A simple Memory

It's funny what can trigger old memories.  Sometimes we will spend years apart from a person, a place or an object and then suddenly out of the blue there will be a trigger to our senses that brings it all back.  It can be something simple like the smell of warm cookies or the sound of the ocean.  It can be the taste of blood in your mouth when you loose a tooth or the sight of an old photograph.  It it was the latter for me recently. 

My mother has been putting together old photographs of her mother (my grandma) on a shelf by the kitchen.  On a whim one sunday morning I picked one up and looked at it.  I haven't thought of my grandmother in the some six or seven years since she did.  I had an image of her last days in my mind, frail, mind failing due to alzeimers.  She could barely comprehend most things, but she could still play music on her organ in the little home where we'd put her.  

This picture however, was of some time before that.  She was holding this one purse with flowers on it.  I'd completely forgotten it, but my grandma had always carried little purses like this.  They were almost crochet covered, knitted but with plastic or leather straps.  I remembered picking one up as a kid and trying to figure out what exactly was in it.

In that moment I could suddenly remember the smell of the purse, how it felt in my fingers as I traced them over the strange bony protrusions along the edges. That memory triggered other things, thoughts of my grandma's house, what I did there, the sound of her voice or her music and for the first time in a long time I felt on the verge of tears.

So many years after her death, and still the memory of that pain is very fresh.  It made me realize how very soon I'll have to go through it again with my surviving grandparents.  I don't want to think about it, yet it looms so large in the foreseeable future.  In the end, such things are beyond the power of mere mortals to comprehend.  We are just infinitesimal specs in the eyes of time, death and the universe.  But in death, there is still hope beyond the eternal mystery.


My Mom once told me about the day my grandma died.  She had just passed and she and my father were in the backyard.  I think they were talking when they noticed a very old dove sitting on the top of the house.  The dove was cooing softly, then it spread its wings and took flight.    When my mother told me this I wasn't so much surprised as humbled and awed.

There are a great many things no one can explain about death.  Many would argue that the dove was merely circumstance.  These same people would say that the only point of life is to live then die and that there is nothing afterwards.  In that moment, I think, my grandmother would strongly disagree.  She was a very devoutly religious woman, and it was from her that I started learning my first lessons about death when my grandfather died.  There was a strength of resolve that remained within her, even to her last day.  A brightness in her eyes that I never want myself or anyone to forget.