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.