My Words Will Die With Me

I was delighted to learn that author Tish Harrison Warren burns her words. In her latest book, What Grows in Weary Lands, she describes a tradition that began unintentionally with her first book. At the end of the publication process she winds up with a full copy of her manuscript—printed but unbound, with her handwritten edits. Near the end of that process for her first book, she realized she would have a ream of paper she couldn’t really use, and it didn’t feel right to toss it in the recycling, so she burned it. Thus the personal tradition of burning her words was born.

With the manuscript for Weary Lands, the tradition continued. She and her husband lit their backyard fire pit, poured champagne, and began tossing pages into the flames. They thanked God it was over, prayed for the people who would read it, and watched page by page turn to ash.

She wrote: “It has become a happy tradition over the years. And a dual symbol for me. On one hand, all those printed words ascending in smoke feel like a prayer in themselves. All these ideas and sentences, both lovely and faulted—this editing and effort, self-disclosure and self-doubt, worries and words—rising to God like the incense we burn in church each Sunday, curling and twisting toward heaven. There’s something glorious about it” (142).

I don’t have a manuscript to burn, but I did a variation on this theme with someone else’s words—emphasis on the symbolism—after a dating relationship ended fourteen years ago. The man I was dating knew my love of words and showered me with them in the form of handwritten cards. We dated for about eight months, so I had a modest collection when the end came. I would have ended the relationship myself, but he beat me to it. Deep down I was relieved; over time I saw a significant mismatch on many levels, and I was okay when the relationship ended.

After things ended, I gathered up the notes and cards, walked out to my parents’ fire pit, and lit a match. (Well, I probably lit a lot of matches; my fire-starting skills are not great.) I burned the cards in small stacks, slowly, until they were gone, watching paper and words turn to ash. This wasn’t an act of defiant severance—it was much deeper. It was my own quiet, symbolic way of letting go. I knew that if I held on to those words I would be tempted to re-read them, “to taste life twice,” as Anaïs Nin put it. I would keep reliving the past and all those emotions—and I knew it wouldn’t be healthy. But, like Warren and her husband, I prayed over those letters—asking that every one my ex had written be returned to me a hundredfold by a future husband, a man who would be a significant match for me. In its own small way, there was something glorious about those words, rising to God like incense—my prayers along with them.

Warren went on to write about her word-burning tradition, reflecting that while there is something glorious about it, there is 

at the same time something sad—something that admits futility, that speaks of our long defeat. These flames remind me that all of my effort, struggle, failures, and successes end in death. All these hours of work—early mornings, headaches, drafts, tears, cursing at the rafters, and small moments of triumph—turn to ash. They go up in smoke and are gone. I cannot make them last. Years of my life, thousands of words . . . it blows away with the shifting wind (142).

I signed an updated version of my will yesterday. It included a specific stipulation that all my personal journals are to be burned—twenty-one volumes as of now, dating back to January 1, 1997. My original will named two friends for the duty. I had joked with them for years about leaving them with the task of burning my journals, then I stopped joking and legitimately included it in my will, which I signed in late 2023. I recently decided that was unfair, so I asked my oldest brother to do it, and he agreed. My other brother is responsible for deleting my digital words—removing this blog and taking it off the internet. I don’t know the hour or day when I will meet Jesus, but it will come; when it does, I have deliberately chosen that all my words go up in smoke, whether actual smoke or some kind of cyber-smoke. There will be a day when years of my life—thousands, if not millions, of words—will blow away, so to speak, with the shifting wind. I won’t last—and neither will they. We will both turn to dust and ash: flames that burn for a while and then flicker and die.

However, there are words that do last forever. I have long believed that heaven will have a spectacular library based on the beautiful words in John 21:25: "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” For those who go to heaven, I believe that we will read all those books that the world supposedly did not have room for.

My words will die along with me—as will every word ever written by anyone, anywhere, at any point in history—every book, blog post, tweet, newspaper, magazine, script, and email—every version of words you can think of—will someday be lost to the end of the ages. They won’t even survive as distant memories, relics, or artifacts. All of them will blow away with the shifting wind. But for those who are in Christ, the shifting wind will carry us home to Jesus Christ in heaven.

And when I reach heaven, I’ll settle in for some good books filled with good words. Words that last forever.

“All people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever" (Isaiah 40:6b-8).