His mother put notes in his school lunch every day. She’s now gone but still inspires.

Every morning, from the time Nelson Zimmerman started kindergarten to the day he finished high school, his mother tucked a hand-written note in his lunch: “Congrats on the tryouts,” she’d write, or “I hope you crush your AP exam” or “I love you to the moon.”

He’d find them hiding under a granola bar or behind his ham sandwich, and he could tell if she’d been rushing when the notes had a jagged edge torn from a notebook. But each one started “Dear Nelson” and ended “Love, Mom XO XO.”

Sometime around 10th grade, he started saving all those notes, one sheet at a time, collecting more than 500.

He has them still.

And when he wakes up each morning at age 24 and pulls one from the box on his nightstand, the ink still seems fresh and the message still seems fitting, even now that’s she’s gone.

Remembering as Mother’s Day approaches

“This one’s good,” he told me last week, reading them tearfully as Mother’s Day approached. “Dear Nelson. This may be the last lunch I make you for junior year. Have a great last day of classes. Good luck at tryouts. Give it your all. May the Lord bless you and keep you. Love, Mom.”

Donna Zimmerman’s feat of motherhood gets even more impressive considering Nelson has two older brothers — Michael Jr. and Tyler — and all three of them got daily lunchbox notes personalized down to who had a test in what period.

I learned all this because Michael Jr. wrote a short essay about his mother’s endowment fund at Cardinal Gibbons High School, the Catholic school all three of her sons attended.

“You could not leave for the day without a blessing from Mom over your head,” he recalled in the essay. “No meat on Fridays during Lent, often those lunchbox notes had to remind us — ha!”

Both accountants, Donna and Mike Zimmerman Sr. met in 1982, when they were working for Perdue Farms in Salisbury, Maryland. By a crazy coincidence, I spent three years in Salisbury working at my first newspaper, so all three of us met chicken magnate Frank Perdue before migrating south to the Triangle.

But at the home they built in Durham, Mike Sr. recalled Donna being on the sidelines for every one of her son’s games, or eye-deep in their books before every test, or up early every school day writing her daily notes — though Dad, no slouch himself, would be upstairs ironing his boys’ pants.

“We raised a gorgeous family,” he said. “Don’t know what the secret was. A lot of it was her.”

Then she got sick.

News of her cancer came just as the pandemic settled in. With the churches shut down, she couldn’t attend Mass — a rarity. And with chemotherapy making her even more vulnerable, she had to stay isolated. Sometimes, when the family got together, they ate in the garage.

A box to keep the notes in

But not long before Donna Zimmerman died in 2021, she remembered the speech Nelson gave at his high school graduation in 2017, which recalled his years of discovering notes with his sandwiches.

“She knew I kept them,” he told me. “As she was passing away, she got a wooden box and she said, ‘This is for you to keep the notes in.’ “

Nelson told me this while calling on the way home from his job in California, where he works as a flight test engineer at Edwards Air Force Base. Recalling this story got us both choked up.

My own mother in Baltimore still sends me envelopes full of news clippings she thinks I’ll like, and crossword puzzles she can’t finish, or pictures of me in high school, standing next to my first car.

Nelson and I are strangers beyond that phone call, and I never met his mother.

But as he read from the selection of favorite notes he keeps in a folder, which he had in his backpack when he called, we finished our conversation in a shaky voice — the kind only your mother can inspire.