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Our parent’s generation had their Brownie cameras, thin airmail letters, and sketchy oral history sessions to collect a lifetime of memories. They had little else to encapsulate their era, decades of living and snippets of generational history. My, how times have changed.
A while back, I was able to escape Minnesota for a week in Palm Springs. It was a respite from the craziness that had become my life over the last six months. A retreat to the desert was meant to being clarity to my brain and recharge my batteries for the continuing challenges ahead for me as a caregiver back home.
Not surprisingly, my long list of have-to-do projects was pretty quickly set aside for quiet times on the back patio and time to reflect. I made a point to playing catch-up with our neighbors and little touch-up tasks around the house. Most importantly, I made a point of seeing several close friends, one of which was Howard.
Howard is a wonderful man at ninety-three who has had a good life. We were lunching at the Senior Care Facility where he now lives. Bob, his partner and husband of 54 years, had passed away this fall and Howard was struggling with his new reality of living alone again.
One particular statement he made touched a nerve with me. “All I have left now,” he said “are my memories. I lived the first fifty years in a straight world and then the next forty-four years with Bob.” A smile slowly escaped from his face and it was all good. Despite being almost totally blind now, living in an assisted-living facility, Howard still had his memories to keep him alive. He is keeping busy, reading through an instrument from the Braile Institute and making new friends and, most importantly, cherishing those memories of ninety-three good years well lived.
It was only in her later years that my mother was able to recollect and relish (to some small degree) her life growing up on the farm, the early years working in the Twin Cities as a domestic, then raising two children on her own and finally meeting her second husband and another thirty good years spent with him. Unfortunately, collecting memories weren’t paramount on her mind back then.
Handwritten notes (really scribbles) of her life are now the only tangible thing along with some photographs that she left behind. Her later-in-years recollection of past events were often clouded by old age, memory loss and fractured truths that often didn’t pass the test of reality.
Howard’s comments about holding on to memories brought up an interesting realization. While my parent’s generation wasn’t very big on picture-taking or memoir-writing, my own generation was and is. With the advent of the iPhone, everyone can now be a photographer and able to capture any of life’s moments in an instant.
With Cloud storage and digital capabilities, the total amount collected is almost limitless. The same can be said for data, documents, videos, and any other form of digital-capture. More memories can be captured, created and stored in one day than our forefathers could muster up in a lifetime.
When both my kids did their semester abroad sessions while in college, I was able to capture their experiences on video (now digitized). It’s a visual benchmark upon which their kids can compare their own future explorations abroad. We captured the same precious moments when Sharon’s parents were interviewed about their early years growing up in Nebraska and then Minnesota.
Over the years, I written more than 700 blogs. Each is my own version of a memoir, covering various aspects of my life, interests, failures, success, places I’ve been and dreams I’ve captured. Writing my own obituary and that of Sharon is simply another way, she and I can capture (in our own words) a lifetime of living. For us, memories are made of that.
