Sacred moments

I paused to smell a rose. With the scent, tears puddled in my eyes. Was it a memory, nostalgia, or just the pure beauty of it? I wasn’t sure.

Memory is the mental capacity to retain and revive things learned or experienced previously. I have become a reluctant observer of memory loss. My mom has been living with dementia for the past few years.  It progresses. There is no going back to the way it was. She has no short term memory. When I am with Mom, I am living with her in the present moment. She knows what she knows in that very second. In some strange way, although it’s extremely limiting, it’s also oddly grounding. These are sacred moments.

Mom knows her immediate family. When I walk in the door, she says “Hi Honey” with a big smile and great excitement, just as she always has. But she doesn’t realize that she just saw me yesterday or that she hasn’t seen me for a month. This actually makes it easier on both of us since I live a thousand miles away.

Mom still has many long term memories. But mostly they don’t sync up to the correct timeline. She is living in her very own world now. Her brain does not operate in the way that ours does. And I have come to accept that it doesn’t have to. We are figuring it out. And now we operate on what I call, “Sharon time.” We join Sharon in her world when we are together. There are only smiles there, so I can’t say that it’s such a bad place.

This experience with Mom, as well as grief over the loss of Tim, has heightened my desire to revisit memories.

I think that grief has a unique way of opening a door to the past. It begs you for attention and asks you to live it all over again. Some days I do it intentionally by revisiting photos or verbally sharing those details of past moments with others. But occasionally, a memory comes through like a lightning bolt and with that a number of reactions could be triggered:

• I may be faced with something I would actually like to forget. Because bad things can and do happen throughout our lives. Those are memories we are stuck with and need to learn to live with in a healthy way.
• I may be reminded of that “do-over” moment. Where in my heart I suspect I did it all wrong the first time. We are human. We are not perfect. And though we hope that in any given moment we do the best with what we know, when we reflect, we realize that we’ve grown and we want it back. We want the do over.
• There are other times when the do-over is packaged in beauty. It was so magical the first time around. I just have to have it again. That’s the greedy part of memory, and I think in some ways it’s just as dangerous as feeling like we need to fix the past.
• Some memories can strike fear. How can you look at the future? How can you do it solo? How can you ever take a chance again to be happy, to love, to thrive when you know the pain of grief?

I try hard to let my memories be as they are. They are my unchangeable story. I am grateful for the life I have experienced and that I can still recall a good part of it. I don’t want those memories to define loneliness, sadness, fear, or even greed for wanting something again. I want those memories to ground me in my present maybe as if to say, you are here today, who you are today, in part because of this moment in the past.

Maybe the one thing I hope I never forget is to stop and smell that rose and simply breathe, into this very sacred moment, the unmistakable beauty of it all.