Journaling: What a Gift

Each year on this day Doug sits down and reflects on the year past. He captures his thoughts in his one journal entry of the year. Just one, today, preserved.

I've been keeping a journal since my tween years, when I knew four things about myself: I would never get married (I tried anyway); I would never have kids (I'm the best eccentric aunt); I would live in an apartment (I'm baaack!); and I would be a journalist (well, writing and teaching will have to do).

Now, my journal takes the twice monthly form of a letter to a friend. We have for many decades corresponded faithfully. What I tell him is my record of my life and reflection on it. It's all stored electronically these days (with backup) but I have a storage unit near full of boxes of hard copy journals dating back to the 60s.

I do it to confront an issue or capture an experience. Maybe for someone in the family down the road to understand us all a little bit better.

I had a coworker who wrote brief comments in his day planner about important events in his life and those of his family as a form of journaling. Another who writes notations in her cookbooks about when and why she made a recipe --- someone's birthday, a wedding, other significant turning points...

When my mother's memory started to fail, evolving eventually into dementia and Alzheimer's, she started keeping a "notebook," (she would never have called it a journal) to recall what she did each day. She'd note the date, the weather, her schedule for the day. It sat open next to her place at the kitchen table, always faithfully at her side. We kids started to leave her notes in it as well. If we stopped by and she wasn't there, we'd leave a note. Hidden somewhere in the future pages we'd write "I love you," for her to find as she turned the pages on new days.

I have all of her notebooks but I haven't read them yet. I'm curious about the thoughts that she might have included beyond her daily activities but I'm scared to perhaps witness her decline captured among those pages as well.

Mom's been lost to Alzheimer's for 12 years now and my dad died too young. There's so much about them and our family history that we'll never know because we have no one to ask.

It doesn't really matter whether you think of yourself as a journal writer or how often or faithful you are to the task. It doesn't matter why you do it --- to preserve family history, wrestle your way privately through some personal challenge, make notes to yourself for future use... There are no rules, no requirements. You're the writer, the editor, the publisher. You decide.

What matters is that someday someone will be able to touch your words. Absorb them and the stories and lessons they tell. Imagine opening up your long gone great grandmother's cookbook to find her handwritten notes. What a gift.


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