Matthew's Birthday

It’s funny how some dates have meaning as soon as they cross your mind. Birthdays and anniversaries of people and events significant in your life and those holidays celebrated for all of our lives come to mind.

Today is the birthday of a dear friend. For weeks as I looked at the calendar I was mindful that his day of birth was soon approaching. I considered buying a card and putting it in the post, but never found the appropriate sentiments. So the task was left undone and a last minute email was all I could manage this year.

This is his 53rd year. I have only known him for about 38 of those years, though many have been from a distance. There were about 5 years where he was closer than anyone else, aside from my parents and siblings. But for 33 years he has been in another state and we share occasional communication, mostly emails or holiday cards.

So why with such limited contact can someone remain so strongly rooted in ones heart and mind after all these years? So much so as to have a date on the calendar instantly evoke their image. An image assuredly out of date and locked in youthful memories.

Obviously it’s love that binds these memories of our dearest into the book of our lives. It matters not that they are long gone from our lives, whether by choice or the grave, we remember them always, or at least so long as the grey matter continues to respond.

I say that as I see my Mother slip into memory loss at the age of 76. It seems Alzheimer’s disease runs on her Father’s side of the family. Her sister Josephine and cousin Charlotte are both in advanced stages. Mother is being treated with the latest drug called Aricept and suffers mostly short term memory loss. She’s still pretty clear on her childhood, but hardly remembers her children’s childhood.

So given the family inclination to memory loss, how long will it be before my memories fade into the dust of history? If I write of my life, will I recall it when I read the stories once my memory is lost? Or will they seem stories about a stranger? The book “The Notebook”, later made into a movie with James Garner looking so much like my Father it made the movie doubly sad, addresses just this issue. He reads his wife stories she had written and she thought them to be beautiful stories about a lovely couple, not realizing she was the author and it was her own life.

I’ve also learned the older you get the more you wish you knew more of your own family history. And once the elders are gone most of the stories go with them to the grave. As a genealogist I’ve had some success at digging out mysteries and some answers to questions of why. But they are at best hunches. So I write some of my history just in case my daughter wonders someday. She’s into history, but just doesn’t have much time for it in her life right now.

It rained most of the day. So unusual for here. It gave me time to sit and reflect.