People and Memory

Today, I am so grateful for the ebb and flow of people in my life.  Sometimes, particularly when we are young, it seems as if the people in our lives will always be there, that this or that friend will be your BFF, and that while others may come and go, this one is permanent.  We also learn, as we grow up, that family members who seem as constant as the sea, are not necessarily.  Some of us are lucky enough to have parents into our own advanced age, and some lose parents unexpectedly young.  Each situation has its own happiness and heartache. 

When we have our parents into their (and our) advanced years, we are the witnesses to their physical and sometimes mental decline. But we have all the good times that we shared for so long, all the tender moments, and the opportunity to still feel like someone’s beloved child.  The people who were our guiding lights, who taught us the things we needed to know, or were even examples of how we did not want to behave, sometimes become a responsibility, sometimes even a burden. But the loss of parents, or even siblings at an early age, is a different kind of responsibility.  It entails keeping their light alive in us. We have the advantage of remembering them as they were, at the height of their health or beauty, but it reminds us that we lost out on creating more memories to take with us into the future.  It makes us enforce a mental stamina to not give in to overwhelming grief, and to appreciate the years and the days of happiness that we spent together.  Remembering is the scaffolding that helps us build on the foundation that was laid when we were together. To be overtaken by sadness is to surrender all the good times, all the laughter and the anticipation and the enjoyment that we had in each other’s company.

This week I had occasion to feel the sadness of loss, because we are celebration holidays that I have always been particularly fond of.  But I let that sadness be a signal to me to also remember the happy times, the closeness, the love that we shared, and the things that I learned from my loving parents and brother, of blessed memory. Feeling the sadness and their absence, I felt the empty place that they one filled.  Allowing myself to feel further, happy memories of the love and laughter filled that empty place and I felt gratitude. Appreciating how lucky I was to have had them for as long as I did, I felt gratitude that I can remember and enjoy the good times that lifted me up.

As a result of that loss, I have been lucky enough to reconnect with old friends, with members of my family that I had not seen in a very long time, and to take comfort from that renewal. There is present in every event, every day, every moment  both good and bad, happy and sad;  it depends on where we cast our eyes and let them rest that we decide what kind of life we are going to live.