Memory Lane

I find myself at holidays sometimes consumed by memories.  I suppose everyone is guilty of thinking back to their favorite Christmas, or some wonderful holiday celebration from the past.  And we all compare this holiday to the last, to the special one, to the one when we were a child.  We look back and think of what was before.   I am a scrapbooker at heart - seeking ways to remember special moments, to preserve feelings and seconds of time. It’s our nature, I suppose, to remember and compare.  Why else, of course, would we be able to remember?  Why would we take pictures or save mementos, but to savor the memory of something lovely that we don’t want to let go.

But this Christmas, I was wallowing in my memories for different reasons.  This Christmas I have been unable to shake the words that hover, inside my brain.  That this will be the last Christmas.  Daddy's last Christmas.  I have my Daddy on my mind all the time, his illness is eating at me.  I know so little about Alzheimer’s disease, and I don’t have a lot of faith in the medical community on this one either.  So many things go on inside the human mind that I don’t think people can trace and monitor and interpret.  I suppose part of me wants to believe what the reports say, because it will give me some comfort and make my life easier.  But there’s still that corner of my own mind, where I wonder what really goes on in the mind suffocated by the disease.  What does my daddy remember?  What memories are there for him?  I know he has memories, because all too often, when he talks, it’s about things from his past, people he knew, and things he did.  But what are the memories that remain?  And what makes them linger while others disappear like smoke in the wind.  How does that damn disease pick and choose what to take and what to leave behind?

Daddy doesn’t really remember me most days.  He has called me Sandy.  And Phyllis.  Most days, he simply shakes his head that he doesn’t know me.   Sometimes, my Mom can tell him I’m there, and he is aware I’m someone he should know. Now and again, I can see a flicker of recognition.   But mostly I can tell by the confusion in his eyes that he doesn’t know.  I worry that he doesn’t remember me anymore because I wasn’t around enough.  Because I was last.  Because I was a pain growing up.  Because I let him down.  Because...  Because why?  What about me makes my memories fade in his mind while others are fresh and vibrant and seem so real that they block out the reality of his day to day?  I am at least relieved that for now, he always knows my mom.  They were married for sixty one years in May.  He has been with her his whole life.  It makes me happy that, for now, she is still lving in his mind and still a part of his world.  I cannot imagine a world more dark than one where the person who you knew best and loved most just disappeared.  I need to believe that hasn’t happened for Daddy.  That it won’t happen for Daddy.  That he will, until whatever end there is, know that she is there with him and for him.  That she sits by his bedside – holds his hand.  That when she gets there each day, she makes sure his hair is combed, and she files his fingernails.  That just as surely as she fixed his breakfast every morning for 61 years, she is still there with him now.   I hope those images live in his mind, too, knowing that she is still the one he can count on.

On days like today, though, I torture myself with questions about what is on his mind and in his memories.  When he sleeps, he seems so fitful, as if something is bothering him, nagging him.  And I wonder, are his memories good ones?  Or are they, like all of our memories, a mix of good and bad, with happy moments sprinkled like sugar, over deep scars of pain and sorrow.  For me, as much as I want to remember every detail of the happy moments in my life, I find I have much deeper memories of the sad ones.  I can remember snippets of the day Mike and I got married, but I remember almost every tearful minute of my Uncle Ronnie’s funeral.  It’s that reality that bothers me.  That if the human mind is more prone to remember sorrow, if those are the memories that are stronger and more vivid, then are those the ones left for my Daddy?  Does he recall those snapshots I have of him laughing in the front yard with his nephews when he was younger?  Or instead, is he haunted by the night his sister died in a car accident? Does he remember the day we visited his friend whose dog begged for ice cubes, making him laugh out loud?  Or is he watching his grandson slide out the passenger door of the truck while he drives?  What makes a memory stay or leave?  I need to know.  I need to have someone tell me that he isn’t re-living all the heart-breaking days of his life, as images flutter away, a day at a time.  That somewhere, still burning in his mind, are family Sunday afternoons, under the mulberry tree in the back yard, taking a nap in the cool breeze between Sunday morning service and Sunday night service.  That when he awakens, he can still smell the musty odor of a barn full of freshly baled hay, not just the antiseptic smells of the nursing home where he stays.  I want to believe he’s reliving the joyous moments of his life – taking walks with Trouble to the farm, watching all his grandsons crawl up on the tractor and long to drive it like Grandpa Draper.  Evening supper on Wednesday night, when Mom would make cornbread and pinto beans for him.  And visits to Aunt Mary on Sunday afternoon, where she would tell stories and make him laugh.

 I cannot stand to think that he’s somewhere else in his mind, plagued by memories of people who made him angry, and moments that left him sad.  Forced to relive days like the one when he had to help a man who’d lost his foot in a machine at work – Daddy found him.  He had to call the ambulance and wait with the man.  I remember that night at home, how pale Daddy was when he talked about it.  Or when Aunt Mary died, and Daddy was so heartbroken and angry.  Or that day, not so long ago, when he told me his dog Trouble had died, tears in his eyes.  And if I remember those things so vividly, and they are not my memories, how bright then must they burn in Daddy’s mind?  If I cannot forget them, can he?  When I pray at night, the first thing I pray is that those memories are the ones that have fled.  That if there is one blessing in this awful disease, it is that it eats away the painful memories that take root in the mind, that it erases them first.  So things like broken promises, and broken hearts, will disappear from his life.  And then, I pray, that the ones that remain are the sweet ones, the ones I know he would love to live over again.  Those are the moments I hope he has tucked away, as the last ones to go.  Memories of his mother, of my mother, his grandchildren and great grandchildren.  The farm.  His dog.  Years with his brothers and sisters surrounding him.  That big horse he had when he was young.  That night at the fair, when he had his picture taken ( I still love to look at that picture), as he was laughing.  Let him remember the moments he spent laughing.  And then I pray that God will let me remember them too.