A Memory Glad and Honourable

Grief and Memory in The Return of the King

Credit: New Line Cinema

I broke a guitar pick last month. Normally this wouldn’t be such a big deal. Picks are a dime a dozen (well, more like $5 a dozen, but you get my point). And I have many other picks to choose from.

But this particular broken guitar pick made me pause. Not because of what it was, but because of who I associated it with. 

This guitar pick belonged to my youngest brother. I took it as a memento when I visited home in the immediate aftermath of his passing last year.

Over the past year I’d occasionally played guitar using this pick to feel close to my brother, to remember him while doing something we both enjoyed and shared.

When the pick broke, it triggered a slew of questions: 

Should I have not used it? Should I have saved it instead? What do I do with it now? Can I fix it? Do I discard it? Does this somehow symbolize the growing distance between my brother each day I keep on living and he does not?

I wrestled with these questions over the following days, but they slowly faded into the background as time wore on.

A few weeks later I was reminded of the broken pick as I revisited a scene from The Return of the King that I read several times last year while working on pieces on grief and loss and on Aragorn in the Houses of Healing.

In the words Aragorn spoke at Merry’s bedside in the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith, I found encouragement, comfort, and peace for my own situation.

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