Tag: memories

What Will They Remember?

Since burying my son, I’ve thought a lot about memories.  Not only recalling specific moments or events, but the nature of memory itself.

Why can I easily relive certain events, bring to mind a joke, or a car ride to the store in great detail yet not access others except in bits and pieces?

There are all kinds of theories on how our minds make and store memories.  Lots of research being done on which synapses fire and which pathways are activated.

But can I just tell you from a mama’s heart that what makes memories–good or bad–is strong emotion.  

We remember what we passionately feel.

When we engage our hearts, we imprint our minds.

So be aware that all the fancy fixings for Christmas don’t make memories. The moments you and they will cherish are the ones bathed in love, covered with laughter, circled round with the warmth of fellowship.

Presents, menus and decorations will be forgotten by this time next year but the sweet aroma of a peace-filled home welcoming the Presence of Christ will linger for eternity.

Skip the lines and frantic last- minute preparation and spend the next few days basking in God’s love, mercy and grace.

Your soul will be filled with His peace and overflow to those you love.

And that will be a memory everyone will cherish.

Minus More Than One

No child grows up in the SAME family because the addition of another child CHANGES the family. So does the subtraction…

We all miss him.

But each in our own way.

A family isn’t just the sum of its parts.

It isn’t a simple equation that can be worked out on a chalkboard or around a dinner table-this person plus that person equals two persons.

A family is an organic mixture of personalities, relationships, strengths and weaknesses that exponentially influence one another.

I always joked that our family was a ready-made committee.  Wherever we went we brought a fully staffed, action-ready army of six that spread out and triumphed over whatever challenge we faced.

The last great task we conquered together was burying Dominic.

Our family has been diminished by more than one person.  

We have lost the unique relationship that each of us had with him, lost the added strength that those relationships wove into the fabric of our lives.  There are gaping holes everywhere.

Some people say that on earth we can only see the ugly underneath of the beautiful tapestry God is making of our lives.

That’s probably true.

But I long to get a glimpse of what loveliness is to be wrought from these threads.

A Life in Scraps

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Just a few months before Dominic was killed, this hoarding homeschool mama decided that it was time to finally give up some of the thousands of pages of handwritten, color-crayoned papers stacked in the attic, the storage building and floating in corners and crevices throughout the house.

Four children and twenty-two years of teaching them at home had produced a mountain of memories.  I began to sort through the ones I deemed “most important to keep” and “everything else”.  

Several loads were taken to the dump and tossed unceremoniously onto the trash pile.

It felt like freedom.

Now it feels like regret and longing.

Because what I have left of the physical presence of my son is represented in the scraps I have kept-the clothes, the notes, the scribbled comments in the margins of his notebooks and college texts.

I hear his voice in the tweets– his wit and wisdom, cynicism and societal critique.

Sometimes I hold them and think of the boy,the teen,the man who wrote them.

Sometimes I hurry past because thinking of who he was and feeling the absence of who he would be right now is too great to bear.

I wish he had left more voice mails-

I don’t erase them anymore.