SOME THINGS WE MAY
TAKE WITH US
A Widow Bit – Feb. 10, 2008

By Mary Koch

            The e-mail request was brief and to the point. Had John ever shared with me the name of someone who had been involved in an event that occurred 50 or so years ago? That identity may have been kept a secret, and John  may have been the last living person to know.

            I knew of the event, but I didn’t have the name. I’d never thought to ask. I had to inform the e-mailer that I couldn’t help him. It wasn’t the first time that I wished I could have asked John a question.

            After his stroke, I still could ask questions. But because the stroke had robbed him of speech, answering was laborious.

            That first summer, I couldn’t figure out how to work our automated, underground sprinklers. Like many things in this old house, it was a Rube Goldberg kind of system. My brother-in-law, who can figure out just about anything and make it work, tried to help, but he too was stumped.

            So we asked John, who used his eye-blink method to spell an explanation, letter-by-letter. Problem was, the explanation didn’t make sense. I worried. Was John’s brain more muddled than the neurologists had led us to believe? Ultimately I found someone who had worked on the sprinklers and learned that John had it exactly right; it was the system that made no sense.

            In the years that followed, John’s communications became briefer, more concise. Maybe he grew weary of eye blinks, or maybe, as the years went by, he felt less need to say much. That’s hard to believe of a man who once issued words—written and spoken—in a crystal clear, ever-rolling stream.

            John’s words are all over this house. I have file cabinets filled with notebooks, letters, old newspaper clippings. His daughter Katie compiled a scrapbook of columns. And there is one file folder entitled, simply, “John’s Words.” It contains a few of the eye-blink messages that struck me as important to save. Some are dark, almost scary—messages during his occasional struggles with a delusional psychosis. Others reflect his profound passion for life. One message was as if he were taking inventory:

            “I like me,” he spelled on Dec. 7, 2004. “I love Mary. I love God. I like neighbors. I like Omak, Okanogan County, caregivers.”

            So I wonder about that 50-year-old secret—probably one of many—John had held. What happens to a secret when all who hold it have died? Is it like the proverbial tree falling in the forest? If no one knows of the secret, then does the secret itself no longer exist?

            And I wonder about the knowledge that each of us accumulates during a lifetime. We’re so careful to write wills that will distribute our material possessions. “Can’t take it with you,” we’re advised.

            Yet do we make arrangements to pass on what we have learned? Otherwise, knowledge and wisdom, it would seem, are two things we do take with us.

© Mary Koch, Omak, Washington 2008

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