Thank You For Trusting Us

A few years ago I attended a meeting for aspiring writers. The meeting was given at the local library. I don’t recall the speaker’s name, but I will never forget her. She had a saying she loved: “What you keep, keeps you.” To illustrate her saying, she pulled out a rusty nail. It was obviously old, but I didn’t realize how old until she told us the story that went with it. The nail fell out of a wagon that hauled away her great-grandmother to her new master’s plantation. The nail had been passed down the maternal line, mother to daughter, for 150 years. Whenever she saw that nail, it reminded her of the stories of slavery and hardship of her ancestors. The nail that she kept, kept her. It was her tie to family.

After she told us her story, we talked for a short while about writing, and then she had us write our stories about the items we kept that kept us. I keep a small pewter angel in my pocket. My wife has an identical angel she keeps in her purse. I bought them at the gift shop in the hospital one time when my wife was in for pancreatitis. She was in really bad shape, and the doctors didn’t know if she would make it or not. She was in ICU singing gospel songs she learned in the church of her childhood, and talking to her grandmother, now deceased for 50 years, just like she was in the room with her. It was like she had one foot in this world and one in the next, and nobody knew which foot she would come down on.

So we all wrote our stories, and then the speaker had us read them aloud. Most of the stories were really good. Then it was my turn to read. I started out just fine. But partway through the reading, the emotion caught up with me and I very nearly broke down. I had to stop and collect my wits a couple times, but somehow I made it through the reading. And then the speaker said something that has stuck with me ever since: “Thank you for trusting us.” So simple, yet so honest and accepting and healing.

Today an admin on one of the pages I subscribe to on Facebook posted something so personal it was incredible. She told of a history of being abused, of losing 3 family members to suicide, of recurring bouts of mental illness including suicidal thoughts and PTSD. She laid it all on the line in total honesty, making herself completely vulnerable to anyone reading the post. And suddenly I remembered the kindness shown to me those years ago by a guest speaker at a writers’ meeting. “Thank you for trusting us.” A simple, yet effective balm for the spirit, now paid forward to a friend I’ll never meet.