Treasured Memories

Loving memories are with us forever

A trip to Wellington to stay with my lovely friends, Lois and Peter, this week was a time of sharing stories, renewing friendships and creating memories to treasure.


We create memories every day we live; some we treasure, some we want to forget but all make up the colourful, metaphorical tapestry  that we each weave on this journey called life.


Our memories are stored in our minds, like the files on our computers and because our brains can store so much information we can replay those treasured memories at will or when something triggers a particular memory, such as a piece of music, a scene, words or a particular scent.


As the American author, poet and naturalist, Diane Ackerman, states in her book 'A Natural History of the Senses'  'Nothing is more memorable than a smell.  One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town.  Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.  Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once.  A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. 


Being a Marriage Celebrant one of the things I really wanted to do in Wellington was visit the 'Unveiled Exhibition.' This exhibition comprises 200 years of gorgeous wedding fashion, featuring dresses from one of the world’s most superb collections - the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Each beautiful gown or accessory held treasured memories both personally, for their original owners and from the historical fashions point of view. 


They also evoked special childhood memories for me as, from an early age, I was taken to the Victoria and Albert Museum, along with all the other London Museums and Art Galleries by my father, my Papa. My love of history and art was conceived during those visits and blossomed and flourished into a an inquiring passion to know more. I would squirrel away each experience in my memory banks to be re-awakened at a later date.


'Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us,' wrote Oscar Wilde, in his wonderfully witty and memorable play 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' and how true that is. Particularly when someone we love dies, for nothing not even death can destroy the many  memories made across the years or the love enfolded in them.


Mind you, I do find I am getting a tad forgetful sometimes these days but when I came across these wise words by Friedrich Nietzsche I felt  much better - 'The existence of forgetting has never been proved:  We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.'  


When my husband died memories swirled around me, they took me on a roller coaster ride of grief ridden emotions and feelings. Each memory was bitter sweet - a bitter sweet comfort to wrap myself in. Music would and still does of course bring particular memories into sharp focus but the pain of loss is bearable now.

A roller coaster ride of grief ridden
emotions and feelings

Today I took a ceremony to honour and celebrate the life of the father of some close friends of mine and memories filled the funeral chapel with the warmth of love and light evoking much laughter as well as the tears. Each memory was filled with love and love over-arched every word that was spoken. 

Writer Thornton Wilder said it all when he wrote 'there is a land of the living and a land of the dead - and the bridge is love.' I think we could add 'memory' to that bridge for it's our ability to use our memory to remember and bring to life our loved ones who have died, that somehow makes grief more bearable over time. Like the audio-visual presentation that are shown in so many life celebrations today we are able to play a slide show of memories in our minds.

However I discovered in my grief journey that life goes on and there comes a time when we all have to move on too. However I was able to do this knowing that my store of memories was always there when evoked or when I chose to delve into them.

The 19th. century Christian writer Margaret Fairless Barber expresses it so well in her book  of meditations entitled, 'The Roadmender'  - 'To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.'

'To look back for a while
is to refresh the eye'

I enjoy looking back through the memory banks of my mind back but my focus is always on the future for that's where my journey of life is taking me and that's what makes my life so exciting.