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Read Time: 3 minutes

by AJ Canterbury

Time yellows the corners of memory. Recollections get fuzzy and faces blur. The mind struggles to piece together who was doing what and who was where.

I have always been grateful that God has given me a mind that captures and stores the past. When I talk with others and retrace memories, I realize how atypical that ability is. Some things I would rather forget and not remember with such detail, but the gift of remembering conversation and jokes and places far outweighs the bad.

But a gifted memory is still subject to the decay of time. The mind just cannot hold onto everything forever (a result of our perishable, finite bodies) so eventually things begin to slip.

It has been 24 years since my mom passed away, and I fight to maintain all the memories I have of her. Some of them are still as crisp as if they happened yesterday. Others seemed to have gotten lost somewhere in the brain’s synapses

Pictures often help resuscitate dying memories back to life. But I get so aggravated that cameras and pictures were not as easily available as they are now. I know I grew up in the 1900s, but the availability of cell phone cameras with instant, unlimited picture storage really is a new technology, believe it or not.

In a conversation with my youngest brother, I expressed my need to share with my siblings who their mom was. As the oldest, and the one with the most memories of her, I feel privileged to tell them what I know.

As I told him about the night she passed, a memory he was too young to remember, I was caught off guard by how vivid the pictures were and how deep the emotions still cut. The true mark of how significant she is. For grief does not hang around for two decades if the person did not matter, nor do the images leave behind such an indelible imprint.

Ode to Mom

I combined my gift of words with my gift of memory, and I put them to work to best showcase who my mom was and share her with you:

I remember how your eyes would squint in the sun or with your easy smile. You loved the smell of clothes that had been dried on the clothesline.  And the way the gentle breeze buffeted the kitchen curtains through the open window. 

I still see you dressed in a navy nightgown, wrapped in your quilted bathrobe and sitting at the kitchen table. With one leg pulled up beneath you, you sipped your coffee while solving the crossword. Mornings and being home were times to be relaxed and casual, but the rules changed when the day called you out the door. I still have trouble leaving the house looking a mess, remembering your warning that “the time you do, is the time you’ll meet the most people you know.”

You taught me hospitality and the value of treating others with kindness. No visitor left your house without being offered a drink or a baked good. Your kitchen was open to those seeking coffee and conversation or to the shipwrecked soul seeking a different kind of refreshment.

Your co-workers defined “unwinding after a long week” as simply sitting around your table and laughing with you. The family gathered at your home every Friday night for dinner, Dukeman’s ice cream, movies, and games. We spent summer nights gazing, from the security of sleeping bags, tracing the constellations, watching meteor showers, and sighting possible UFO visitations.

Your home was the place everyone gathered, but it wasn’t the house we came to find. It was you. You were the hub.

When you picked me up from a friend’s party, my peers begged you to come dance with them before you left. With pride, I thought “not everyone has a mom like this.”  And when you did dance, I realized that I would never be as cool as you.  

The day we moved me into my dorm room, you disappeared for thirty minutes and we both pretended like you hadn’t slipped away to cry.  I remember how often I aggravated you after you got sick because I pushed you to keep fighting, but it was still me you wanted to watch movies with all afternoon and read scripture to you.

I remember holding your hand as it grew colder, knowing I never wanted to let it go.

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