If I leave here tomorrow, would you have been honest with me?

One of my all time favorite songs begins with the lines "If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? For I must be traveling on now, cause there's too many places I've got to see."

I can still remember exactly when that song found its place eternal place on my favorite list. I was a teenager and both my sister and I were home sick. My best friend knocked on the door that evening and I opened it. She didn't look good and I asked if she was okay.

She wasn't. As soon as the words left my mouth, she burst into tears. They'd found her older sister dead that morning. She had overdosed on meth. Even more heartbreaking, her older sister's infant son was with her when it happened. He'd crawled around on the bed for several hours while she lay there, dead. My friend couldn't get that image out of her head. Nor could I.

Her sis was like an older sister to all of us; not really close but close nonetheless. We babysat for her often, chatted with her on the phone when we called to talk to her sister, laughed and joked around with her, and took our boy grievances to her for advice. We'd babysat for her just a few days before. We cried right along with our friend for the sister we had all lost.

Her mom was in the car downstairs, unable to put to words the heartache she was enduring. We went down to her and cried some more. And then they left to begin the sad task of putting things to order for the funeral. I escaped into my room and flopped down on the bed. Somewhere over the next hours, I had a small crowd of friends sitting in my room with me and sis. Someone turned the radio on and that song started playing.

For the first time, I actually listened to the song I'd heard so many times in the best and yet never really heard at all. It captured her spirit perfectly and immediately became a favorite. Over the years, it's been one of those songs I turn to when death claims someone close. As a result, that song reminds me not only of Cassie, but of all of those people I've lost. The memories it evokes are as bitter as they are sweet.

On Friday, my husband's grandmother passed away at 97. My husband has been trying to find that balance between grief and relief since her death and that is never an easy thing. You feel guilty when you feel relief that someone has died. It seems somehow wrong to feel relief even when you know that you didn't wish that person to die.

So, in my effort to help him through his grief, I found that song again and started to play it for him. But, I never made it passed the first few lines before I remembered something that would help him even more than the song that has helped me out in those times.

When we discussed wedding gifts before getting married, we had two conditions. The gift couldn't be something that could be bought and it had to be presented to the other at the reception after we were officially married. I knew immediately what I was going to get him.

His grandparents couldn't be there physically because we were getting married in Arkansas and they weren't physically capable of traveling the 12 hours to make it... but I would get them there for him one way or another. And I did. I called his mom and told her what my plan was. She readily agreed and during the wedding reception, I handed my husband a video tape and told him that he had to play it as soon as we left the reception. He agreed, presented me my gift (a song sang by my father) and as soon as we made our escape, he popped the tape into the player.

His grandmother and grandfather appeared on the screen and delivered the sweetest message I've ever heard. They told him how much they loved him, how much they missed him and how very proud they were of the man he had become. By the end of that message, there was no doubt that they'd told him exactly how much he meant to them and exactly how much they adored him... and that they knew that he felt exactly the same toward them.

When I turned that song on and that tape came to mind... I realized he didn't need that song at all. He needed to pop that tape back into the player and hear those words once again. He needed to put to rest the doubts her death had brought crowding into his mind and remember that he already had the answers to those questions. A million times over.

They may have traveled on without him... but they left behind an incredible gift. He'll forever have their words to him upon our marriage. Eventually that tape will play out, but the words will linger long after that tape is gone and he will never have to doubt the way they felt and never have to question whether he did enough to show them how important they were to him. They knew... and he does too.

And that knowing is something that is so vitally important and yet something we so very often go without. If we're honest with ourselves, we admit that we're not very honest to others, particularly when it comes to discussions that touch on the emotional or the personal. We prefer to tuck our true feelings away and brush them off every once in a while when we're alone... if we're even capable of doing that. When someone asks how we feel about X or about Y, we give the stock answer, knowing all the while that the words leaving our lips aren't anywhere near accurate.

Words, no matter what those words are, have power. They stick to the people who hear them long after their echoes have receded. The joy, the hurt, and the many other varied emotions those words can bring linger just as much as do the words.

We're too worried about what others will think to worry about what we really think. Like you, I worry too. And we never seem to realize that we all suffer for the worry that keeps up silent. Having seen the evidence of that myself... I prefer to leave people with no doubts as to how I feel or what I think. I'm not perfect with it by any means and every day is a challenge to answer those questions with uncluttered honesty instead of stock falsity. But, I don't want to live with regrets and wonder or make others live with the same because I couldn't be honest, so I make the effort.

The opportunities we miss, the doubts we carry, and the regrets we contend with all pile on and an endless list of 'what if's' take up energy better expended elsewhere. I don't want to expend that energy on worry and doubt. I want to expend it in living. And part of living is taking risks.

It's a risk to open up and tell people how you feel... but the consequences of not taking that risk can be just as bad. Life is far too short and far too uncertain to waste time beating yourself up over what you wanted to say but didn't. The truth might not be pretty, but it is the truth.

Tell it and know that when you're gone, the people you've left behind won't have to wonder what you really thought. They will know. And they will appreciate that knowing just as much as you do.