Write Thank-you Notes

Audio Members, listen here:

Today is my mom’s birthday. If she were alive today, she would be 95. She lived a long, rich life even if most of the last decade was bittersweet due to mental deterioration. However, she never lost her laugh and her good cheer. Even when she didn’t remember who I was, she treated me with the warmth and kindness that she gave to everyone she met. I actually enjoyed being the recipient of that more-generalized love rather than the more burdensome love of being someone’s child. That love for her fellow human beings stayed with her to the very end. 

I miss her laugh and the joy with which she lived. She had Original Joy. It was embedded in her. She didn’t believe in big issues; it was the small things that mattered.

My mother believed that you could make the world a better place through little gestures. Flowers in a vase. Hosting a party. Sharing a piece of chocolate. Telling a grocery clerk that they had done a great job. Encouraging her children to “try and look cute.” Her life, like all lives, was touched by tragedy but she was determined to be relentlessly positive. It was her creed. 

And she wanted to share that joy around.

At the apex of this philosophy was her admonition to always write thank-you notes. I am aware that today such niceties are regarded as prim and old-fashioned. In a world of overlapping crises, who has the time to send a thank-you note? If the world is coming to an end, what good is a thank-you note?

I would say: It makes all the difference in the world. 

Call me a fatalist but the world has always been coming to an end for each of us. One day we will lose everything and everyone who ever mattered to us. How we face that finale is the great choice we must all make. We can wallow in the tragedy of it all — and there are plenty of good reasons to do so —  or we can celebrate the bounty we have been given precisely because it will soon be taken away. 

If you choose to celebrate, then every single moment is precious. Every ray of sunlight, every puddle you step in, every mischievous glance, every love, every bead of sweat. It is all precious compared to the emptiness that likely awaits us. 

I choose, as my mother showed me, to give thanks for the immense beauty of it all. 

Thank you, Mom.