Dear Diary

Several years ago, I told one of my cousins if I preceded him in death, he should make a beeline to my place and burn any journal he found before anyone else arrived. He said, “I’ll buy you a shredder, and you can take care of that yourself.” And so, he did. And I got busy.

Not all diaries are secret BFFs, confessionals or epistolary therapists. They are written for many reasons, and some have been quite enlightening in a historical, humanitarian or artistic sense.

After her death, through Anne Frank’s recorded thoughts and feelings, the world, including her father, came to know what it was like for her in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Virginia Woolf’s famous diaries are autobiographical as well as where she experimented with and explored her writing. The diary John F. Kennedy kept as a young correspondent in 1945, in which he expresses his opinions about Hitler and the UN, sold for over $700,000. Historians believe it is the only one he ever kept.

Charles Dodgson’s (Lewis Carroll’s) family tore several pages from one of his diaries and mysteriously misplaced some volumes, only adding to speculation about the nature of Dodgson’s relationship with the Liddell girls, including Alice, who encouraged Dodgson to write down the story that became Alice in Wonderland, a book that’s never been out of print since its publication in 1865. Nor has Carroll’s contentious reputation been laid to rest since his death in 1898.

The impulse to keep time and to record fact, fantasy, delight, sorrow, guilt, secrets, and even shame, is not universally felt but sometimes universally appreciated. There is a Wiki page devoted to the many people who were diarists. They include writers, theologians, politicians, philosophers, artists, historians and others.

Whether a diary is intended to be shared or not, the voice is immediate and intimate, implying a sacred trust. The sacred trusts we hold in locked boxes and vaults imo pectore for ourselves and others make each of us diarists. These holy pages can never be shredded, torn out or burned. Along with love and loss, they forever change the narrative.