How You Made Them Feel

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou

Even among those who claim they have a poor memory, I believe these words still hold true. We all recall what it felt like to be unexpectedly helped or unaccountably hurt; to be embraced by love or injured by hate. When people from the past reappear in our lives, we remember immediately if they played the role of angel or demon.

In fact, once you start thinking about how people made you feel, it becomes difficult to stop the flood of emotional memory. And it tends to be so arbitrary. I'm immediately transported to my desk on my first day of First Grade when my teacher stared at my name, that I'd just printed on lined paper. Painfully shy, I looked hopefully up at her. She quickly snatched up the paper, held it up in front of the class, and tore it in pieces, shouting, "This is the worst penmanship I have ever seen in my life!" Demon.

Then, a folded piece of paper was suddenly on my lap. I opened it with shaking hands. "Don't cry. We're best friends forever." I glanced at my friend, Holly, who nodded her head at me and gave me an encouraging smile. Angel.

I think, too, of how I have made others feel in my life. I wince at the memory of my decisions to not answer the phone or to say something I knew would be hurtful. I try to console myself with recollections of the better choices I've made. As a wife and mother, I hope I've made my husband and son feel loved and supported. I want my husband to remember the hundred daffodils, his favorite flower, I surprised him with on his thirty-fifth birthday. I want my son to remember me cheering him on as he took his first steps and read his first words. I'm hoping the memories of me absorbed in my iPhone or having the occasional rant won't take precedent.

This all came home to me several years ago. I wasn't able to attend a high school reunion, but a friend of mine did. As she reported back, she mentioned the name of a shy girl who had been in our class, and told me that this woman had recently received the direst of cancer prognoses. "Oh, and she said she'd hoped you would have been there." "Me?" I asked, "Why, I wonder?" "She said that you were the one she remembered taking the time to befriend her when no one else noticed her."

And I literally felt a lump in my throat. Yes, I remembered occasionally trying to pull her out of her isolation, sharing a joke now and then, or commenting on a pretty color of her sweater. The lump in my throat wasn't from pride, it was from the realization that something small on my part had mattered to her. The tightness in my neck was from the guilt that I could easily have done so much more.

It's so achingly simple after all. Words and actions have consequences that have lasting echoes. People will remember how you made them feel.