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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday, this is episode #713, “Monday Mailbag.” I’m Darrell Darnell, a postage stamp, which now costs .82¢, was .13¢ the year I was born, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
It’s the fifth Monday of August, and that means it’s Monday Mailbag day! We have one piece of mail in the bag this time and it comes in from Jeff. Here it is:
According to Nate Bargatze’s George Washington on SNL, there are two ways to spell Jeff: The short way with a J and the stupid way with a G.
This is Jeff with a J.
I first discovered podcasts with Darrel’s Fringe podcast back in the day. I have lately been enjoying the Fringe Rewatch Podcast for… Has it really been over 4 years? I can’t believe it is going to wrap up in a few months.
I am recording this at the beginning of July, and the last podcast covered the episode “The Human Kind.” For those who don’t watch Fringe, you need to know that Olivia is part of a team that investigates unusual or fringe events. In the final season, they are in the near future where invaders call the Observers have taken over and their adult daughter Etta is leading the resistance. Spoiler alert for a 14-year-old show: Etta is killed in e4 by Windmark, the leader of the Observers. In e8, the most recent one covered, there is a scene where Olivia is sitting in her car waiting for a contact. She is looking at posters of her daughter calling people to resist. The posters are being removed by workers. This symbolizes for Olivia that people are forgetting her daughter.
As listeners of What I Learned Yesterday may recall, my daughter Abigail was killed by a drunk driver in October of 2024. We were very blessed to have family and friends who rallied around us. People at our church that we hadn’t even met embraced us and took care of us. We had unimaginable amount of food. My wife’s best friend flew down from Baltimore to manage the household and visitors when we weren’t up to the task. We sat with our other kids and anyone who would listen telling stories about Abigail. I am still overwhelmed that Darrell put in great effort to send white roses to her funeral. None of this made the pain go away, but it meant so much to know that Abigail had touched so many lives.
As the casseroles got eaten up and the number of visitors dwindled, it got quiet around our house. We were now empty nesters. We had always assumed that we would celebrate when that occurred. We never could have imagined that it would happen like this. People, understandably, went on with their lives. We started to feel, like Olivia, that people had forgotten our daughter.
Last summer and again this summer, we had people at church tell us how much they missed seeing Abigail at VBS. We recently had a missionary family return to the US. They spoke to my Sunday school class, and the wife said that she wanted to tell me in person how dear Abigail was and how sorry she was. My wife has a FB store, and we’ve had some customers who tell us they knew Abigail. One of her old bosses shared some stories with us.
I can’t speak for everyone grieving, but these and other encounters remind us that we aren’t the only one who remember her, and we find comfort in that.
In this last episode of Fringe, Olivia says this about her daughter Etta: “She is alive, inside us, and there is nothing that Windmark can do about it, because the love that we can share with her now is invulnerable to space and time, even to them. And I know that our hearts are broken, and that is hurts, but that’s what makes us human.”
The pain we feel at the loss of Abigail reminds us how much we love her and miss her. We find comfort in knowing that others still love and miss her, too.
This is Jeff with a J. And that’s what I learned yesterday.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag on November 30th! Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page at goldenspirlamedia.com/feedback.