Month: December 2016

I got a letter from Hawaii Public Radio the other day. Whenever there is an on-air pledge drive, I show up for a two-hour stint sitting with a station employee and one other person, ready to tell a few stories meant to prod listeners to phone the station with their pledges of support for the next six months. Sometimes we are successful, other times we are not.

A particular target audience is those who listen regularly but do not give any support. The size of that group was driven home to me in the letter. I was being thanked for being one of the 11% of listeners who is a “member” by virtue of a financial gift.

This is the time of year when the holidays focus attention on giving. What a gift it is to us Americans that there is at least one time of year in which people turn their attention to giving gifts; to children, family, friends, co-workers, “the less fortunate.”

Set aside whatever feelings you have about the commercialization of what started as religious holidays or the angst some find in trying to match the perfect gift to the recipient. We still have about one month of the year when the generally accepted mode of behavior is to think about giving gifts to others.

That is a cause for some joy.

A less positive side of me wonders why it takes a special time of the year, promoted heavily by commercial enterprises whose yearly bottom lines depend upon lots of buyers from Black Friday (was there ever a more aptly-named day?) to the end of December, to prod people into a spirit that, in my view, should be present every day, the spirit of giving?

People of a Certain Age, whenever you give—your self, your time, your resources—don’t you feel really good? If the result of giving can be feeling good, why aren’t we giving all the time?

My letter from HPR reminded me of a story I first heard my Dad tell, one that has been around for a long while. A fellow came back to his hometown after many years to find that the church he had once attended was out of business, the windows boarded over. He asked a friend what had happened. The friend replied:

“Most of the members thought others would give enough so that they did not have to. Pretty soon, the bank foreclosed, the pastor left town, and the church was gone.”

We 11% of HPR listeners who are members are aware of the consequences to ourselves and to our community if we stop giving. But, we are of a certain age and aging. Will a new 11% emerge?

Mom was an easy target for a good cause. Each year when I helped her with her tax return, I noted how many causes received a $5 or $10 check from her. For her, a product of the Great Depression (when $5 was worth $5), a $5 gift meant something, and I came to see her point of view.

If one hundred thousand people gave $5 each, a lot of people would be fed, many hours of research could be funded, many doses of needed medicines could be made available. Presidential candidates in recent times have understood Mom’s principle; enough small gifts can raise a lot of money.

Mom’s gift reminded me of the story in the Bible in which Jesus observes a widow giving a small sum of money. He describes hers as a gift greater than some larger amounts given by others because she has given out of her poverty. There are data to show that, measured as a percentage of wealth, poorer people tend to be more generous than rich ones.

I wonder what Jesus would say to the billionaires who have generously pledged to give one-half of their fortunes to charity: “Thanks. Nice start. Now how much more will you give?”

What if the spirit of giving so evident in this season of the year was an everyday attitude? What if everyone woke up each day wondering “what can I give today?”

Another of Dad’s stories told of a grain elevator operator in a farming community agreeing to be church treasurer for one year but only if no one asked him any questions about the books for that year. At the end of the year, the church had a surplus several times the size of its annual budget.

When asked about this, the treasurer said, “I store all your grain. I took away 10% of your grain every month and saved it for the church. You never missed that grain, did you?”

For the sake of HPR, I would like the 89% who listen but don’t give to set aside one dollar every day, to be collected and given to the station once a year. I would like those who care about hunger or homelessness or mental illness of life-threatening diseases to do the same. Remember Mom’s wisdom: a little from many can make a lot.

Giving could become a habit.

Daniel E. White

December 26, 2016

At the celebration of Mom’s life last October, I told how she described her days in the weeks and months following Dad’s death. “I opened the curtains, I closed the curtains. I opened the curtains. I closed the curtains.”

I called that the rhythm of her grief. I speculated that any of us who loses a loved one is likely to develop his or her own rhythm. At that point, 2 ½ months after Mom died, I didn’t feel that I had experienced grief. Certainly, there did not seem to be any rhythm to my feelings.

I matched how she described her daily experience with the curtains to how she described her reaction to the death of each of her parents. She said that she had shed few tears but that certain situations would draw from her moments of wistful memory; more history than histrionics, she might say with a chuckle.

That she has a visceral and physical manifestation of grief about Dad is no surprise. They were married for 56 years and had raised three children together. Their presence for each other was daily, for better and for worse. The disappearance of that daily reality was bound to leave a hole in her life for which she needed to find a fill.

Those moments of wistful memory, though, I am coming to see as a form of grief. This is not the numbing form, the kind that blocks the sun in one’s life until it has ebbed. Its ache is more like the twinge of a muscle tweaked by an awkward step, the briefest of heartaches, suddenly there and suddenly gone.

It is a fact, fellow People of a Certain Age, that, as we live on, we will endure more and more such flashes of fleeting sadness, not for the departed but for the growing number of rents in the fabric of our lives.

Such tears can be tiny. I was first mindful of tiny tears when Charles Schulz died. My only connection was that I read Peanuts. More recently, the death of Gwen Ifill affected my humor for a while, so accustomed was I to her presence on the PBS News Hour and Washington Week. The orderliness of my world, caused by the untimely passing of a gifted and dedicated person, had been disturbed ever so slightly by the introduction of a whiff of grief.

When Dad died, we were in the midst of moving to Hawaii. We left even before I had the chance to share with my siblings the act of placing his ashes at the memorial park. My focus from afar was Mom, how she would handle her loss and loneliness. I can’t find anything in my memory, though I loved Dad, that feels like grief over his death. I felt sadness that his life did not turn out as he had hoped, but not grief. I have wondered about that.

And so it seemed was the case after Mom died—no grief—until it wasn’t the case.

Judy and I mark the start of our Christmas music CD playing with the same piece each year, written and sung by Keali’i Reichel. We understand only some of the words as it is sung in Hawaiian. But it is magical in the way it separates not-Christmas from the Christmas season.

For several years, the song has transported us to a rental car parked in the lot of Foothills United Methodist Church in La Mesa. Mom, Chad, Sandee, Judy and I were waiting in the chilly darkness for the choir’s Christmas music show to begin. Nobody spoke as the CD played. It was one of those special moments one shares with loved ones.

When we played the tune this year, I ached for that night in the car in a different way than I had before. It felt like grief.

In her Christmas letter, a friend from college years wrote about her mom, now gone. “She makes us smile when we think of travel, or see a puppy, or go to the beach, or go to the store, or read without enough light, or feed the birds. Those are the small and endearing things that were so central in her life.”

My friend nailed it: “the small and endearing things.” It is drizzling today—Mom would have wanted to know that and how many hundredths of an inch we caught in our rain gauge. She might have told me then about the article she had read in the Yale Divinity School journal she read whenever it came, or talked about the theme of last week’s Lawrence Welk show.

Some days I think I need to share my day yesterday with her in my morning e-mail to her, and then I remember. No big deal, she would say, and she’s right. No big deal. The momentary flash of loss is real, though.

I am lucky. A profound sense of happiness for her and her life nearly always follows the ache and flashes alike, replacing my moments of wistful memory. I expect things to be like this for a long time to come, possibly for the rest of my life; ache—happy thoughts—flash—a smile of joy; a rhythm of grief, perhaps, after all.

Daniel E. White

December 12, 2016