“I can’t do this right now…”

I realized I had not updated anything on my Youtube channel in a long time so I opened my photos library and started to browse to choose some to publish for anyone that might be interested in seeing them. As I looked at them too many memories started crowding in until tears clouded my vision and I simply hit the tiny red dot in the upper left-hand corner of my computer to close the photo folder.

Memory … I watched a video of my dad being asked how old he was on the occasion of his 94^thbirthday, I did not make that particular video or I would have edited out the part where he simply could not hear because of hearing loss, but making him look simple minded because he didn’t know how old he was. My dad was sharp. But then my mother was asked how old she was and she looked at the camera and said, “I don’t know how old I am” which elicited a little chuckle because it seemed she was trying to be funny when the truth was that she really did not know.

What she did know were all the names of her mother and father’s siblings, ten on each side, her best friend as a little girl and taking care of her twin brother and sister born the year she was fourteen. It was amazing to me that her memories of them were so clear when she didn’t really know who I was. There were times she called me “Mama” and tell me she was trying to be a good little girl for me because I was such a good mom.  I would tell her that I thought she was a perfect little girl and I was proud of her. One day the “twins”, who were in the seventies, came to visit her. Her brother asked her about the twins and if she remembered them, she told him how much she loved them and when she married and they were five how hard it was to leave them while she traveled three thousand miles away because that’s where her new husbands church was located. They were satisfied that she remembered them and told me how glad they were that she knew who they were.  I thought it was comical, and I never told either of them, that before they got to the front door she turned and said to me, “Is that man a relative of mine?” That was not as funny though as her thinking that my brother was “her boyfriend” or telling me I would never know the heartache of not just one man leaving her, but two. Only thing I could figure was that she was thinking of my dad as a young man and then older because she married him at the young age of eighteen and there were no other men in her life before that except her dad and her brothers.

I turned from pictures of them to pictures of my own grand-twins, now eighteen months old, and saw the promise of a life yet lived and hope that if they don’t remember me in their mind they will always remember me in their heart.

I said to myself, “I can’t do this right now”…

“Memories light the corners of my mind, misty, water-colored memories of the way we were…”