What to do for our mothers and the mothers of our children on Mothers Day? Flowers and family dinners out are wonderful, but end quickly. A moving story by Rabbi Irwin Kula on The Huffington Post suggests using the structure of a Tweet on Twitter to give the mom you love a more lasting gift this Mothers Day.

A few months ago my mother died. She was an amazing woman who among her many accomplishments and talents raised six sons, each of whom, for years and years, spoke to every other brother once every few days. This past week, my brothers, my father, and I have been trading emails about the words to be engraved on my Mom’s headstone….The least wordy of my brothers complained that with everything we all wanted to say the headstone was going to look ridiculous. “We need to tweet the headstone!” I impulsively offered.
To tweet my Mom’s life was unnerving, humbling and actually quite necessary. Capturing her memory in 140 characters? No amount of words could adequately describe my Mom and yet we needed to tweet her life. My mom use to say, “Get to the point already,” and to tweet her headstone, we needed to heed her advice.
Well, I am pleased to report that I think Twitter has been a great practice, in the spiritual use of this term. My mom’s headstone has 99 characters.

Tweeting a headstone compels us to think about getting our sense of significance as human beings down to just a few characters. What an interesting exercise: How would we boil down the message of our own lives to just a few words?

How would you boil down the gift of your mom’s life? How about the mother of your children? You don’t need to wait for them to be gone to do that, and you don’t need Hallmark to get it down to 140 characters either.
So along with the flowers, the dinners and even the cards which I too have bought for the moms in my life, I plan on a few very brief notes which I think may be the best gifts any of us can give the ones we love.