Our Lady of Sorrows, Pray for Me ... and My Memory

I see it's been awhile since I posted here. And on today, the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, I both want to post and don't want to post. Why the reluctance ... ? I think there's a big part of me that just plain doesn't want to think at all these days. Yet if I don't I am really afraid of what my memory will do to me ... and to my remembrance of my Mother.

Historically, my Memory really has been what most folks would consider, well, Bad. There's a reason for this I think. Not to go into details, but there were some very traumatic things that happened to me ... and to our family ... when I was very young. Different children react differently to early trauma. This child ... me at a very young age ... developed a highly selective memory that simply tended to block out any memory associated with Pain. No complaints here: I have no doubt that my Memory did yeoman's work in protecting me from things when I was very young. Fair enough. Alas, my Memory ... especially my ability to "encode" ... has remained a real challenge in general, and a special challenge in the face of Pain in particular.

Now in the case of my Mom ... there have been, it's true, many Painful Memories associated with her over the past (say) 6 months or year, when her decline really began. But ... I do *not* want to lose these Memories. These may be Painful, but they are also so, so, so precious to me. The Memory even of how my dead mother looked, and how her hair felt in my fingers, and how her hands felt in my hands, and how smooth her skin was to my touch, in the hour or so from 5:45 AM on Sept 22 - when she died - until her body was taken away a few hours later -- these memories contain much Pain, but also much that is so very, very good I think ... my real physical Good Bye and last physical experience of my dear, dear, dear Mother. I do not want to lose such memories. Yet my Memory is "trained" from childhood to do exactly that.

Hence both my scrambling to take pictures of things, and get together new picture albums to keep these pictures, and to write about these things ... on the one hand ... and my frequent emotional inability bordering on paralysis preventing me from even touching these things over the past few weeks.

Just got to find a way to move forward with memorializing these things even in the face of my dear but misguided training in memory avoidance.