by Linda Ellis, Copyright 2009, www.lindaellis.net
I started cleaning out a back closet the other day, and on the top rack, I found three large boxes. I recognized them instantly and drew in a slow, deep breath as I brought them down from the shelf where they’d spent the last five years, undisturbed.
I carefully pulled back the tape that I distinctly remembered applying on the day I brought these boxes home. I recalled the tears that fell under the strips of tape as I pressed them slowly along the corners and seams of each box to securely hold them together until I was ready to open them again and, with a clearer mind, inspect their contents. I thought how ironic it was that this product was called “masking tape” as I had certainly tried to “mask” my feelings that day by attempting, unsuccessfully, to seal my hurt and pain inside each box as well.
I opened the first box and began to carefully sift through the black and white photos, documents and papers. My eye caught the corner of a sheet of paper that I recognized as being written in my handwriting. As I removed it from the box and began to read it, I realized it was a poem I’d written to my father when I was thirteen years old. In it, I’d referred to a favorite joke of his: “Daddy, I know it must be hard…seeing your little girl grow up. Telling everyone you know, that you’ve raised me from a pup!” I grinned as I recalled the witty sarcasm in his voice every time he’d repeated that little joke. I remember staying up late one night writing that poem and leaving it for him in his lunch box so he’d open it and read it at work the next day. I wondered now, how often he’d reread it over the thirty years he’d saved it.
Then I looked back into the box. I glanced at his passport, some silver dollars, lapel pins from his employer marking ten and twenty year milestones, etc. I found an old fishing license, some bills, receipts, birthday cards and letters.
I sat motionless staring intently at a photo I’d taken of him about a month before he’d passed away. I asked myself how it happened that seventy four years of walking this earth could eventually be contained within three boxes.
Then, it occurred to me, that what my father had actually left behind was so much more than one could place in any box. Even if it were possible: if love, guidance, support and protection were tangible items, there could never be a box enormous enough to house all that he’d given me.
The items in these boxes contained a paper trail which began in 1930 and ended in 2004. From their contents, anyone who hadn’t known him would have been able to ascertain his financial status, how many children he had, where he’d traveled, different residences throughout his life, but not what truly made him the man he was.
I realized then, that what was in these boxes, didn’t truly matter. What mattered most in my father’s legacy were the things I still carry with me every day: the life lessons I still hear in his words repeated aloud in my mind, the respect that he demanded I show others, the love and affection I feel free to give my children, the humor I find even in the most difficult situations and the empathy for others I feel in my heart when I see someone who is suffering.
Those are a few examples of the “things” my father left me. Maybe that’s why God has made such things, intangible. For if they were physical objects that we could see and hold, they might very well be sealed in boxes and put high upon a shelf to be revisited every five years or so, instead of being remembered and utilized every single day, literally inside the soul of a still living, breathing being.
After going through the boxes, I'd found that I was not yet ready to discard their contents, and probably never would be. So, I resealed them and put them back in the closet. Yet, this time, I placed them on a low, visible shelf as a reminder to me, a reminder of the most important lesson my father had taught me: that I should strive to live a life that ensures my own legacy is more than a monetary inheritance to inevitably be divvied up amongst my loved ones; a life that ensures that what I leave behind will instead be carried in the hearts and memories of those I knew and loved, as a very part of their own lives.
And that day I vowed to leave my loved ones and friends with so much more than what can be packed up and sealed…in boxes.
Copyright 2009 Linda Ellis
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