The Miles Words Can Close

When my niece Jessica agreed to beta-read Purple Flower on My Nose, I wasn’t sure what to expect. She’s my sister Mary Frances’s daughter, and Violet’s granddaughter — but she grew up far from her Nanny and rarely saw her. I wondered whether the book would feel like a stranger’s story to her.

Instead, Jessica told me something I didn’t expect. She said reading about my mother’s earlier life — the wartime evacuation from London, the velvet gown, the courtship — gave her a glimpse into her grandmother she’d never had before. Not a stranger’s story after all. Something closer to a reunion.

That surprised me more than it should have. I hadn’t written the book for Jessica. I’d written it to honor my mother, and to make sense of the twenty-six days I spent caring for her at the end of her life. But somewhere in the writing, I learned something I think applies far beyond books: God doesn’t waste a life, and He doesn’t waste the telling of one either.

While I was working on the manuscript, I used a familiar teaching from memoir coach Marion Roach Smith that changed how I understood what I was actually doing. She teaches that every memoir needs what she calls an argument — a truth it illustrates, not just a story it tells. Her formula, later expanded by her colleague Kyle Young, goes roughly like this: it’s about a universal truth, illustrated by something specific you lived, told in some form, in service of a real audience who needs to hear it.

At first, I was using this formula as craft advice — useful but technical. The longer I thought about it, though, the more it felt like a spiritual principle rather than a writing rule. My mother’s life made its own argument, whether or not I ever wrote it down: that holy surrender — the opening of our hands in the hardest moments — is asked of us far more often than we realize. It is surrender in the small moments that prepares us for the ultimate surrender death asks of us. Her eighty-some years illustrated that truth long before I turned any of it into a book. I simply had the privilege of writing it down and, eventually, of discovering who it might be for.

That last part came to me almost by accident. After a workshop on caregiving and grief, I found myself looking up how many people in this country are currently caring for someone they love. The number is enormous — tens of millions. I hadn’t set out to write for them specifically, only for my sisters and to honor my mother. But learning they existed, in that number, changed how I understood my mother’s story. It wasn’t only ours anymore. It had somewhere to go.

I think this is true of far more than memoirs. Each of our lives is already illustrating something, whether we’ve named it or not — a truth about mercy, about patience, about showing up for people even when we’re afraid. We don’t always get to choose our argument. Often, like my mother, we simply live it faithfully in ordinary days and trust that it reaches whoever needs it, even if we never learn their names.

I didn’t know, while I was caring for my mother in those twenty-six days, that my niece who knew her from a distance would someday draw closer to her through a book. I didn’t know a stranger might read the same pages and recognize her own mother, or her own fear, or her own faith, in a woman she’d never met. That’s the quiet grace in it. We rarely get to see who our lives, or our words, actually reach. We’re only asked to live them, and tell them, as truthfully as we can — and trust the rest to God.

Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. (Romans 12:12)

Sometimes that faithfulness looks like twenty-six days at a bedside. Sometimes it looks like finally writing them down.