New Life for Words to Live By : Columnist’s 1985 Essay on Coping With Tragedy Is Reborn on Internet

Retired executive secretary Ann Wells sat in her Laguna Niguel condo 13 years ago and penned an essay titled “What Special Someday Are We Saving For?”

Her sister had died unexpectedly, and Wells’ published article talked about “reading more and dusting less.” Of “using our good china and crystal for every special event such as losing a pound, getting the sink unstopped, the first camellia blossom.”

Zoom forward to May 1998.

Wells, an occasional freelance writer, flew back East to attend her granddaughter’s college graduation. While she was there, her granddaughter received an e-mail chain letter. Its author . . . Grandma Wells.

Wells, now 76, was flabbergasted to see her work of April 1985 zipping around the Internet. She doesn’t even have e-mail.

But that wasn’t the end. The day after Wells returned home, she went for her weekly hairdo and manicure appointments.

“It was the weirdest thing,” she recalled with amusement. “My hairdresser and my manicurist had both received my column a couple times each. . . . I have received letters from people in Brazil, Florida, Texas, all over the world.”

A professional soloist. A Beverly Hills agent. An author. The supervisor of a hospice organization. Even neighbors she didn’t know read the article the first time said they got it via electronic pony express.

“I’m as surprised as anyone,” said Wells. “What mystifies me is: Who started this?”

The answer: Who knows? It’s all part of the Internet’s informal and uncontrolled way of spreading the written word.

In keeping with cyberspace’s freewheeling mixture of fact and myth, several paragraphs are tagged to the end of Wells’ piece, spanning all manner of religion and psychobabble.

In addition, the closer has that irksome ominous chain letter tone: If you don’t send it to 10 people immediately, you “risk the consequences of being alone, wrapped up in your own affairs and being too busy to do the things you actually care about. May love litter your life with blessings!”

But most of the text is attributed to Wells and true to her original essay. Wells overlooks the matter of someone mucking with her essay. Mostly, she is thrilled that her work has had a rebirth compliments of the electronic age.

Figuring out how many people have now seen her very personal column over the Internet is an impossible chore. Wells has received dozens of telephone calls and letters and keeps running into people who have gotten her writing via computer hookup.

Coping With ‘All the Sad Chores’

“I recently read ‘A Story to Live By,’ and was very touched by your ability to put the grief ‘experience’ into words with such dramatic expressiveness,” wrote the bereavement manager of a Maitland, Fla., hospice organization. “I follow about 1,500 of our families who have lost a loved one on our program. . . . I would like very much to put your story in our newsletter that we send out to comfort our families--I think your story would be a real inspiration for many, and would help them to move forward with their lives.”

And a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing who lost his family and, more recently, his sight, due to delayed effects of radiation exposure, wrote Wells in July from Lafayette, Calif.

“Your story . . . has touched many of my friends and me,” he wrote. “Memories of having buried six members of my immediate family, including both parents, [have] left scars deep in my soul. So, your story gave me a special meaning and inspiration. Thank you very much.”

To think that she has moved even a few people during this second boomerang of her column means a great deal to her, Wells said, though she hardly thinks it is worth much of a fuss.

“I think I was more excited about it than my grandmother,” said Erin Mishkin, 22, who works in academic publications at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Wells had left the secretarial pool 35 years ago after she married her second husband, a corporate president who did not want her working. She had put her daughter through school as a divorced single mom, and once remarried, she had the time to write light-hearted columns for newspapers, including The Times, the Kansas City Star and the Daily Pilot in Costa Mesa, for which she wrote a weekly feature.

But the death of her sister rocked her world, and the deeply emotional words of loss spilled onto her pages.

After her sister passed away, Wells flew to the Midwest to help with, in the words of her column, “all the sad chores.” As she sorted through her sister’s possessions, her brother-in-law opened the bottom drawer of a dresser. He pulled from it a handmade slip, his wife’s, and handed it to Wells.

Her sister and brother-in-law had bought the silk and lace lingerie on a New York trip nearly a decade earlier. Wells fingered the undergarment, the exorbitant price tag still dangling. “She never wore it,” the inconsolable husband said. “She was saving it for a special occasion. Well, I guess this is the occasion.”

The exquisite slip was draped on the bed, with other clothes bound for the mortuary. “Don’t ever,” the husband insisted, “save anything for a special occasion. Every day you’re alive is a special occasion.”

And quoting those words, Wells crafted a first-person piece, published in The Times, that struck a universal chord about waiting for a tomorrow that might not come.

Living by Her Words, Then and Now

“I thought about all the things that she hadn’t seen or heard or done. I thought about the things that she had done without realizing that they were special. I’m still thinking about his words, and they’ve changed my life.

“I’m sitting on the deck and admiring the view without fussing about the weeds in the garden. I’m spending more time with my family and friends and less time in committee meetings. Whenever possible, life should be a pattern of experience to savor, not endure. I’m trying to recognize these moments now and cherish them. I’m not saving anything.”

They were words that she herself lived by. Six years later, she lost her beloved husband, Bryant--20 years her senior--but felt that she had made the most of every day they had together. And indeed, she continues living this way, remaining active in a decades-old writers group, penning a monthly column for the local hospital’s newsletter.

She said she probably will not bother getting Internet access to receive the very electronic mail that gave new life to her evergreen column. She’s too busy.