence. We'll listen to orators recite Rudyard Kipling's "Recessional" refrain, "Lest we forget." My boys will remember the fighter jet flying 500 feet overhead, but I will remember the Recessional's more forgotten second stanza:

The tumult and the shouting dies---

The Captains and the Kings depart---

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, may I remember:

I am the change the world needs most.

Serious Trouble, Simple Outreach

“When you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble, and you will be right more than half the time.”

- Quoted by Henry B. Eyring *

Last week my friend was diagnosed with cancer. She’s only fifteen.

Last summer I learned two loved ones were battling addictions. They both served missions. They rarely miss church.

Last year I watched a family suffer debt, depression, and unemployment. Their kids ride bikes, play sports, attend Scouts. They wear clean clothes, eat fresh food, and live in a comfortable house.

What looks hunky-dory outside sometimes proves hideous underneath.

Like my next-door neighbors’ porch. They purchased a can of paint to repair what looked like weathering. As they scraped off the peeling exterior, they exposed the entire structure—rotted.

I was thirteen weeks pregnant and my only living son was sixteen months old when I noticed during his bedtime stories one Saturday night that I was bleeding. I phoned my midwife. She said I was miscarrying. “You’ll have a lot of bleeding,” she explained briefly, “and then it will subside.”

A lot of bleeding. Okay. I put on a maxi pad, asked my husband for a priesthood blessing, and went to bed.

The next day was Sunday. My bleeding seemed to have slowed. “I guess that was that,” I assumed naively; and, childlike, I went to church.

I survived Sacrament Meeting but spent most of Sunday School locked in the bathroom. I nursed my living son to sleep and swapped my saturated maxi. I might as well have stretched forth my puny arm to stop the Missouri River (D&C 121:33). By the time Relief Society dismissed, I was in serious trouble. I stood in the hall, my backside to the wall because that backside was covered in blood.

People passed—virtual strangers; we’d only lived in the ward for a month. Acquaintances stopped to chit-chat. “Cute sweater.” “Great lesson.” “Your baby’s peaceful when he’s sleeping.” “Nice hair.” “Full hands.” “Looks like snow.”

I need my husband, I wanted to whisper. I need help. But I didn’t know how.

Within a few minutes, he came. He shielded me with his coat, shuffled me out to the car, and drove me home. Within twenty-four hours, everything was over; my body seemed to think it had never been pregnant. Within ten months, we had another son, and four have followed him—no long-term anything to sniff for. But I’ll never forget those five or ten minutes of serious, unseen trouble.

I wonder how many false fronts conceal blood-stained backsides. I wonder how many sorrows masquerade in plastered grins. I wonder. Sometimes serious trouble sports a slick facade.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t fault the friendly by-passers. I don’t propose intuiting perfect strangers’ shrouded needs. Ultimately,  I needed my husband, not the nice ladies leaving Relief Society—which is maybe why the unseen service inside homes is most sufficient.

But not all homes are healing.

Not all women in crisis have husbands.

Not all sorrows last twenty-four hours, ten minutes, ten months, or ten years.

I can’t reverse miscarriage, cure cancer, heal addictions, erase depression, offer employment, or even repair a front porch. Still, I mustn’t forget what I can do. Like the Old Testament’s Naaman, I’m usually looking for some great thing: ten-hour projects, twelve days of Christmas, casserole, cake, and the complete home make-over. Sometimes I'm so stressed trying to execute the elaborate, I neglect the essential small, silent, and simple. Sometimes I'm so busy cooking or cleaning or composing that I fail to smile, hug, listen, or ask. I too frequently forget that by small and simple means, great things are brought to pass (Alma 37:6-7). Christ fed five thousand not with casseroles and cakes, but with a few loaves and fishes. He opened deaf ears and blind eyes with His spit; He cleansed the leper and raised the dead with His words;  He healed the woman's twelve year's issue of blood with her touch on the hem of His clothes. And while my words and my touch can't eliminate ills, they may lend the needed courage to bear the on-going struggle.

Another Sunday, ten years after my miscarriage, I stood in the hall of another church building, cradling another sleeping baby. I should have been in Ward Council, but my son's squalls drove me out. Locked in the bathroom, I'd nursed him to sleep. Now I wanted to go back to my meeting, but I couldn't bring myself to interrupt it one more time. So I stood outside the Bishop's office, superficially serene but stormy within. It wasn't just one meeting. This was the third such Ward Council in a row. Who thought to call you as Young Women's president? my thoughts seethed. You can't even quiet your baby. Serious trouble? Maybe not. But in the moment, it felt serious to me.

Another ward's Sacrament Meeting dismissed—my sister-in-law's Sacrament Meeting. People passed. "Hi there." "Hello!" "How are you?" My brave front fooled friendly acquaintances; but my sister-in-law wasn't deceived. She stopped and put her arm around my shoulder. Our familiar, familial relationship and that simple gesture invited my tears. She took her daughter to the nursery and then returned to my  side. We talked until Ward Council adjourned; then she hugged me and left for her meetings. She didn't change my circumstance. She did change my heart.

“I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,” wrote contemporary Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye (80).

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,

but because it never forgot what it could do.**

References

*  Eyring, Henry B. “In the Strength of the Lord.” Conference Report April 2004. Web. 2 Nov. 2013.
** Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Famous.” Words Under the Words. Portland: The Eighth Mountain Press, 1995. Print.