John Dickerson reflects on the death of his mother, and what her absence has come to mean as he himself ages:
My mother died when I was 29, and though it has been 17 years, I still have the instinct to call her. She was also a journalist, so there’s the news to talk about, and there are the anniversaries of big events that she covered, and now that I have kids, there’s the larger set of conversations we could have about ambition, faith, fear, and generally trying to keep it all together.
He offers this advice to parents: “Write to your children now for when they’re older. Leave them some writing for after you’re gone.” For him, his mother’s words have proved invaluable:
I have [my mother’s] childhood journals, her letters to her parents when she was just starting out, and her journals as an adult. There was so much in what she left after her death, I had to write a book to figure out what it all meant. In those artifacts I’ve learned about grace during times of struggle and self-doubt. I’ve seen examples of a joyful spirit alive in each day. This window into her inner life offers a more global lesson: People are always more complicated than they seem. Your guesses about what motivates them are often wrong. This is both true about her and true about the people she judged. Not all the lessons I’ve learned from these papers are behaviors I’d emulate.
Mom also kept letters she wrote to me…. I don’t remember getting them when they were originally sent (“I get the feeling you don’t read my letters,” she wrote to me, saying it was a line her mother wrote to her), but they’re full of wisdom as I reread them. And instruction: “always keep smiling and making people happy,” she wrote on my copy of her letter about her will. This kind of thing reminds you of yourself later in life when maybe you need to be put back on course.
The Dish 