The morning before Thanksgiving 2008, Chris woke up and told me he’d just had a dream about his former boss and good friend, Tom Dardenne. Tom and Chris had been very close during their time working together at The Winter Haven (Fla.) News-Chief, but had completely lost touch in the nine years since we’d left the paper, and the state.  So Tom’s presence in Chris’s dream was a pleasant surprise. We hadn’t talked to Tom – or about him – in years.

In the dream, which he vividly remembers was in black and white, Chris was standing in an old saloon drinking a beer with friends, when he noticed Tom in a dimly lit room in the back of the bar. So he walked over to his old boss, who was dressed in a suit and sitting on the edge of a bed, smiling. Tom always had short hair and a beard, but in the dream he had long hair, pulled back in a ponytail. The two of them exchanged hellos, sat and chatted.  Chris didn’t remember what they talked about, but he woke up feeling close to Tom, as if they’d actually caught up on each other’s lives. I remember him smiling as he told me, that contented smile you wear when you’ve just seen an old friend.

A half-hour after our conversation about his dream, Chris received an email from another old Florida friend. It contained the shocking news that Tom Dardenne had died the night before after a long illness we had known nothing about.

I have thought about that dream often these last five years. It becomes particularly vivid as the holidays approach, not just because that’s when it happened, but because so many people feel the loss of a loved one with a palpable poignancy this time of year. I think about how many people out there yearn for one more friendly exchange in a quiet corner of an old saloon with a cherished friend.

I have a friend whose husband is dying of cancer. I think of her daily, and I wish there was something comforting I could say, a bit of kindness that could reach the depths of her despair. The last time I saw her she told me she was going to record her husband’s voice, and that he was going to write letters to his daughters, who are still in high school. I loved these ideas, ways for them to hold tight to the tangible evidence of his presence in their lives, when they can no longer hold him. These are the things we yearn for when someone is gone. If only I could hug him one more time. If only I remembered what his laugh sounded like. If only I could hear her voice on the phone.

What is not as obvious, particularly to those grieving, is the fact that the people who have crossed our paths and meant something to us leave us with more than notes and echoes of familiar voices. They leave parts of their very essence embedded in our own. And they don’t have to be dead to do it. Our loved ones leave us with plenty of intangibles, and we do the same for them. I’m not talking about things that remind us of them. I’m talking about the ways in which their lives change our opinions, the way their presence and personalities shape our tastes and influence our perspectives. Sometimes we realize it when it happens, but often we don’t.

Traces of the people we’ve loved are not just saved in cherished old voicemails or sitting inside picture frames. They are here, today, in the way we hate the Yankees, or think John Madden is an idiot. They’re subtly responsible for our love of “Star Trek,” or our fondness for single malt scotch, or the fact that we can’t pass a Salvation Army kettle without dropping in some cash. We use an odd catchphrase picked up from a good friend and after awhile we’ve said it so many times we take ownership of it. Or we realize one day that we structure our kitchen cabinets in the exact same way our mother did hers, because it just makes perfect sense to us.

We are, in many tiny ways, a collection of those around us.

Someone might have given us a fear of abandonment. Someone else, a love of Brubeck’s “Take Five.” Another person may have imprinted a quiet prejudice we now have against those on welfare. Still another, a sense of pride in the shape of our eyes or the dimple on our chin.

I like to imagine our souls have a flexible, opaque casing, like shards of soft stained glass through which our inner light shines in a way that is stunning, brilliant and exclusively ours. But if we’re lucky, and wise, we give as many of those shards away as we can. We give and trade and share them one kiss, one quirk, one catchphrase at a time, collecting others’ shards as we move through this dream we call life. My periwinkle for your fiery red. And just like that, I love Tom Waits on vinyl, and you love a full-bodied Chianti on a cold winter’s night.

These are small things for sure, and barely a comfort to someone like Cindy, who is watching cancer steal her partner away from his family. But life is a series of small things, tiny moments strung together, passion and tears, newborn skin and whispered secrets and juicy apples and dark chocolate and sparkly snowflakes and God’s grace. You see how the small things are actually enormous?

“And if you take of my soul 
You can still leave it whole 
With the pieces of your own you leave behind…”*

My goal this holiday season is to trade some more shards, to give away as much of this periwinkle as possible, and reflect the gifts I take from you; they will be with me long after we’ve said goodbye. I find comfort in knowing a bit of my purple-blue will live in some of you. Because beautiful dreams of old friends can be in black and white. But life is lived, and shared, in color.

Happy Holidays, friends.

[*from “Salvation Song” by the Avett Brothers]