Memories are like scraps of paper blown randomly across your way by the breeze. Every so often a headline catches your eye before the wind picks it up again and sends it on its way.
It's as random as that mostly, though sometimes the memories are fed by the events of your life. Things happen, the scraps of paper come from the one place, connected in some way by a common thread. It's as if some archivist in your mind works silently and secretly picking up the cues and feeding back the disparate but linked moments of a barely remembered past.
I think much less about mum's situation than I did a month or two ago, though there is a constant awareness that at some point the end will come. For now I have managed an uneasy adjustment to the situation. While I think less, I remember more. As if knowing that soon there will be no more new memories my mind has sought out the old and dusty one's.
It's strange what you remember. You might think that particular occasions are recalled. Key moments in your shared life. But no, not yet, not for me anyway. I recall figments, truly scraps of memories as if torn from larger memories. They come unexpectedly, passing through my mind much as a piece of old newspaper might blow across the street. Sometimes I might linger over these memories, curious again, my foot on the corner of the paper to prevent it blowing away. And then I move on and the wind does its work.
I recalled my mother of the seventies when I was a boy. I remembered in general the parties my parents would have in our home in Lower Plenty, how the Conolly's and the Holton's would visit for a raucous night of free-spirited enjoyment, the wine and beer flowing, Barry White, Neil Diamond (Hot August Night), the Bee Gees playing, and the ribald laughter of the men. We kids, now all grown up and responsible, had our own party which was fun then and fun remembering. I recall mum in all of this, most particularly I remember how she was, an attractive, vibrant woman, her hair permed stylishly in the fashion of the day, the born hostess in her very element.
Another memory comes to me. This one is very prosaic, so much so that you wonder how it can be recalled now, why, in fact, it was stored away in the first instance. There it is nonetheless, and you find something fond in the very ordinariness of the memory: of queuing up in a technical book shop with all these mother's with their children looking to source the school years book list. That was somewhere in the city, and though I can't say where I can close my eyes and can picture the scene.
How does this make me feel? Sad, predictably, though not necessarily in the way you would think. Back then I was dependent on my mum, and I her much loved son. I was held within the warm routine of family, though I took hardly any notice of that. I had a close relationship with my mum.
The relationship must, I guess, change and mature as you yourself mature and become independent. To some degree the shoe is on the other foot. Mum is not dependent upon me, but she leans hard, and did so even before her illness. I'm happy for that to be the case, but in recalling this hatful of old memories I am wistful for what I have lost, lost whether she lives or dies.
We were closer once; our relationship was different; I wish she was as she was then, and not is as she is now. She probably thinks the same of me. What I feel then is regret. Things always change, we lose a little, we gain a little. I'm not sure how possible it is to hold onto some of these things: is it just time that makes them slip from your grasp?
Mum is dying, and that's hard. She has been good with it, but if I am to be selfish and self-indulgent for a moment I wish she was that vibrant woman of yesteryear still. I miss her to a poignant degree. She exists only in those scrap of memories now.
