Mom looks at Dear Medora with Nyel, 2007

I remember, a few years back, when it was popular to say – perhaps after a family outing or a special event – that you were “making good memories.”  Perhaps people still use that expression and I’m just not hearing it.  Ten or twelve years ago I noticed it bigtime because it was when my mother was still living.  She had dementia and, although she ‘knew’ me until she died at age 97, she had no memories of much else.

I remember when my book Dear Medora was published in 2007, two years before mom died.  Medora was my mother’s older sister who had died unexpectedly at age seventeen when my mother was just three.  The book is full of photographs of the family and house and Oysterville from that period of time.  Mom had been helpful with my information-gathering in the beginning but, by the time the book came out, I knew it would mean very little to her.

Nevertheless, I took her the first copy.  I wasn’t surprised when she showed no interest at all.  The next time I visited her at ‘the home,’ though, I tried again and, on that occasion, she went through the book page by page, stopping at each picture of a family member.

“That’s Mama,” she would say.  “Is she dead?”

“Yes,” I would nod.

“That’s Papa. Is he dead?” and she’d turn the page.

“That’s Medora.  Is she dead?” she’d continue.

And on the next page, “That’s Mama, is she dead?”

And so it went through all 168 pages.  Since mom was last living member of her family, I had to answer with “no” after “no.”  At the end of the book, of course, there was no closure (so to speak) and Mom was doing fine.  I, on the other hand, was thoroughly depressed.  And, so much for “making memories!”

A page from 2008

Yesterday, in connection with another writing project, I went through some scrapbooks from 2008 and 2009.  They are loaded with photographs of events and activities from those years – things I had not thought about for eons – and every photo showed friends and family members, many of whom are “no longer with us,” as they say.  Gordon and Kaye and Charlie, Jim and Carol and Beeg and Dennis, and oh so many more.

As the memories came flooding back, I had the fleeting thought that when all the people are gone who have shared memories with you… what then?  Who remembers my mother when she was young?  Who is left that remembers the MG TC I had in 1956?  And who remembers riding Sugar or Spice, the Shetland ponies at Miss Elliott’s Camp Willapa in the forties?  And… just what is a memory if it can’t be shared with someone else?  Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I write down the stories.  It’s not quite the same, though.