The Last Valentine’s Gift
Forty years ago this month, my mother gave to my three siblings and me the last Valentine’s gifts we would ever receive from her. Cancer was diagnosed shortly after Thanksgiving, and our mother was in the last battle of her life, a battle she would lose one month later. But as a devoted mother of four, she chose to turn, characteristically, to the needs of her children.
I grew up living in the shadow of an older sister who was successful in everything she tried. I was a good student, but I did not reach my sister’s level of success until I went to college. Until then, my teachers regularly compared me with my sister, which did little for my self-confidence as a student. Until confidence found its way in me, as it does, in time, in many of us, I can remember my mom’s constant, kind encouragement and affirmation.
In my junior year of college, I came under the spell of a gifted teacher, Alpheus T. Mason, who taught for nearly forty years at Princeton before becoming a visiting professor at my college. He had been a constitutional scholar, along with Edwin S. Corwin, in the 1930’s, a seminal time in the transformation of constitutional law into the modern age. Seeing the power of it all, the notion of what would become my life’s work, the law, came more clearly into focus for me.
My teacher kept in his office a picture of a famous lawyer whom he admired as a young man and who served to inspire his love of constitutional law. I wanted to have a picture of that lawyer and I looked for one, but I was unable to find one anywhere.
My mother gave to each of her children that last Valentine’s weekend we had with her a special gift, a travelling companion for the rest of our life’s journey, since her journey, at fifty-nine, would soon be cut short.
The last Valentine’s gift my mother ever gave to me was a picture of that lawyer. Somehow, someplace, she found it.
For years I viewed this gift as the last example of my mom’s ability to find the most special of gifts for the ones she loved. We had no other lawyers in our family. It had been ten years since I had mentioned that lawyer’s name. Mothers, however, have a special way of tucking some things away.
But the deeper meaning of this gift became more apparent to me as my own children were finding the full stride of their life’s work. The picture was the final affirmation of the more I could become. My mother could have given to me a hundred different things that had greater utility, but she abandoned her lifelong practical nature for this gift. She was swinging for the fences, and she made it.
One of the greatest gifts we can give our children is to help them see in themselves all that we know, as parents, is in them. My mother knew this instinctively. Some call it a mother’s intuition. I believe it may be life’s intangible hunch about all of us but nurtured along in the lucky ones among us by the kind and affirming encouragement of one of life’s greatest advocates: moms.
Here is what I have learned on the way to the courthouse: Encouragement, in all its forms and forums, is a powerful force for good which we likely do not appreciate fully. We have no idea the extent to which the talent and skills of any of us can grow and even blossom when they are fueled by sincere affirmation.
Most everyone of us has a memory in our mind’s eye of the person or persons who saw more in us, and in time, with their encouragement, we came to find it. Every one of us has drawn from that well of hope from time to time to boost our spirits when life buffers that hope. When life’s cold winds blow, we remember when someone else was still betting on us, too.
You do not have to be a parent or a teacher, or a sports icon, to be an encourager. If you ever have a person you have encouraged tell you or write to you about what you did to encourage them along the way, especially at a time of challenge for them, and what your words meant to them, you will have a deeper understanding of the intrinsic power of encouragement. You may not even remember that time of encouragement, but they sure do.
This picture hangs in my office to this day, forty years later in my life’s journey. The power of the law, of what it has been in a free society and what it still yet can be, even for the seemingly most ordinary among us, remains with me as when I began to see it on those spring afternoons in class in Cabell Hall so many years ago.
And yet on my more challenging days, this picture, and what it represents, remain my great encourager. My well of hope, my affirmation, and my renewed confidence in myself. Given to me by my life’s first great encourager so long ago.
And still.