Tiny Tributes
No gesture is too small when it comes to keeping someone's memory alive
As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the urge to keep someone’s memory alive is powerful. When we’re lucky, we eulogize, we gather, we toast, we pray, we raise money in someone’s name, we gain strength from people showing up in big ways and small. It’s the small ways we want to talk about today, namely, the way seemingly tiny tributes can have a powerful effect on honoring someone’s legacy — not in an official start-a-memorial-fund way, but in a day-to-day way.
When Jodi’s brother David passed away suddenly last October she and her husband Fred were tasked with cleaning out his house and moving his kids into a smaller space. It was heartache on top of heartache. She was already in mourning, and in addition to dealing with the heavy emotional load, she had to deal with the logistical side of things, too. David had many deep passions — architecture, graphic design, railroads, urban planning, Berlin, ancient Rome, the World’s Fair to name only a few — and the number of books reflected the depth of his interest in all these topics. “Winnowing down his lovingly assembled collection was a heart-wrenching prospect, and breaking it apart felt disrespectful,” she said. But they only had three weeks to clean out the house and pack, so she spent the first week reaching out to friends, family, train museums, professors in various subject areas, vintage booksellers, design book dealers, and many others. After a while they realized they simply didn’t have time to find loving homes for all of his books, so committed to donating the boxes and boxes to a local library bookstore. “But before dropping them off, she said, “we decided to handwrite 'From the collection of David E. Levine' in as many of the books as we could. This small gesture brought us some comfort—the idea of spreading his memory, particularly among people with like-minded interests.”
Sometimes keeping someone’s memory alive happens by accident. When Jenny spoke of her father’s love for sweets — specifically Mallomars — in her eulogy for him, people showed up to the shiva with piles of the distinct yellow boxes, and continued to do so all year long, bringing them to her house for host gifts, or even just texting photos of supermarket displays from the cookie aisle. To state the obvious, it felt good to know that her father was on people’s minds, however briefly, as they went about their daily lives.
Sometimes there’s more intention behind the ritual, and we are thinking specifically of Like Magic contributor Kim who started a ritual with her best friend, Liz, who was grieving her mother. "Liz is an only child and only has one cousin who lives far away,” she wrote. “She was very close to her mother. When her mother passed away, I put that date in my digital calendar with a yearly reminder. Every year I stop and get her a small bouquet of yellow roses on that date." We love this gesture because it acknowledges that grief doesn’t really have an end date, and also because it’s simple. When we try to comfort our friends we don’t need to overthink it. We just need to show up.
Lastly, another Like Magic contributor, Lisa N, was surprised to find that after her mother’s death, she gleaned comfort from the tiniest thing imaginable: a one-cent penny. As she told us: "My mom was very conscious of money and spending it - not cheap by any means but just really good at saving. When I was young, any time we saw a penny on the ground, she would pick it up. But as I got a little older, I was embarrassed by it — really, what’s a penny going to do for you? Turns out more than I thought. My mom died a couple of years ago and now any time I see a penny on the street, I’ve decided it’s her saying ‘hi’ to me. I always stop to pick the penny up and then take a moment to talk to my mom and tell her what’s going on and how much I miss her.” And the whole family got into it — her husband and kids send pics of coins they find in weird places and she saves them all in a special pocket of her wallet. “Haven’t decided what to do with them yet, but they’re definitely adding up."
We love that so much. What small thing have you done to memorialize someone you love?
Thanks for reading,
Jenny & Jodi ✨
When our friend and sister-in-law passed away, all the books we kept of hers, we noted inside the book that it was from her collection. Books are a GREAT tribute to someone.
I love all your posts very much. The mallomars one made me smile.