Lessons from school today

I am reading No More Words by Reeve Lindbergh, daughter of Charles and Anne Morrow, about the years of taking care of her aging mother - when there were indeed "no more words."

It is pretty thought-provoking - and I wanted to share some lines from the book that caused me to get out my highlighter during SSR today:

When she reflects on her day:

"I think I have other things, so many that they spin in my head and churn in my stomach, making me dizzy with a kind of backward self-importance. I think I have myriad responsibilities and burdens, each one distracting me from the other, all of them multiplying so fast that there are more and more in motion around me all the time, like the nightmare of breeding broomsticks in The Sorcerer's Apprentice."

On finding herself caring for her aging mother:

"Oh, yes indeed, I am overwhelmed, overloaded, and traveling over my weight limit, dragging with me my treasure chest of daily obligations. I guard them jealously - mine! mine! - I take them with me wherever I go, cling to them so tightly that I am grinding my teeth and hunching my shoulders as I drive over the back roads of northern Vermont this very morning."

When she went to see her sister who was dealing with brain cancer: (note, her sister died.)

"Yes, I turned up. That's what I do. That is my family job. I turn up, often bearing flowers, but always bringing myself, and words. Words are the family legacy and the family habit, and they are what I have to offer, whether anybody pays attention to them or not. If somebody doesn't want to listen, he or she can go to sleep. I don't mind. I'm just doing my job."

When she started reading the poetry her mother and sister had written: (maybe like we re-read blogs and letters)

"I look again for words, not for my mother or my sister but for myself. I search for words as if for traveling companions on a journey I did not expect to be taking alone, and I look first in the family collections."

When she was looking at the stars: (something her parents did with her all the time - they had the constellations memorized - not too odd for the daughter of pilots.)

"So dazzling was the spread of constellations that it had the impact of a vision, of some hidden insight.I drove home saying to myself: The dead, too, are like this, blazing within us - invisibly."

I recommend the book.