A Life Well Written

My father sat up straight in what would soon become his death bed.

“One last thing before I go,” he said with a grin.

I winced a little more at every word. So this was it then. The Last Thing. The Going. I, at eighteen years of age, couldn’t comprehend how he maintained that soft smile of confidence while I dematerialized into a hazy puddle of grief.

He continued as if my thoughts of death had been said aloud. “Let’s focus on living in the moments we are alive. While I’m still here, I have something to give you.”

Leaning towards me, his grin shifted into a stern seriousness. From beneath his bedsheets he pulled a small rectangle bundled in old newspapers, tied shut with a tattered string of twine. Extending a frail arm, he maintained his typical air of calm certainty as he handed me the bundle. “What you’ll find in this package is worth more than any inheritance. Wait until I am gone to open it.”

I waited.

My father passed gently in his sleep just before midnight that same night. As the heart rate monitor slipped into a steady, dull tone, I wept as the only person who had given me any sort of direction was now gone. Like losing my GPS in an unknown town, I sat bewildered. After a few hours, nurses kindly and gently shuffled me out of the hospital room and down the hall to the chapel. It was too early to be called morning.

There I sat in the miniature cathedral. The only dim light in the room pointed up at an empty cross, which only served to illuminate my own sense of emptiness. Confused, frustrated, overwhelmed with pain, holding nothing but the small bundle in my hands.

Before I really noticed what I was doing, I saw my hands untying the twine. Pages upon pages of newspapers fell to the floor. The last instructions I would ever receive from my father were now fulfilled. In my hands, I found a small, black notebook enclosed by an elastic strap. I was shocked to find the journal appeared new, the elastic still tight, the black leather unfaded. Here it is, I thought. The memoirs of my father. Something to remember him by. More lessons to learn.

Carefully, I pulled aside the strap, feeling the binding crack as I opened the cover slowly.

The cover page was oddly empty. I flipped to the first page to find only horizontal lines that were yet to be filled. Frantically, I flipped through every page, finding only open lines where I expected to find my father’s familiar handwriting, providing stories and lessons, knowledge and wisdom. Nothing!

As I slowly lowered my hands in defeat, a small note fell from the back cover of the notebook. Holding my breath, a numbing ringing sound radiated through my mind. I could feel my heart forcefully pushing blood into the chasm behind my face and above my throat as I reached down to pick it up. There, written on scrap paper, I found one short sentence:

“Many will try to move your hand, but only you can write your story.”

The numbness stopped. I remembered a family vacation to Lake Michigan from when I was younger – the feeling of ice-cold water smacking into my unexpecting, youthful face. A sense of clarity washed over me that I couldn’t fully comprehend. I flipped back to page one in the notebook, picked up an old pen with a missing cap that someone had left in the pew beside me, and started writing.

I didn’t know quite what I was writing, but for some reason I knew the exact words didn’t matter. I wrote how I was feeling. I wrote about anger, frustration, sadness. I wrote about the past.

Somewhere in the hallway behind me, a ceiling light set to an early morning timer flickered on, reminding me where I was and why I was here. I thought about my father. I wrote about what he would want for me. I wrote about ambitions, goals, the future.

Later that day, I sat leaning back in a wooden chair at my kitchen table with the notebook open before me. A new concept shuffled repeatedly through my mind. My story. My story. My story. I had never thought of it this way. I could write it. No one else could. I leaned forward, picked up the pen, scribbled in a circle for a moment to get past the dry ink clotted at the tip, and the words continued to flow.

Chapters came and went as life continued on and years went by. That original notebook that I didn’t expect to be new when I unraveled the newspaper around it so many years ago was now tattered and barely held together, on a bookshelf alongside fifteen similar notebooks that followed it in succession. I wrote what I wanted to be true about my story, and I was always surprised how these desires spelled out into reality.

At first it was small things. I wanted a better job so I could make more money. As I wrote about my financial and career goals, they became true. I had more money than I knew what to do with. A few years ago, I had an idea that came to me while writing. I tore out the page with the plans for this idea, and to my shocked surprise, a company paid me $20,000 to share that one idea with them. But this was just one page.

Money became something I could give rather than figure out how to get. I wrote about what else I could give: my time, my love, my passion, my own lessons learned along the way. My story was slowly becoming less about me and more about the characters I could fill it with. I realized something; my father’s story didn’t conclude in that hospital bed. It carried on in the stories of the characters he built up along the way.

The simple, black notebook was not magic. But day after day as I returned to fill more of the blank lines laid out for me, it unlocked something within me. I knew that this was my story, and I intended to make it a good read.