Memories are like scraps of paper blown randomly across your way by the breeze. Every so much a headline catches your eye before the wind picks it up again and sends it on its way.
It's as random as that mostly, though sometimes the memories are fed by the events of your life. Things happen, the garbage of paper come from the one place, connected in some way by a common thread.
It's as if some archivist in your brain works silently and secretly picking up the cues and feeding back the disparate but linked moments of a barely remembered past.
I believe much less about mum's situation than I did a month or two ago, though there is a constant awareness that at some degree the end will come. For now I have managed an uneasy adjustment to the situation. While I think less, I think more. As if knowing that presently there will be no more new memories my brain has sought out the old and dusty one's.
It's strange what you remember. You might suppose that particular occasions are recalled. Key moments in your shared life. But no, not yet, not for me anyway. I recall figments, truly scraps of memories as if torn from larger memories. They come unexpectedly, passing through my head much as a man of old newspaper might blow across the street. Sometimes I might linger over these memories, curious again, my foot on the tree of the newspaper to keep it blowing away. And so I go on and the nose does its work.
I recalled my father of the 1970s when I was a boy. I remembered in general the parties my parents would give in our place in Lower Plenty, how the Conolly's and the Holton's would visit for a raucous night of free-spirited enjoyment, the wine and beer flowing, Barry White, Neil Diamond (Hot August Night), the Bee Gees playing, and the ribald laughter of the men. We kids, now all grown up and responsible, had our own party which was fun then and fun remembering. I recall mum in all of this, most especially I think how she was, an attractive, vibrant woman, her hair permed stylishly in the manner of the day, the born hostess in her very element.
Another memory comes to me. This one is very prosaic, so often so that you question how it can be recalled now, why, in fact, it was stored away in the 1st instance. There it is nonetheless, and you see something warm in the very ordinariness of the memory: of queuing up in a technical book store with all these mother's with their children look to reference the school years book list. That was someplace in the city, and though I can't say where I can finish my eyes and can see the scene.
How does this hit me feel? Sad, predictably, though not necessarily in the way you would think. Back then I was hooked on my mum, and I her much loved son. I was held inside the warm routine of family, though I took scarcely any mark of that. I had a close kinship with my mum.
The relationship must, I guess, change and grow as you yourself mature and get independent. To some point the horseshoe is on the other foot. Mum is not dependent upon me, but she leans hard, and did so even before her illness. I'm glad for that to be the case, but in recalling this pot of old memories I am wistful for what I get lost, lost whether she lives or dies.
We were closer once; our kinship was different; I wish she was as she was then, and not is as she is now. She probably thinks the like of me. What I find then is regret. Things always change, we miss a little, we make a little. I'm not certain how possible it is to hold onto some of these things: is it just time that makes them slip from your grasp?
Mum is dying, and that's hard. She has been well with it, but if I am to be selfish and self-indulgent for a second I wish she was that vibrant woman of yesteryear still. I lose her to a poignant degree. She exists merely in those scrap of memories now.
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