It's the small stuff that endures

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My college softball coach has given me loads of good advice over the years on matters big and small: the proper technique to lay down a bunt, the best strategy to pursue in a cut-throat game of Hearts and the value of hand-written correspondence. Maybe most importantly, was the notion that if someone in your orbit dies, it’s always a good idea to turn up at the funeral.

I had that last bit of advice ringing in my ears a couple of weeks ago when I attended a memorial service for a former colleague. I didn’t know her very well, but we’d stayed in touch over the years, trading emails every so often and liking each other’s Facebook posts.

Her service was held in an airy sanctuary, full of natural light. Two hundred or so people filed into the space, alternately hugging and crying, every shoulder squeeze delivering an unspoken how could this be. There’s a sameness to the ritual we use to say this final farewell — readings, eulogies, prayers, music — but I somehow always learn something funny or quirky about the person who’s passed. Something that makes me wish I’d known them better.

Invariably the program, in all its stillness and quiet reflection, got me thinking about how we’ll all be remembered one day. We might imagine it’ll be for the work we do or the good we’ve done — and surely that’s a big part — but this memorial reminded me it’s also for our silliest dance moves and best homemade soups and passionate hobbies. The fun we sow.

At the time of this particular service, I was beginning to prepare for an on-stage interview with the author and podcaster Gretchen Rubin about her new book. Rubin is probably best known for “The Happiness Project,” but in her telling, she’s most curious about human nature. Her work offers bracingly practical ideas and frameworks to help people better understand themselves — “to thine own self be true” is easy to say, harder to do.

She identifies four areas to examine when cultivating a happier life: embracing things that make you feel good; nixing things that make you feel bad; feeling right (or being aligned with your values); and an atmosphere of growth, because we’re happier when we’re growing or learning or fixing things in some way. Those four pieces seem so darn simple, but Rubin’s articulation of them is sticky because of how accessible, pragmatic and nonjudgmental she makes this elusive thing, happiness, feel.

Her ingredients were floating around in my brain as I listened to friends and family reflect on my colleague’s life. Rubin says if your life is overfull in one area (too much growth, too few values, etc.), you get out of whack, however my colleague, even through a long illness and demanding career, seemed to have found the right mix. It made me wonder if her family of origin was intentional about happiness, and what advice she got along the way to make it so.

Elissa Ely wrote for us this week about giving advice to her daughter, but she’s also an expert on grief; for years she worked on a series at WBUR called The Remembrance Project. In it, she told stories about the recently deceased by interviewing their family and friends. When I asked her what she learned from those years of memorializing, I was expecting her to share tidbits of her subject’s lives or lessons in death she transferred to her own life.

Instead, with her characteristic art and grace, she wrote about the loved ones left behind:

I learned that we all rise differently to sorrow. I learned that sometimes watching someone at the very end of life, especially when death has been difficult, obscures all that has gone before … I learned that there is no equal feeling to that of being overcome with love for someone else. I learned not to say ‘I'm so sorry,’ but instead, to listen very, very, very carefully.

As I read back through a handful of Elissa’s essays, I noticed all the wonderful details they include. How one woman, a mother of six, was stunningly self-sufficient, making her own soap and starting the family car with a screwdriver. How one man, a pediatric dentist, began each sunny day singing “Oh What A Beautiful Morning.”

Gretchen Rubin will tell you there is no one way to be happy. No one-size fits all plan, no final destination. Part of the work is to “move towards happiness,” to keep finding ways to get ever closer to this squishy and evolving and yet utterly essential thing. For me, that progress is part of the “slipperiness of the human experience” (Maggie Smith’s phrase, not mine). It’s making my kids laugh with operatic versions of Sia songs over breakfast and jogging in a downpour and drinking my martini with a twist and olives. Maybe that small stuff is how I’ll be remembered; it’s also what keeps me going right now.