What happens to memory?05:59 Nov 16 2005
Times Read: 1,057
When we forget to remember some things, important things, not necessarily like where we left our keys or what time the biscuits went into the oven, does the Tree of Tales lose a leaf?
I can't rememer what my mother's face looked like when she laughed.
I can't remember her smile.
She's been dead for almost five years now, and I find my memory is inconstant, like having Pan for a husband.
I can't even sharply remember the last years of her illness, like she couldn't remember my name. She called me Betty, her adoptive sister's name.
The only thing I can remember is her throwing the football for my brother after she got out of the hospital following her first heart attack.
It wasn't immediately after, but close.
She'd retired from working in the laboratory, and started her own book-keeping/accounting business, and she seemed to be doing better physcially. Her first heart attack came when I was in fifth grade. I was nine years old when that part of my world came crashing down.
I finally realized my mother was not going to live forever.
It was a cruel realization and I still resent the world for ripping off my eyelids regarding her mortality that way. I had dreams and nightmares of both my parents dying.
What I remember most about my mother now, and it is such a damn shame, is the terror I felt when she threw that football.
Somewhere deep inside me, I was firmly convinced with every action like that she took, that meant a few less heartbeats I'd get to have her around.
I resented those throws. Every time she threw the ball, my throat would get tight and I was convinced she was going to die on the spot.
Intellectually, I know now that it was an unreasonable fear. But I am still, in some little selfish nine-year-old part of my heart, angry that she would do that, risk going away so blithely.
I want to remember what her face looked like when her laughter would chase across her features.
I want to remember the green-eyed, red-haired passionate woman my father fell in love with.
I want to remember the exact way her face looked the last time I saw her alive, when she had her last coherent moment, smelling the roses that Valentine's Day, 2000.
The next clearest memory I have is of the one glimpse I managed to force myself to take of her being dead, intebation tube still snaking out of her mouth, but not connected to the machines any longer.
I remember my cowardice in not being able to go into that hospital room with my father and comfort him. I remember my weakness and my fears, most clearly.
I wish those leaves had fallen off the Tree of Tales instead.
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