A Little Kindness For Your Holiday.

Revisiting this blog seems so foggy, like everything that happened in the past few years was a drug-induced delusion, and thinking about how sad I used to be feels like moving through cotton balls.

No, I'm not stoned. Yet.

I came back to give you a little holiday story from last week.

But before I tell it to you, a little family review:

Ed's still crazy. Sharon's still kicking cancer's ass, with another CT scan in January. I had a miserable cold over Thanksgiving (and oh, how fucking thankful we were that day) and she contracted it, to my dismay. She was hoarse, and febrile, and miserable.

"But," she reminded me regularly, "Could be worse. I don't have cancer."

True freaking story, Mommles.

So, onto the kindness. It begins with Matthew.

I've always been inappropriate with my friends.

For non-stalkers, Matthew was a friend of mine who died in 2003. He was a beautiful, complicated creature, and his sudden death destroyed us all. My roommate Megan and I, unable to verbalize the words we'd never get to say to him, wrote letters, and burned them, collecting the ashes into metal lockets: she had a ring, I found a pendant.

Embarrassing Grad School Photo, but the locket stayed on a ribbon, like an early 2000s Jane Austen

I never took off that locket. That is, until climbing the stairs while in grad school, when a student turned back to me and said, "Hey..your locket's open."

I froze. I remember feeling mentally paralyzed, afraid to touch my chest.

But I did, and there they were. The two open sides of my heart-shaped locket. With a little soot left inside.

It wasn't just about the ash, or the letters. It was a memory I had, a tangible thing, something that connected me not only to Matthew, but to a time that didn't feel as plagued with sadness.

Last week, Norah came across the locket on my desk. I told her the whole story: about Matthew, about the letters, and how I stopped wearing jewelry after that.

The next day after work, she came up to me with the locket held in the palm of her hand.

"Open it," she said, sweetly.

Without any one prompting her, she had taken it upon herself to write, in her scrawled, uneven handwriting, a small note, tucked inside the locket.

"Deer (sic) Mom, I love you, Love Norah"

I looked at her, eyes full of tears, and she gently said, "Now you have a new note to wear."

Thank you, my very favorite human

I often discuss my daughter's compassion; how I'm worried that her heart will break for the world, and how terrified I am of it being seen as a weakness. But in this moment, this quiet, beautiful moment, all I could do was stand in awe of this magnificent person who, through very minimal suggestions from her parents, has already proven herself as good of a human being as there ever will be.

So happy holidays, readers. Remember there is love that goes beyond materials, and kindness that moves right through death.