Six Months
My mother as a memory keeper.
My mom departed from this world six months ago today. It was around 1pm that I got the call, almost out of the blue, but of course not. Her health had been in decline, and still, her death was a shock. I think that in many ways, the shock is just now beginning to wear off, and I don’t know how to talk about grief without talking about where I’m at with it at any given moment.
To risk sounding cliché, it is almost exactly as if I’m trying to describe a river. The experience of standing in the middle of a river, with the water surrounding you and life teeming all around you, is nearly indescribable. As is the grief of losing someone dear.
My grief moves around. I feel it in different parts of my body, it affects different parts of my mind, and it sits differently from moment to moment.
Today, I am mourning the loss of my mother as a memory keeper.
I’ve done a lot of sifting through our shared memories in the months that have passed, but specifically during the time I spent cleaning out her home a few weeks ago, and going through the boxes where she kept all our photos. I’d never given much thought to my mother as a documentarian, but it was in her nature. Throughout my childhood, she worked as a pressman for the two newspapers in town. She printed the town’s paper, physically, and brought into creation the announcement of more deaths, births, and stories than either of us can count. I can still hear her voice saying the words “Duplicator Operator,” emphasizing the exact matching parts of each word. So many of -isms feel like prayers now.
Now that I am the one left to tell our stories, share our family photos, and carry on our legacy in ephemera, I am taken aback by how much of a responsibility that is. It is so much to manage.
Now all our photos are transferred to plastic boxes, and maybe one day I’ll organize them.
Today I set out to scan some in, but it’s still painful to look at them without her by my side, telling me stories about every image.
Some stories I will never know, because the keeper of that memory has departed.
Some stories I can only guess at.
Some stories I must tell alone, without my biggest cheerleader and without the one who loved me most in the whole world.
So today, six months without my mom, I wanted to show you some photos, with no context, they’re just some photos of her I liked. Nothing profound, just wanting to share her and share some of the grief in a way to unburden myself or steep myself in it. I’m not entirely sure.
My mom on her birthday, I believe she’s 18 in this photo.
Above: My mom at the Grand Canyon, just days after she found out she was pregnant with me. Whenever I would tell her I wanted to go to the Grand Canyon she would say “You’ve already been there” without fail. I joked once that this was our first photo together, and she really liked that.
This photo sits framed on my desk. I look at it all the time. She is so beautiful, and so fiery. This was taken near her mother’s grave by my aunt Kathy. When I visited my aunt a couple weeks ago she had picked out the same photo to frame and it sits next to her chair in the living room. It is also her favorite.
Of all the images, this is the one that shocked me the most. My mom was always so weary of me traveling, and was so worried something would happen to me. I worried her sick by traveling all over the place. I was shocked to find this photo of her, taken in Mexico, right after her visit to the Grand Canyon, newly pregnant with me.
This is her birthday and she’s just been given a Polaroid Camera on which the first photo in this set was taken.
With my Grandma, on a smoke break in Myrtle Beach.
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