Blank Pages

I saw an entry in my mom’s journal from 1977, about my aunt feeling down and I knew right away it must have been written soon after my uncle passed away. I backed up, scanning the pages for some reference to an emergency, a phone call, a funeral but I found nothing.

I finally saw his name, “Us and Richard’s were at mom’s for supper.”

Then 14 days and 2 pages later, nothing. Blank pages.

Later, I did find, under the “mom’s for supper” comment, a little footnote that read, “(last time we were to see Richard on this earth!)”

There, after the 30th she talked about life again, as if nothing really changed. She only mentions my aunt more. She comes over more, she sees her looking lost. She’s quiet and she “can’t even imagine how she must feel.”

I believe that mom didn’t write in the journal every day, but would leave space for her entries and any updates she wanted to add later. I think she intended to write about what happened to Richard, the accident at the farm, the phone calls, arrangements and funeral, but these pages are blank.

I was frantically looking for the days I know were there. The questions, the anguish, the sadness, the fear and frank reality of a young father, husband, brother, son very suddenly gone. The pages are clean of it. How did it get lived so quietly here? Where are the large angry letters, the tear stains, the frustrated loops of script gone mad? I expect if I were her I would have scrawled an “X” or found some red ink to just scribble over the whole page.

I was only 5. I remember the bits and pieces of it. My cousins sitting on either side of another aunt on my grandmother’s sofa. Their faces still and unapproachable. I remember the family gathering around, praying without knowing what to pray, the people I counted on, the pillars I leaned on, falling all around me. I remember their heads shaking, their voices low. I remember the quiet that only the phone-call from the hospital was allowed to break.

The news was expected and the last little hope was tucked into pockets because we knew that families always need a little, and must protect it at all cost. These large farm families, they see more death than other families. More risk, more frailty, more trust and there’s always need of hope. There was the unborn cousin who would join his daddy in heaven in the weeks to come. Even at 5 I saw the mercy in a miscarriage. I hadn’t known she was pregnant until he was gone and I froze a little inside as I processed the news. I heard the women around me talk of God and wisdom and I had so many questions I couldn’t form into words. Little pockets of emotion, and thoughts that would not anchor, left empty spaces.

Blank pages I wanted to fill.

There they were again. Those same pages. Still empty.

35 years later I wept over them. I wept over the little girls and the brave mothers. I wept over the loss and the pain. I wept over the questions I’ve grown into and the answers I can’t have. I wept because I wanted to see my mother’s anger. I wanted her to write it down. I wanted to see her lash out at life the way I could understand it. In writing. Pen to paper, heart to heaven, tightness unwound in syllables that didn’t even have to make sense. I just wanted to hear them.

She didn’t use a pen to rip the seams of her heart though. Writing was just for recording the facts. The here and there, the coming and going. Writing was brief and simple. I picked over the snippets and saw the names, the births, the appointments, the goals and the process and I had to give up.

There was nothing more to find.

But there was more to understand. Unhidden. The obvious language of collecting it all. She kept so much in those notebooks. She saved dates and trivia and wound herself into the one thing I could always count on her for.

Practicality.

Life did go on. Her own unborn child still needed her care, her toddler still needed diapering, her little girls all needed to see her chin up…way, way up. She kept it there, and she did her crying with her door closed because sometimes explaining tears when there are so many minds to translate for, is too much.

The bread still needed baking, the floors still needed sweeping, the clothes still needed mending and the deep October cool needed us to move into November and December and find a warmth from the promises we knew that spring and summer would fulfill.

Faithfulness.

God provided. Every single day.

Even with her blank pages, my mother showed me God’s faithfulness. The facts of those days were too knotted up to occupy straight lines. Blank pages told a story I already know and I realize they represent her in ways I often remember her. Silent. Still. Knowing God.

I am going to open that notebook again. I’m going to read her “day to day” and relish the telling of my own memories from her perspective. I am thankful. So thankful for the things she never wrote down. The way she combed through our hair with her fingers as we leaned into her. I’m thankful for the way she talked to us, bluntly, about life and death and why we live the way we live. I’m thankful for her understanding and her patience. Thankful for when she seemed to know more about why I was cranky than I did. I’m thankful for all the things she never wrote on paper…the blank pages that didn’t need detail.

Writing wasn’t the way she ripped the seams of her heart, but her pen did stitch the days together. I’m so, so grateful to her for those remnants she kept for us all. Even the pages she left blank.