One Less Thing for Our Estate Sale When We Die

I’ve always been a big advocate of bedtime reading to kids. As Adam and Lizzy were growing up, we built a collection of children’s books and I’d read one (or more likely, several) to them every night. I credit that ritual with the fact that Adam and Lizzy both grew up to be voracious readers. I’ve continued that nightly practice now with our five grandkids. An interesting thing about kids’ books is that there’s actually a lot of grown-up wisdom in them. I recalled a piece of that wisdom over the holidays to help me through a challenging episode in our home. The source of that wisdom was a Sesame Street book entitled Bert and the Broken Teapot.

Here’s what happened. During the last week of the year, we went from a home of two to a home of 11, plus a dog. It was a joy to have our kids and grandkids (ages 11-3) with us over the holidays. But as any honest person will tell you, it’s also a hectic experience. One Friday night we made it even more hectic by inviting nine more to join us for Shabbat dinner, including 3 more munchkins. As you can imagine, eight little ones running around is a fun scene, but a recipe for chaos. Soon there was a CRASH! Stella, the biggest of the bunch, collided into a table and the breakable contents went flying. One casualty was a beautiful porcelain pot.

I remained calm on the outside, but my insides were in turmoil. Then my mind went back to Bert and the Broken Teapot, and I quickly began to heal. In that story, Bert was minding the soda fountain for David when he accidentally knocked over the special teapot that Mr. Hooper had given David years ago. Like my porcelain pot, it was now in a million pieces. Bert felt terrible about it and fought back tears to say “I’m sorry,” as Stella did to me. Here’s how David responded: “My friend Bert is more important to me than any teapot.” Those words were ringing in my ears. My granddaughter Stella is more important to me than any porcelain pot.

From her reading, Lizzy also came to my rescue and waxed yet more philosophical. She explained that Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps, taught that “between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” We cannot control what happens. The only thing we can control is how we respond to it. The crash happened. Now I was in that space where I had the freedom to choose how to respond. I chose to prioritize my love for my granddaughter (and my understanding that this kind of thing happens when you have a house full of kids) over some THING. Lizzy went on to explain that Frankl’s wisdom applies well beyond broken pots. In her words, here’s how she uses it to handle life’s challenges: “I say, ‘ok, this is the situation. I can either fall apart, refuse to acknowledge it and build up anger, or deal with it the best way I can and hand the rest over to G-d.’” That night, the tables turned and the father learned a lesson from the daughter.

My wife Laurie chimed in with her own good wisdom to help everyone feel better: “Who cares about a pot? So there’ll be one less thing in the estate sale when we die.” So simple, yet so profound, and so true!

And as if all that wisdom from Sesame Street, Viktor Frankl, Lizzy Savetsky, and Laurie Blum wasn’t enough, a session of restorative yoga helped get my headspace right too. In these hectic times, we need all the help we can get!

As I’ve often emphasized in this blog, we have to be intentional to create family “glue” that helps keep a family connected over the generations. Let’s learn from the actions of those 10% of families who do it best. They have family meetings, teach meaningful lessons to their kids, engage in philanthropy, take family trips, preserve stories of their heritage, and very importantly, they gather as a family for special occasions and holidays and keep alive family traditions, just as we were doing at that Shabbat dinner. Don’t let a broken pot spoil the beauty of your family time together.

Marvin E. Blum