I opened the camera app on my phone, changed the setting to video and rotated the camera to face me. In my mind, I had rehearsed the message I planned to send. As sometimes happens in life, things didn’t turn out the way I hoped.
My message was to be sent to a loved one in another province who only had days left to live. There was so much I wanted to say. How could I possibly express my feelings in a short video?
I recorded a two-minute message to be sent to my niece who would play it at the hospice bedside. I tried to send it through Messenger but it was too large. Next, I tried to email, with the same results.
It looked like I’d have to start over. A minute and a half was still too large a file to send. So was forty seconds. I was getting frustrated and started to panic. Time was limited and I needed to get this message sent before it was too late.
Once more I went back to my camera. I had already cut out much of what I wanted to say. The short reading was gone. So were the encouraging memories we shared. I was sure the thirty second version would send. Wrong again. In desperation, I cut all extra words and the recording came in at twenty seconds.
This was still too large a file so I cut a few more words and came in at sixteen seconds. My prayer of, “please let this work” was answered when I hit ‘send’ and it went. Relief was mingled with regret at what I wasn’t able to say.
The next day I heard how much my short message had meant. The following day my sister-in-law passed away.
I learned an important lesson through this experience. It doesn’t take a lot of words to say what’s in my heart. All I needed was to say, “I love you and your memory will remain in my heart.” If I had waited to figure out how to send a larger message I may have been too late.
Thank you, Earleen for the final lesson. Rehearsed words are not as important as saying, “I love you” every chance we get.
The lyrics in the song had such impact on me that I had to write them down as soon as the song was over. I was afraid the busyness of life would push them into the back of my memory and didn’t want that to happen.