She would have hated this
She would have hated this. Not the occasion — she loved an occasion — but the fuss. If she were here she would already be telling me to sit down and stop making it about me, so I will be brief, which is the last thing she ever successfully asked of anyone.
Three memories
The first: she kept a jar of coins by the door labelled "for people who need it more". Every few months it would be empty and she would start again. When I was about nine I asked her who it was for, and she said: "whoever tells me." She never once asked anyone to justify it.
The second: she made the same phone call every Sunday for thirty-one years. Same time, same question — "have you eaten?" — to the same person, who had, every single week, eaten. She knew he had eaten. The question was never about food.
The third, and the one I think about most: when I failed my first year of university, she did not say it would be fine. She sat with me in the kitchen for a long time and let it not be fine. Then she made tea and said: "so, what is the next thing?" She never wasted a single moment pretending something hard was easy, and she never once let hard mean over.
What she actually taught
People will say she was kind. She was. But kindness is not what I am taking from her, because kindness sounds like a soft thing and hers was not soft at all.
What she had was an unshakeable belief that a person's circumstances were not a verdict on them. She applied it to the man at the door with the jar, to the cousin on the Sunday call, to me in the kitchen, and to every single person she met. It was the most stubborn thing about her.
An invitation
I have three memories and there are four hundred people in this room, which means there are about a thousand more that belong to you.
So please: after this, tell somebody one. Say it out loud, in the car park, over tea. Tell the one about the coins or the phone call or a Tuesday I know nothing about.
That is how she stays. Not in a speech about how kind she was — in a thousand small stories told badly by people who loved her, to people who will then tell them slightly wrong, forever.
Thank you, Amma, for the jar, for the Sunday call, and for the kitchen. We will keep asking what the next thing is.