Carol's Corner

“Preserve your memories, keep them well, what you forget you can never retell.” Louisa May Alcott

Always curious, I eagerly opened a plain round tin my mother handed me when I was eight years old. I pried open the tight fitting lid, undid the tissue paper, yellowed with age, and found a child’s china tea set. None of the pieces had chips, cracks or blemishes in the blue trimmed, sand coloured set.

“My sister Luella and I got this as our Christmas present when I was almost four. We had to share. Now I decided to give it to you.” my mom said. I thanked her and then begged for more of the story surrounding this tea set. She rarely shared more than a few details of life from her growing up years and this time was not different.

I continued to want more stories and details of my mother’s life as a child and young woman. From the snippets of information, I knew that many of the events held a lot of pain like the death of her sister Luella just before my mom turned ten. Several months before mom’s eleventh birthday, life became even harder. Her mother, my grandmother, suffered a massive stroke four days before the birth of her youngest child. But my quiet, soft spoken, hard working mother never gave more than a glimpse into what life must have been like, at least not until her heart began to fail.

One day my mom decided the time had come to preserve her story and family events. She talked and I recorded her stories. Probing questions from me pulled more details from her memory. We browsed through old photo albums. I made sure that each picture had the appropriate caption and the faces would not remain nameless once mom was gone.

For eight months, mom reminisced and I wrote. We dug out some written family history and old photos. Then we matched them up with mom’s memories. Yet too soon the time came to say good bye to mom. I still have questions I wish I had been able to ask, yet I am grateful for the memories I recorded. I typed the tales, wrote an epilogue of the experience and her funeral and made copies of the memoir for her sisters, her grown up grandchildren and a few cousins. Mom’s memoir gives me the opportunity to review the stories of the past, see how they helped shape the person I am today and cherish the memory of time with my mother during the last eight months of her life.

Why did mom resist, for so many years, sharing the lessons and stories of the past? I do not know but I am glad I had the opportunity to record them once she offered to share. I began to understand how these many events helped shape my mother into the person I knew. I can not rewind history and preserve the stories my grandparents told me, I can simply write the ones I remember. However I can learn from the past and share my life lessons and stories with my children and grandchildren.

How are you working on preserving your family stories?