One day my mom called with a request.
“I have a favor to ask,” she said. “When I die…”
“Mom,” I whined, “Not the ‘When I die’ scenario again…”
“No, this is serious,” she said. “Just hear me out.”
I hate when Mom does the When I Die speech, because it usually means she has very specific instructions about who gets a piece of jewelry or her old high school memory book or some other item, and I never have a clue what she’s talking about. Do I get the Elvis bracelet or the comb her 3rd grade boyfriend gave her? What Elvis bracelet?!
I sighed. “Okay. When you die… what?”
“I want you to speak at my funeral. I want you and your brother and sister to all stand up and tell stories about me.”
Now there’s a tall order. Stand up in the middle of my grief, face a sobbing crowd, and tell cute, upbeat stories about my mom on what will likely be one of the worst days of my life.
“What if I’m too sad to speak?” I asked.
“I don’t care. When I die, I want my life to be told by the people who actually knew me. I want to be remembered personally.”
Ah. Remembered personally. Makes sense. To be remembered officially when we’re gone proves we were alive. But to be remembered personally… accurately… sort of proves we really lived.
We all have our public face (“Jennifer Brown: mother, sister, daughter, wife, writer, PTA member, blah, blah, blah…”), but who wants to be remembered by that boring stuff? Not me. I want to be remembered by my “real” face. The face seen by the people who know me because they’ve seen me when my defenses are down, my titles don’t matter, my make-up’s off, curlers are in, jammies on, and tea made. The stuff I really am (“Jennifer Brown was the lady who cried when she saw a young lifeguard save a kid at a waterpark once, because she imagined how proud that young man’s mother must feel knowing she’d raised someone’s hero…”).
In that light, as tough as Mom’s request may be, I know I’ll honor it. She wants to be remembered not for her public face, but for the reality that is her.
And it makes sense she’d ask me to lead up the effort. After all, seeing people for who they really are as opposed to who we think they are based on snap judgments and shallow first impressions is a theme I’m so passionate about that I built a whole novel around it. This is my main character, Valerie’s, major challenge --- separating reality from what she thinks she “knows” about the people in her life.
Today, September 11th, will forever live as a day of remembrance.
For some of us, we will only remember the “public faces” of the people lost on 9/11. But for others, they will remember the “real faces” of their loved ones lost. They will remember them personally.
Seems like a good time to ask ourselves… are our public faces the only faces we’re showing… or does anyone see us as we really are? If you could leave behind one item to represent the real you… what would it be? And, more importantly, if you were given an item meant to represent someone else in your life… would you know who the item represented? How are you living up to Valerie’s challenge: are you seeing reality or are you only going off what you think you “know” about the people around you? And why wait till they’re gone to find out?
Personally, I think these are important questions to answer.
-- Jennifer Brown
