Life lessons

      This story started out as my list of life’s lessons. I soon realized that as I get older and increasingly appreciate how precious life is—and how fragile we all are—these lessons really boil down to just these two:

Lesson Number one:

Never put off letting someone know you care

      I’ve always been a procrastinator, and the effect of dragging your feet on most things is often inconsequential. However, when those “things” entail doing something for someone you care about—or letting them know you care—putting it off can have a lasting impact. You might well regret it for the rest of your life. I do.

      The first time it happened for me was when someone I knew and admired died of breast cancer. I hadn’t seen her in about a year and recalled that she’d told me of the diagnosis when I ran into her. I didn’t follow up for a long time.

      I was so ashamed. I knew her professionally, not socially, but I was very fond of her and hoped that she knew that. I vowed never to let that happen again.

      The next time I found myself in a similar situation, I got an opportunity to honor that vow. When I learned an elderly colleague was slowly dying, I reached out to him. Over the year leading up to his death, I called periodically, sent him a long note, visited him a few times, and let him know directly and indirectly that I cared.

      As sad as I was when he died, I was comforted by the knowledge he had been aware of what he meant to me.

Lesson Number two:

For those painfully difficult occasions when you don’t know what to say, when perhaps someone has lost a loved one or received a horrific medical diagnosis.

I’ve finally learned:

it’s okay to just say “I’m thinking of you”

. . . or even “I don’t know what to say.” Simply saying “I care”—or, frankly, most anything sincere—is okay. Staying silent is the absolute worst thing you can do.

      I learned this lesson by being on the other side of it, when an ambiguous diagnosis left me in doubt for months as to whether I had breast cancer. I was scared and lonely, and very fragile emotionally. I was crushed when I didn’t hear from a friend for weeks. Afterward, she admitted that she didn’t know what to say.

      “What was I going to say—‘I’m sorry you have cancer’?” she sheepishly admitted.

      I told her honestly that, awkward or not, those words still would have been preferable to her silence. My only possible conclusion at the time had been that I simply wasn’t in her thoughts at a very difficult time. She was in her early thirties at the time and a normally compassionate person, so I chalked it up to immaturity.

      After I started writing this story, I learned of the death of my older cousin. I was very fond of him, even though we hadn’t seen each other in nearly 20 years. We typically spoke a few times a year.

      After getting the news, I thought back to our most recent conversations. I was the only one in the family still in touch with him, and I know he enjoyed talking to me. He’d always say “I love you” as he got off, and I’d do the same. If he left a voicemail, it was often “Hi Carol, it’s your favorite cousin, Stan!”

      He was a character and had done both incredibly maddening and baffling but endearing things through the years. When I wrote to share the news of his death with my sister and my closest cousin, I ended the email with “He was certainly a piece of work, but he loved us—and I loved him.”

      And I felt sure he knew it.