dear friends,
i’m glad that you’re here.
thank you for being here.
as you may know, i often use this space to share short jokes and sometimes i use it to share longer pieces. today, a longer piece!
this is a message that i sent to a good friend a few years back, a little while after my grandma iris died. my friend and i had been talking about caring for our loved ones and the concept of “pretending” and i had wanted to share a little more about it. i recently revisited this piece and found meaning and enjoyment in it and thought others might like to receive as well. please enjoy as desired and possible! here we go!
Good day, my friend.
Hello.
How are you?
I love you.
Thanks for reaching out this morning. I hope your work day is going well.
I was just thinking more about the concept of "pretending," and how we all do it to some extent, potentially, in conversations with loved ones or anyone really. And I just want to reformulate it in this way:
Sometimes a loved one will tell us a story, or we will tell a loved one a story, about our day, about a person that the other person doesn't know, about a topic that isn't our main topic of interest, about something, whatever it is, and we listen. And we listen with care, because we love the person. In a way, I think that that is the Opposite of pretending.
Like, when I've been on the phone with my grandmother, and she has said "I'm just happy to hear your voice," my joke has always been, "but she doesn't care about the specific things that I'm saying." And that may be true in a way. She loves ME. (Even though she has died, I speak of her love in the present tense due to love's eternal nature.) So it doesn't matter WHAT I'm saying. And to her, just hearing my voice for a minute or two each week was enough, sometimes more than enough. For her.
I would say that for you and me, our relationships with our loved ones often have more depth, more than simply listening to the sound of their voices. But at the root, there is a sameness. The root is care, of love for the person. That is why we listen, why we WANT to listen, why we are there and want to be there. Why we offer our time and attention and care, because we have it. And they do it for us.
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