Life is About Living Now!

Hardest topic for me.

This post. Memory.

One. I feel envy for all you mommy’s blogging about your life with your little children. A living, breathing, written memory for you to cherish. I can’t seem to remember much when my children were little. Little things filter through my mind. Their crooked smiles, the way they tucked their little hand in the back of my neck when I was holding them, my husband carrying them to bed when they fell fast asleep in ours. Now they have grown and I have forgotten so much.

But I will never forget how much I love them. But the look on their face when they ate their first piece of chocolate—I can’t remember. The first time they found money under their pillow from the tooth fairy—can’t remember. The first time they caught a baseball in the outfield—can’t remember.

I wish I could. I wish I had written about it.

I do remember my 17-year-old giving his 8th grade graduation speech, his sweet hug and kiss every single night, his screams of excitement when the Yankees won the pennant. I remember him climbing into his tuxedo for prom.

I remember my almost 14-year-old waving at me from a wakeboard behind a ski boat with a smile the size of Lake Tahoe, his patience and dedication as he reads my novel over and over again with so many helpful points, his smile every day as he approaches my car on his segway. I will never forget my son sailing me around the lagoon on his sunfish with the wind in our hair and the sun on our backs.

Or will I?

Two. My Mom lost her memory many years ago. MANY. And she sits in her chair without a memory or a voice suffering with Alzheimer’s.

“Does she know you?” everyone asks.

I have no idea. She senses me. Does that count?

A whole life of memories she doesn’t remember or does she?

She lost her husband and a daughter I hope she can’t remember that.

But all the other stuff. Where does it go? A whole life, filled with sweetness and light, with horror and grief. Where does it go?

I have become the memory for too many people. My mother, my father, my sister. I am a vessel filled with important memories that I can’t let die. Yet I can’t remember what my little boy said to me on his first day of school. I can’t remember the look on my little boy’s face when he took his first step. I can’t remember how they smelled after their bath.

But I remember my father dying. Clearly. And my sister sticking her tongue out at me in the hospital, angry that I was letting the doctors do awful things trying to keep her alive.

On those sleepless nights, and there are many, I want to remember the good things and not the bad. Turn off the switch of too many bad memories and let only the good ones filter through.

Why are the painful ones so vivid? It doesn’t seem fair. I can remember them in detail. Paint pictures, summon up feelings, re-create scenes.

The good memories are fading. I don’t want them to, because I need them desperately.

But life is not about memories. No. It’s about living and creating more memories.

Life is about living. Memories pull us backward, through time and space, sometimes unkindly, sometimes to help us remember and go forward freely. But life is about living. NOW.