True Inheritance

Never lose track of your dreams. That was the phrase written on the back of half a bank envelope. It’s one of the many scratch papers that I had inherited.

It’s funny. My grandmother never could keep a journal, but she was forever writing on scratch paper. After she passed, we found little notes everywhere. Shoeboxes, drawers, under cabinets. Some were more profound thoughts like the ‘six lessons God teaches us’ or observations she made while caring for her ailing mother and others were more practical such as the total dues from each lady in her women’s social group. Grandma Nora was their reluctant treasurer. Reluctant because she stressed about keeping everything correct, but she could never say no to a request.

She would likely describe herself as a jotter, not a writer — and yet she was probably a more prolific writer than many professionals. I had always romanticized old diaries with narratives about inner feelings or full recountings of life events, but after going through those tattered boxes, I think an argument could be made that these single sentence reflections — the jots and tittles of life — create a wonderfully insightful picture of their author.

Weeks after the funeral, tattered boxes filled my kitchen table except for a little real estate I managed to clear so that I could go through the contents of each box methodically. They held old photos and paper ephemera from scratch notes to magazine pages.

She loved magazines and if she found a lovely commemorative plate — usually with birds — she would gently remove the page and the most special ones were taped to her kitchen wall just above the telephone.

This inheritance has been a paradigm shift. One that I’m grateful for. You hope for a good inheritance. It’s a very conceptual thing until that person is gone and you begin to consider what that means. Before grandma died, I pragmatically thought of inheritance as money or property, etc. But after she was gone — my last living grandparent and one I had spent long summers with — these little scraps of paper I had seen, but never noticed soon became the most valuable thing she left me.

Until recently, I had been consumed by the sting of disappointment that often hits at my age. For many of us, there’s a moment when all those dreams you once had, seem to slip out of view in the face of the ceaseless waves of life’s ordinary busyness until you lose sight of them altogether.

Reading saccharin quotes like, “The bird who dares to fall is the bird who learns to fly,” would usually have had me rolling my eyes, but seeing them in her gentle cursive — the one that appeared in every card along with the words, “I love you,” made the quotes land differently.

She had always encouraged me in my interests. When I talked about sewing, she bought me a beautiful sewing kit. When I played dress-up and made up stories, she gave me a piece of jewelry that fit my storyline. When I took an interest in her favorite topic — birds — she gave me one of her bird feeders. Grandma Nora wasn’t effusive in her encouragement or loud about her gifts. She was practical and direct. She gave me inspiration by giving me tools and simple direction.

Even after I had grown up and she had slowed down some, she was still encouraging me and helping me make plans. I had wanted to travel. I had wanted to move and try my hand at starting a new career, but life — and my own insecurities — had a way of delaying any major life changes indefinitely. With that same pragmatic encouragement, she jotted down timelines and budgets on scrap paper that showed me how possible things still were.

As I sat at the table, every little scrap I read reminded me of a story she had told, and in many ways, it revealed new depths of feeling that she had about those topics. She had told me about caring for her mother who was in her 90’s. She and her five siblings had to pass their mother around in six-month blocks because no one of them could take her full time.

Reading through her little scratch pads I came to see how it bothered her that she had to pass her mother around. Though she never said it out loud, these little paragraphs written on magazine subscription postcards or free medical pads from the pharmacy held her deepest thoughts.

While I know her life held disappointments, none of the notes spoke of regrets. They held observations, ideas, and plans.

One of her favorite jots was to write out a quick list of what she would do with money. Many of the pages in my “inheritance” included random totals. No one else may have been able to decipher them, but I knew what they were. They were trips. They were gifts. They were inheritance totals.

The scraps were proof of an ever-present hope and optimistic approach to life. I felt convicted at how quickly I had given up on many of my dreams with even the slightest deterrence where she had plodded right through, all her life. And even at the end, when she was in her 90s, she was making plans.

In fact, she still had one final plan up her sleeve for me. My father stopped by with another box. This one was small and new. “Your grandmother was going to give this to you on your birthday,” he said with his eyes glistening ever so slightly. He missed her. We all missed her. And this gift was like having her back for a moment and broke the spell of grief we had been under.

I opened the gift box and there was a little black Moleskin journal that she had personalized with my name in the bottom corner. I let my fingers run over the details and reflexively opened the book. A check slid out onto my lap. I looked up questioningly at my dad. He simply smiled knowingly. It was made out for $20,000.

The first entry of this journal had to be its origin story, which I’ve recounted here in great detail, but it wasn’t the first thing written in this journal.

Grandma Nora gave me that gift with her inscription in that familiar gentle cursive of hers —

Never lose track of your dreams again.

Love,

Grandma

That reminder. That encouragement. That’s my true inheritance.