What Memories Can Be

FD Thornton

From a  single pinecone to ceramic sea turtles, to literally hundreds of seashells. My office is littered with memorabilia from 37 years of travel. My bride also saves every ticket stub and receipt from the different places we’ve went and stayed. It’s never much just bits and pieces of memories she collects so she doesn’t forget. Part of my wife’s disability has to do with memory. Where she cannot remember lists or tasks she needs to carry out. It also affects her mobility and cognitive function not through any born disability but instead from damage resulting from a high fever and possible a stroke.

So over the last 37 years, I’ve learned to tolerate the mementos and eventually embrace them. Often my kids wonder why I am so tolerant of her actions like her tantrums and frustrations. And why I don’t often “put my foot down” with her child-like request. I guess it’s because for so long I thought I could fix her. So I lashed out in frustration verbally abusing her and my family just as I had been. Some may think I just spoil her rotten and this is just my guilty conscience way of making amends. While that may be true, but as I work on myself and my past traumas. I’m also learning to give other’s the benefit of the doubt, just as I give myself.

So the memorabilia stays, if nothing else but as a simple reminder of what memories can be. When putting up with a bad behavior simple trinkets of apology just won’t do. It requires a wholesale reevaluation of yourself and your life choices. It requires forgiveness and making amends, while it also requires acceptance. So I look around the room at the silly little mixed matched bits and pieces of memory. Reminded that I myself suffer from limitations and that at some point I’ll be dependent on other’s help. So don’t stay upset with the intolerable instead be grateful for what you have and the hidden treasures it creates.