There’s a single hearing aid on the corner of my desk. I’ve picked it up and put it down several times. It belonged to my aunt.

Back at the end of May, my sister and I planned a fiftieth anniversary dinner for my parents and invited all our relatives, including my dad’s younger sister, Aunt Nancy. As we were heading to the restaurant to decorate, we learned that she was being rushed to the ER.

We soon learned that she’d had a stroke and then spent the next few weeks unconscious in Barnes Hospital, suffering multiple seizures. It didn’t look good.

Then one day, she woke up. When my dad and I went to see her, she was tired and a bit confused but more alert than we’d expected. We counted it a miracle. After she was discharged, she spent a few days in a rehab facility before going home to be cared for by her most loyal and loving friend, Beverly.

The whole summer was a roller coaster for her, with trips to the ER and surprising comebacks. When things were going well, I joked about her having nine lives. I came to expect her to bounce back, since she had defied the odds so many times.

A few weeks before Thanksgiving, she ended up back in the hospital. When I stopped by her room one afternoon, she looked frail and helpless, with a feeding tube threaded through her nose. But she was awake and smiling and talking – the picture of health compared to her comatose-like state back in the summer.

Mostly, she was disappointed to have missed Caroline’s birthday in October – our family’s big fall gathering. Although she had been too frail to join us, she was determined not to miss Thanksgiving.

“Tell your mom . . .” she said, turning to me with the NG tube taped to her nose. I waited while she caught her breath.

“Tell your mom . . . I’ll bring the green bean casserole.”

I glanced over at Beverly and we both smiled. Bev tried to temper her big plans, and we both agreed that she should maybe play it by ear and work on getting strong enough to go home first.

We were amused, but we also knew better than to underestimate her. She had come back from much worse. So we made plans for her to ride with us to my parents’ house on Thanksgiving, and Phil agreed to carry her up the front stairs. By that point, she weighed less than an average fourth grader.

However, Thanksgiving dinner was not in the cards — she’d landed back in the hospital. I was secretly relieved, because I’d been mentally stress-rehearsing how to get her safely in and out of the car and then up and down my parents’ stairs. She’d always been petite, but she’d become unthinkably tiny and fragile.

Early in the week after Thanksgiving, I visited her in the hospital. She was alert and as hopeful as ever. She talked about the PT team who’d walked her up and down the hall that day, and how she was working hard to get stronger. Bev asked me to bring a pair of scissors next time to trim my aunt’s bangs.

Two days later, I trimmed and curled her hair, and she looked like Aunt Nancy again. Just a few days, and she’d be back home. That was the expected pattern, anyway.

Early that morning, my phone buzzed. Bev asked me to drive her to the hospital. A nurse had called to tell her that things did not look good. I stayed a few hours in her hospital room but had to go home and get ready for work. My sister came after I left and continued the vigil with Bev. A couple hours later, she texted that Aunt Nancy had died. Part of me couldn’t believe it, even though I’d witnessed her sudden decline.

A few days later, her siblings gathered for a simple memorial. Afterwards, my mom gave me her bag of belongings from the hospital, which I planned to wash and donate. I emptied out the tiny hoodies, track pants, and socks into a laundry basket. Then I heard something land on the carpet with a dull thunk. Squinting at the floor, I thought it was a blob of gum. When I picked it up, I saw it was her hearing aid.

“Oh,” I said involuntarily.

It wasn’t the sadness, the surprise of her death that had knocked the wind out of me but the sudden realization of her struggle. She had lost her hearing at a young age and struggled not only with that but with people often treating her poorly for it, shouting a bit more aggressively than needed. As if she were not hard of hearing but stupid.

It was hope that had led her to half-helpful surgeries and hearing aids, promising technologies barely hidden beneath tufts of her hair. And it was the sheer force of hope behind that promise of green bean casserole on the Thanksgiving table.

I still plan to do some googling to see if there’s a group that collects used hearing aids. Just haven’t gotten there yet. For now, it sits on the corner of my desk, missing its mate, a reminder that every one of us struggles in some way, some more visibly than others. It’s also a reminder of hope, that thing that keeps us afloat against the current, that thing that sets it heart on green bean casserole one more time.

When we left for school, the world was covered in slush and glazed with ice. It was beautiful. Then the arguing started.

Caroline wanted me to drop her off in the parking lot and let her walk to the school entrance alone. I told her she could walk alone from the drop-off lane but not all the way from the parking lot. She whined about me not treating her like a “big kid,” and I warned her that it was basically my job to watch her walk in.

It’s not that I don’t trust her to make it to the door – I don’t trust the crazy drivers who race across school parking lots and practically toss their kids from moving cars.

Anyway, as we pulled into the parking spot she said, “Okay, you can walk me to the door.”

Stepping carefully across ice-cold puddles, we talked about the wet slush underfoot.

“Would you like a delicious slushie?” I asked.

“What flavor?” she played along.

“Salt and road dirt.”

“Yum.”

She half-hugged me and headed for the entrance.

When I got back to the car, my socks were soaked with slush. That’s when I noticed the handful of kids riding bikes to school, their dark coats splattered with salt slushies. I thought, God bless those winter bike riders. They have grit.

“Showing up is half the battle,” an old professor of mine with a strict attendance policy used to say. It’s what I tell myself when I’ve made some commitment that I now regret. I’ve had jobs in the past where I’d rather be in a car accident-induced coma or abducted by drug lords than show up another dreadful day. But I must confess there’s value in showing up.

I realize kids have their reasons for showing up to school, like being forced by parents, having a warm breakfast on a Styrofoam tray, being with their friends, or even wanting to learn. I don’t know the reasoning of those winter bike riders – I just know they made a real effort to show up, and I admired them.

For me, February is the month when winter seems never-ending. It’s the month when my energy is lowest. Do you feel the same? I write this simply to encourage you (and me) to keep showing up.

Winter will surely end and longer spring days will grant us a new dose of vitality. Until then, we have the chance to build up grit. And so, for others, for yourself, for your commitments (even the ones you wish you’d never made), keep showing up.

“So let’s not allow ourselves to get fatigued doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don’t give up, or quit.” –The Message by Eugene H. Peterson, Galatians 6:9

-Em

My parents cleaned out their storage areas last week—attic, garage, nooks, crannies—a time-consuming ordeal. They got rid of stuff that had accumulated over the thirty years they’ve lived there. Although it’s been twenty years since I lived there, Mom and Dad uncovered some old treasures of mine, including:

a faded Mickey Mouse Pez dispenser,

an artificial flower lei from my friend Leslie,

a sock monkey, made with love by our neighbor Mrs. Wheeler,

and much, much more.

Mom also spent an entire day laundering our old Cabbage Patch Kids, doll clothes, a Prayer Bear, and a Sparta High School cheerleading doll. She handed them over with the stipulation that I keep them until she’s dead.

Ummmm, okay.

Since Caroline has never been interested in dolls, she doesn’t want to play with them, so I plan to pack them away in the basement for some unknown future. They now hang in limbo, sprawled on the floor behind my desk chair, dead eyes staring at the ceiling.

(Poor Sock Monkey’s eyes fell off. He lies blindly on the floor.)

There’s already quite a stash in the basement – school yearbooks, dolls from my grandma, and many other things I can neither recall nor bear to part with. Soon I’ll add my Cabbage Patch Kid (little Hortense) and sock monkey to the stash for safe keeping.

These are the days I wish I were a minimalist. When I read about people who live in tiny houses with one cooking pot and seven items in their wardrobe, I think: that sounds intriguing. Then I remember how much perverse joy I get from decorative items that serve no other purpose than pleasing the eye.

My parents did the big clean-out for us – my sister and me. They are healthy, but they know the challenge of sorting through your parents’ belongings and making hard decisions about what’s worth keeping, what goes in the yard sale pile, what should be donated. I appreciate their foresight.

But as I contemplate adding another box to the basement, I’ve started cleaning out nooks and crannies in my own house, starting with the file cabinet. Goodbye, “Teaching Composition,” “Literacy Training,” and “PR Portfolio” files. Even the act of tossing you out bores me. If ever I teach composition again (held at gunpoint, perhaps), I’ll just have to do it without my old notes. With every leaf of paper that falls in the recycle bin, I feel lighter.

Some things are meant for safe keeping – for a time, for a reason. Safe keeping is for the things that help us remember the people we’ve loved and the ones who loved us even before we were born. Some things are lost – to moths, to rust, to death, to decay – and these are kept in the safest place, wrapped in memory. That is, the heart.