On 18 September 2021 I posted:
Well this is beginning to resemble a wild strawberry plant, which is handy because that is what it is! It was designed by my nephew MaxTheHuman, making this a properly transgenerational project, inspired and dedicated to my Mum.
I’ve been thinking of memory a lot as I’ve been stabbing, as you might expect, given Mum has Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia. Actually I’ve been thinking about how we value memories. I’ve always loved stories of my parents’ pasts, their remembered histories. Dad, who was born in Berlin in 1920 never really spoke much of his until he was in his 90s. But what a life!
But Mum. I feel like Mum’s stories, her life, runs through me like it’s my own lifeblood. I’ve known some of her stories as long as I’ve known my own.
And the stories, the memories, have felt like treasure, like my own super power too.
Recently I found a journal that Gran wrote over a 6 week journey from Sandefjord to Cape Town in a whaling ship in 1954. It’s fascinating. And I treasure it. It fits alongside Mum’s stories, but isn’t the actual memories. Mum’s sister Astri was on the same journey and will have different memories of it. I treasure the story, but have no memory of it, of course.
Now, as time passes, it has felt like Mum is diminishing, not just physically, but as she loses her memories and memory she loses something of herself.
And I wondered about this. Why do I consider her less than she was? She still had the same life, still enjoyed the same experiences. It’s only because I value MEMORY so much that I have been seeing Mum as being less of herself. I need to value the experience and the person who had it more than the memory.
Mum is still remarkable. She is living with dementia and I am grieving for the relationship we had, but I embrace our new relationship. It’s not easy, but it is what it is.
Oh, and your bonus today is cheese and onion cornmeal muffins, just out of the oven.
Two years have passed since I wrote the above. And I’ve done a whole lot more thinking about memory and what we value. But that can wait for another day.
This weekend I was reminded that memory is not always straightforward.
The other day I was sitting here at my laptop when I heard The Captain come in from the garden with something of a commotion and a lot of swear words. I went through to the kitchen to discover he’d upset a wasps’ nest and had been stung… several wasps, of course, had followed him into the house. Pandemonium ensued.
After a while things when things calmed down, I felt a tickle on my upper lip and swished it away with the back of my hand, only to experience the searing pain of a wasp sting. Somehow I had inadvertently managed to separate the wasp from its sting, so all that venom pumped into my upper lip, giving the impression I’d spent a LOT on some lip plumping procedure. The pain was excruciating.
The first memory which this prompted was when I was a child and we were foraging in the woods. I was at the back of the Wolffe Pack, with Dad ambling along just ahead of me…. and he must have knocked a wasps’ nest. For they all rose up and stung ME as the nearest human! I screamed as we all ran back to the car; the car seemed to fill with wasps and I screamed some more. So of course I ended up with a wasp sting in my mouth (to add to others on my hands and the worst one, on my eyelid). This incident was forever after referred to as ‘that time Loïs had hysterics‘. I always added, ‘because I was being STUNG BY WASPS’.
That story has never left me, and is part of our family lore.
But another story came to mind, dragged from an older memory. Of a small child in the garden, being stung by a bee on her nose, before she was going to a party that afternoon. And, to reduce the pain, some blue ink was applied to the sting, so the small girl went to the party with a large, throbbing blue nose.
I have a feeling the small girl was Gran, and that it was Miss Wright, her governess, who applied the ink. But perhaps the small girl was Mum? It’s a story I remember being told when I was a child, perhaps to tell me how lucky I was that blue ink was not being applied to my stings? But now I have no idea who that child was. Somehow, I have such a vivid image of her in my mind, of a wicker chair in a sunny garden, and of roses in the flower bed.
I will never know now who she was, but I’m grateful for her… and for the story of that moment in her life that has lived on.
***
If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.
Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.
Shewolfinthevalley 
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