Midlife’s A Trip

Shards of Memories

Posted on 13. Nov, 2008 by Karen in Death and Dying, Family and Friends, Reflections

Isn’t that an incredible title — shards of memories?  I wish I could claim it as my own creation but it comes by way of friend Steve who was responding to a recent email from me.  I wrote about spending time with my cousins this week in Virginia as we all gathered for the funeral of my Aunt Hazel.  She died last week at 79 years old.  My mother is the last survivor of that generation.

My cousins and I sat around the dining table on Monday night and shared our collective memories of life in our family.  It was truly a collection of the good and bad, the happy and sad, the ups and downs of 3 generations of an amazing American family. 

We talked about my great-grandmother Dom who died when I was a toddler.  She was the proud Pennsylvania Dutch, Scotch-Irish matriarch of our family who didn’t stand for anyone bad-mouthing her bi-racial family.  I learned that she wore a Persian lamb jacket with a unique pin that my cousin Dottie still has.  Funny, I have a faux Persian lamb jacket that little old ladies love because it reminds them of the ones they wore so many years ago — like Dom. 

We also talked about my Bermudian grandfather Fred and the lovely hazel-eyed grandmother Hazel I never knew because she died of breast cancer before I was born.  And we reminisced about Great Aunt Clara, the character in our family.  She drove a big black car well into her 80’s and took no nonsense from anyone — except her 5 husbands. 

I’ve often thought of how to spin our family history in a way that allows me to wrap it up neatly at the end with a big red bow.  But this week, I realized, as Steve so wisely put it, that our family memories are shards from the past like broken mirror.  Interestingly, as my cousins and I shared our memories I could almost see these jagged pieces being reassembled like a broken mirror — a mirror that reflected back the person I’ve become because of our family history. 

Shards of memories.

What are yours?

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Tags: family funerals, family history, grandparents, loss of loved ones, memories