Lick that Stamp, Send that Letter, Share that Story:

You may never know the reason why

When my father died and my mother was admitted to a facility, we couldn’t find his best friend Vonnie’s phone number. Months after his funeral she showed up at my brother’s home in New Jersey and fell over in grief at the news my father was dead. He got her a glass of water, a few words of condolences and her address.

I wrote Vonnie a long letter.

I poured out my whole heart as a witness to their decades long friendship, their laughter, the way my father’s racist rants disappeared in our hearts because his best friend was a black woman, the way she showed up for my father and his humor and his talent in ways my mother could not.

I told her how much I learned just by bearing witness to their friendship.

I called out the whole content of the messy bird’s nest in that letter, including the racism in the world and my family, and let her know she and her husband were welcome in my home in California anytime.

And then I licked a stamp, and sent that letter, which felt risky at the time - and I never heard from Vonnie.

Years later I stepped into my life passion of writing my stories. I slowly began putting my stories into the world. I started out small, on Facebook, with maybe ten readers, then sharing in small writing groups eighteen years ago.

I wrote all victim-y at first - blaming my mother and my father and maybe even my brothers for anything wrong in my life . But I kept writing and I kept living. I wrote and wrote myself out of the victim vortex and past the rage and the cancer and into the wisdom.  

If I’m honest, it took years.

One day a man named Mogo fell forty feet out of a mango tree near my bedroom window on Kauai. He wasn’t on a safety line and the sound of his body hitting the ground outside my window was crushing.

I held his hand, negotiated for an ambulance (they were all at other locations), finally got the ambulance to come a half hour later, rode for an hour with his twisted, barely breathing body to the hospital….then found myself in the ER where they assumed I was his wife.  

They handed me scissors and asked me to cut his bloody clothes off, and while eleven doctors and nurses frantically worked to keep him alive, his heart stopped.

One of the nurses told me to call out his name, and I went to his face and called MOGO over and over while they paddled his chest, and he opened his eyes, and then his heart stopped again, and then I called to him again. 

This time when he opened his eyes I asked him if he wanted to live or die.  Those words coming out of my mouth shocked me.

He said he wanted to live, so I told him his heart had been stopping, and if he wanted to live he had to talk to his heart and tell his heart to hold on while the doctors did their work. 

Then I finished cutting off his pants and left the ER to tell his family and friends he was going to make it.

A few days ago a woman wrote on my Facebook wall about being in an ambulance when her heart crapped out on her, and hearing the ambulance drivers insinuate she wouldn’t make it to the hospital, and seeing the fear in her daughter’s eyes. Then she remembered reading the story about me and Mogo in my book Freeing the Turkeys.

She talked to her heart, and let me know the Mogo story reminded her how.

This isn’t a story about Vonnie or my father or Mogo or a mango tree or even the woman in the ambulance who lived, or her daughter, whose fear of losing her mother was reflected in her eyes.

This is a story about all of us, reminding us how much stories matter - not just the stories we write, but also the stories we tell each other every day. It’s how we process our grief and joys and challenges.

It’s how we bear witness to each other and hold up a mirror for others.

Fifteen years after writing the letter to Vonnie I received a phone call from her husband to tell me she had died. I thanked him for calling me.

I need to tell you something, he said. Vonnie read that letter over and over and over until it was threadbare, it meant so much to her, honey.

Why didn’t she tell me? I asked.

Because it just wasn’t Vonnie’s way, but I thought you should know.

I’m writing this to let you know that your words matter, but first you have to let go of the need to know who is reading your story or poem and why, or how many likes or comments you receive, because it just might not be someone’s way.

Maybe your reader is one nursing mother standing in her kitchen at 3 a.m., or one person in a taxi cab coming home from a funeral - your story could be the ribbon on the tree in the forest that helps them find their way home.

We write and we save our own lives, but in the process we are offering our stories up to the world - one anonymous reader at a time.

We aren’t doing any saving, we are just reminding each other how.

From An Atlas of the Difficult World by Adrienne Rich:

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

__________________________________________

I’m teaching a one time class September 13th - Heartbreak as a path to healing as part of our monthly Love & Eros series on heartbreak as a path to healing. I hope to see you there!

Laura Lentz is the author of the essay book Freeing the Turkeys and STORYquest, the Writer, the Hero, the Journey, a workbook for writers. She is the founder of Literati Academy, a live international community of writers creating stories in themed six-week workshops in small, intimate groups. Read her new personal essays for free on Facebook. and here on Substack.

Laura has been on the faculty of The Kauai Writers Conference, where this year she is hosting a spoken word show with producer/director Lee Hunsaker.