By Becky Holland
Today, a little boy was born into our family.
Tonight, I finished a little book.
I don’t think the timing could have been more perfect.
Fredrik Backman’s The Deal of a Lifetime is a novella, barely more than 60 pages, but somewhere in those few pages he managed to make me think about an entire lifetime.
There was one sentence I stopped and marked:
“A second is always a second; that’s the one definitive value we have on earth.”
A second.
We get so many of them that most of the time we don’t notice them passing.
Then a baby is born.
Or someone we love dies.
And suddenly, time means everything.
My great-nephew entered the world today with a lifetime of seconds stretching out before him. We don’t know what he will do with them yet. We don’t know who he will become, what will make him laugh, what will break his heart, what he’ll be good at or what dreams he will chase.
He has an entire story waiting to be written.
But he also entered the world carrying stories that began long before he did.
That is what I found myself thinking about after I closed Backman’s book.
I thought about my daddy.
He died three years ago this coming Sunday, Aug. 16, and this sweet baby will never know him.
That makes me sad in a way that’s difficult to explain.
How can someone who was such an enormous part of my world simply be a name or a photograph to someone who comes after us?
And then another question came to me.
Do people remember?
I think they do.
Maybe not always in the way we imagine.
Someday this little boy can hear stories about the people who came before him. He can see their photographs. He can learn their names. Someone can tell him the funny stories and the serious ones. He can learn where his family came from and about the people who helped shape the people who will shape him.
And perhaps that’s one of the ways we continue.
Pieces of us travel forward.
A saying gets repeated without anyone remembering who first said it. A recipe gets made in another generation’s kitchen. A child develops a mannerism that makes an older relative stop and say, “You know who that reminds me of?”
Values get passed down.
Faith gets passed down.
Stories get passed down.
Love gets passed down.
Maybe being remembered isn’t simply having someone know your name.
Maybe it is having lived in such a way that something of you remains in the people you loved.
My daddy never got to meet this little boy. He never got to hold him or watch him grow. But Daddy helped shape me, and my brother, and the family this baby was born into.
So in that way, maybe there is already a little bit of Daddy waiting for him here.
This week, one generation of our family welcomed another. And in just a few days, I will mark three years since we said goodbye to someone from an older generation whom I still miss terribly.
One does not replace the other.
That’s not how love works.
Instead, the family gets bigger. The story gets longer. A new chapter begins while the old chapters remain part of everything that comes afterward.
And tonight, a little Swedish novella reminded me that our seconds are precious precisely because they don’t last forever.
So, sweet boy, use yours well.
Laugh a lot. Love people. Learn your family’s stories. Ask questions while the people who know the answers are still here. Make mistakes and learn from them. Be kind when kindness costs you something.
And someday, tell the stories again.
You were born into a family of people you will know and people you will only know through us.
We’ll make sure you know both.
Welcome to the world, little one.
You’ve got a lifetime of seconds ahead of you.
Make them count.
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