Ah, Mr. Sabo. I’ve been keeping a daily journal since I was eight years old. My grandmother kept a daily journal and gave me my first real – hard bound – journal for my tenth birthday. I was sixteen when my grandmother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In six months, she would be gone. For two months, grampa would go the garage and bring a box of gramma’s old journals into the house. Box by box, gramma removed the pages she had written, read them to herself, then tore them into pieces and placed them in a trashcan. Grampa would take the trash out and bring her another box. Our whole family always thought gramma would leave her journal for us – to read.
When I asked gramma why she was throwing her journal away, this is what she said. She wrote those pages to herself. It was her way of working things out for herself. She did not want anyone to read some emotion or thought she had about something that had lasted a mere day or two. She reminded me of something I’d done that hurt her, and asked if I wanted to read what she wrote about me that day? No! I did not! I wanted to forget it ever happened! Well, she said, she had forgotten all about it. In my entire life, she said she’d been disappointed in me less than half a day. Why would I want to read about those few hours again and again?
She wasn’t taking chances with our hearts. Her disappointments, hurts and hard feelings had never lasted, they had always faded away, and leaving them behind, written down on paper would make them last forever. So, she was throwing them away.
After that, gramma would select pages and hand them to me to read before she tore them up. Turns out, my grandmother was a seriously fine, even gifted writer, and her journal pages told me the story of a woman I had never seen before. Gramma was always gramma to me, and it had never even occurred to me that she was also a wife, a lover, a mother, a sister, a daughter, a friend, a writer, a philosopher, a kitchen scientist, garden biologist, a family archologist and so wholly independent she was first and always herself.
Seventeen years later my grandfather died. Twenty-seven years later my mother died. Three days later, my mother’s brother called and asked me to send him his mother’s journals. He’d waited all those years to read them and when I told him gramma had torn them up the summer before she died, he burst into tears. I sent my uncle his mother’s scrap book, filled with poems she’d cut out and pasted on the pages – these were the words that mattered to her, but it did not ease him. It is said that expectations are the mother of disappointment and I suppose that is true.
I have begun the task of opening boxes containing my own journals. I too have many boxes. I too have torn up a lot of pages. But I have time my grandmother did not have and have begun turning my journal pages into a graphic novel, including new sketches and old ones, my photographs and correspondence. Finally, I figured out I would have to bind this thing myself. I took some on-line courses in binding, and now I am free from commercial limits. My children are grateful, they had not looked forward to wading through a dozen big boxes when I was gone. They prefer I leave them a story for them to ponder.
Mr. Sabo, I tell you this story by way of saying, we all write to ourselves. Some of our best conversations are the ones we hold alone. All of us, live our lives one minute at a time and every minute we are here, we change the world. Trying to measure the change we bring into this world is a fool’s errand. Sometimes, you just have to believe.
There are only five Medium writers that have made it to my email box, and you are one of them.
