We Can Think About and Remember People Any Way We Want

“Dead people have germs.” 

When their father told his daughters to “kiss Mother goodbye,” my then 7-year-old mother refused, while her 5-year-old sister complied. 

Leaning against the doorframe, observing her sister do as she was told––kiss their mother goodbye––my mother said to her sister, “Dead people have germs.” 

Those spoken words hung in the air and lodged in my aunt’s memory up to the time she died at age 83. 

Auntie must have repeated this story to me a hundred times. 

And I wondered what picture of her 26-year-old mother who had died so suddenly had stuck in the memory of my 5-year-old aunt?

Peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, their young mother left behind 3 girls, ages 7, 5, and 16-months-old.

Back to the Future

Contemplating a recent visit to see friends I had not seen in years, older friends who have aged in ways I could not imagine or foresee, my first thought, “I want to remember them as they were.” 

The next thought displaced the former. You can think about and remember them any way you want.

How do I remember people I loved, those who exit the stage while my life story continues?

Up Close and Personal

My mother would not let me attend my sister’s or my dad’s funeral. Their deaths were separated by less than 3 months.

Mom insisted on closed caskets. Said she didn’t want that last image to be the way I remembered them. She also believed viewing the dead bodies was a kind of intruding––she said, “like watching those sleeping who wished not to be disturbed.” 

Images of my younger sister, Reneé, include her skinny legs, skinned knees, and wispy blond hair, the person who called me “my Carol.”  

How can I ever forget the last time Renée laid down to sleep next to me on a pallet of quilts . . . 17 days after her seventh birthday? Scooped up, taken to the hospital, and before dawn’s early light, she was gone from my life forever.

Friends are friends forever . . .

Thinking about Reneé made me recall images of my closest friend, who died in May 2006. Her birthday coming up on November 11 reminds me not only of her untimely departure, but also of life experiences I wish we could share.

Racing from another town, I knew the mortician had received instruction to open the casket just for me, making me the last person to see my friend’s mortal body. Speaking to her as if she could hear me, I placed something in her hand.

The last thing I would have thought about was germs. 

I remember how this friend looked, but that’s not how I choose to think of her. Much as I dreaded the thought of her being gone from my life––leaving a hole like a meteor crater––seeing her lifeless body helped me accept the finality of her unforeseeable departure. 

She did not look dreadful as I might have imagined. Still, this is not how I remember her.

As I was leaving, the guy at the funeral home said, “People have told me, when she was young she was the prettiest girl in town.”

Muttering, I said, “She was. She was.”

Beautiful inside and out

My friend came to the studio when I was taking photography classes, agreeing to be my subject for portrait class.

I recall my friend’s beauty, yes. But her laughter, the pleasure she derived in surprising my family and me with her homemade chocolate pie, endless walks around the high school track, and conversations in the bleachers while watching football games rise exceeding abundantly above her physical attractiveness.

I remember the movies we saw together in theaters, complete with popcorn and treats. She always got either Hot Tamales, Milk Duds, or a Butterfinger at the concessions and then after eating, she promptly fell asleep. Discussion after the movie, she insisted she had not missed a thing.

I miss her to this day and think of all she has missed too.

These images and others elevate the memories we made together and displace the image of acute unhappiness that overshadowed the last few years of her life. 

Trauma, Unhappiness, and Time-Softened Images

Thinking of my friend’s unhappiness brings to mind my mother’s sorrows accumulated throughout her life––layers of unhappiness––trauma, beginning with her mother’s death when she was a young child.

Like my friend, my mother died miles away from where I lived at the time. I saw Mom for the last time several weeks before her departure. She was in pain. She hated where she was forced to live, yet she had settled on reasons to be grateful for her life as well. A balance to the universe unfolded before my eyes, softening the thought of leaving.

Sitting in a nursing home bed, Mom asked me to hand her purse to her––the purse holding the remainder of her worldly possessions. Asked me to cut her toenails. Hesitating, the thought flashed, How many times must she have cut my toenails?

But that’s not how I see my mom now. I remember her the way pictures capture her youth, her winsomeness, her hopefulness.

I recall her sense of humor and the way her eyes squeezed shut as she cracked up, then coughed––a “coughing fit” she would say––trying to catch her breath when she laughed so hard she cried, wiping tears with a Kleenex, leaning toward the floor as if she had dropped something, then shaking her head as if seeing a replay of what had just happened or the joke we shared. Which made her start laughing again.

I remember countless car trips, the last being when she and I drove a thousand miles, “two mere women,” she said, traveling in a car that appeared as subject to breakdown as a covered wagon must have been for pioneers moving westward. My mother was a gypsy. Mode of transportation, we looked like the “Grapes of Wrath.” Her words, not mine.

Remembering, I could bring up images of when she had been drinking, of the terror I felt as a child when she turned her laser beam of accusation on me, but I choose not to. While writing a memoir about my childhood, empathy and sorrow blanket feelings that could have held me hostage.

I can remember my mother any way I want.  

Whether seeing in your mind’s eye someone who is still living or remembering someone who died, you and I get to decide what emotions to wrap around the memories, how to carry in our hearts the way people make, or made us feel. 

While alive, the body simply contains and carries the actual person inside, as well as about a 40 trillion germs. [1] The soul of a person lives on in the memory of those who loved them. 

And you can think about any and every precious soul who touched your life any way you want.

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-human-microbiome-project-defines-normal-bacterial-makeup-body

https://www.sciencealert.com/how-many-bacteria-cells-outnumber-human-cells-microbiome-science