Tag: Love

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Love Letter to Maggie Lee

jinnyhenson

My precious Maggie Lee,

Your 24th birthday is next Thursday and it is still an outlandish thought that you are in Heaven and not here with us. Time marches on and even the movie Legally Blonde turned twenty this year! Speaking of which, Elle Woods Henson was particularly excited by her prominent placement in this year’s T-shirt graphic. She’s so extra, just like her mommy.

It is always so amazing to see the kindness people perform in your name by many who knew you and even more who never did. I cannot wait to see you again and watch you watch the video roll of all of the good deeds your spirit inspired in people. Who knows but that the box of groceries in Detroit or the simple hand-written note in Phoenix was just the touch God used to restore someone’s broken soul. As you know, kindness is not wimpy and sentimental but rather a force both fierce and transformative.

What began as a simple seed to carry on your legacy of love has grown and next Thursday photos will pour in from different parts of the country where your spirit has spread. Four West Point Grads are having a golf scramble in Las Vegas to raise money for Wounded Warriors, crossing guards in Frisco are being assaulted with showers of Little Debbie’s and children in Jackson, MS are being treated at Batson Hospital because of donations someone made in your name. How wonderful is that?

Amid the celebration, however, there will always be an empty seat at our table. Time forever demarcated before 2009 and after. I suppose this is the frightening risk of loving a soul; the possibility that one day it will be gone. Our insides swell at the thought of love, enlarged by the fulfilled presence of another, but desperately deflated should it be taken away. How miraculous to feel the flat disappointment of grief eventually give way to the infilling of God’s grace? Life can almost kill us and then we least expect, catch it being beautiful once more.

I treasure what we had in you, Maggie Lee. Your sparkle remains like glitter found in the baseboards of an old house years after the craft project has wrapped. Your essence is both impossible to remove and ever present. You will always be the undercurrent in my soul when I react out of love and patience when I have the choice to be selfish. You will always be my inspiration to pull up a chair at the lunch table to make room for one more. You will always be one-half of the best things I ever did in my life on Earth and I cannot wait to celebrate you next week!!!

To join the world wide wave of kindness on October 29, simply go to fb group

Maggie Lee for Good

or email jinnyhenson@gmail.com

#maggieleeforgood #onedayonedeedonedifference #godsgrace #kindnessmatters #grief #daughter #hope #brokenhearted #mourningintodancing #butgod #parenting #parentingtoday #dylandreyer #grievingparents #love #lifelessons #god #help #why? #encouragement #overcoming #thebestisyettobe #motherslove #busaccident #seatbelts

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That Time Jonathan Had to Work Really Hard

jinnyhenson
The result of French photog imploring us to “look deep into each other’s eyes” for this photo. Horrifyingly awkward. Merci.
We did lock our love on a Paris bridge. Look at those young crazies in the heart!!!

If there’s one thing this “from the mind of M. Night Shamalan,” of a year has revealed to us as a people it is that there is no escaping reality. With a world-wide pandemic raging, record unemployment and seismic racial eruptions, we are chest-deep in our new reality. Stuff just got real. From Today Show anchor Savannah Guthrie getting flack over her “hair-do”-it-yourself-beauty efforts or just the piles of unadulterated crap shoved in bookcases as backdrops for tv interviews, there was no dodging the REALITY of this messy moment.

I usually pretty much love reality, particularly in juxtaposition with edited, face-tuned, sound-bitten, shellacky flawlessness our egos present to the world. I’ll take any day the two left feet verses the best foot forward. The outtakes over the seamlessly-edited final promo. The side-by-side of the idealized private, sugar-sanded beach next to the crowded, diaper-strewn sea weed patch of shoreline. The gritty reality, albeit not always preferable, is always far more interesting.

I love the mile-misses way better than the near-misses. So, here’s a photo from our 25th to celebrate our 26th wedding anniversary today. A glance back to last year pre-Pandemic. And kudos to the photog Jonathan in Paris I found on line for super cheap. His portfolio traditionally centered around uninhibited 20-year-olds not grey-haired men and good ol’ gals with maxi skirts and denim flamenco shirts. No traffic-stopping hotness here. We did manage to repulse some unkempt gentleman on his skateboard with our forced awkwardness. John was instructed in broken English, “take heir face into your hanns. Kees her. And you, look into hees eyes” The result looks like a domestic abuse chokehold poster which captured perfectly the goiter created by the bizarre angle of my head in hees hanns.

Happy 26th to my John. I am grateful beyond words for our health and life together during this time of pandemic and complete societal upheaval likened by historians to “If The Civil War and Yellow Fever had a baby.” Ok, so maybe that’s just my take on the reality of this moment we are walking through. I don’t know much but I do know that I adore this guy. He is kind, loving, cat- rescuing and even occasionally “watches” read: scrolls through Twitter paying zero attention a Jane Austen movie. Perhaps a successful marriage is sometimes more about enduring than enjoying the same things together. And this fella has endured a lot.

I love you forever, my John. You are the greatest gift I could ever imagine and I’m flat-out blessed beyond comprehension to get to share life with you. Even if getting that perfectly romantic 25th anniversary photo was not meant to be, I’m so glad that we are.