A to Z blogging challenge: A is for Absent

Today is the first day of the A to Z blogging challenge.  This fun challenge invites people across the blogosphere, whatever their subject matter, to blog every day for 26 days (or fewer, if you just can't come up with something for the letter X).  

I have a lot of people absent from my life:  my father, my mother, my brother, the aunt who helped raise me, my grandparents (none of whom I knew), the grand-aunt who served as my grandmother by her and her husband's adoption of my mother within the family, my best friend in high school, my in-laws, favorite uncles and aunts, cousins, and more.  Our younger daughter, who is 53 years old, has cancer.  She is in remission for now, but it's probably inevitable that she will predecease me and my husband.  So many losses . . . so many memories.

In the Simon & Garfunkel song "Old Friends," songwriter Paul Simon reminds us:  ". . . Preserve your memories; they're all that's left you."

Photographs are a fine way to preserve our memories.   Like this one of me and our younger daughter giving our dog Diamond a bath back in the 1980s.  Unfortunately, our daughter's head is behind the dog!  Not only does this spark a great memory of our younger daughter and our wonderful dog, but also of the house where we lived at the time, a house we loved, and lost in the economic disaster that befell us in the 1980s.  Another loss . . .

In doing genealogy, we document and lend permanence to memories.  My father died when I had just turned seven years old, and it is through genealogy that I have come to know him better.  Researching his Navy career, and his activities after he got out of the Navy after World War II, has given me a great deal of knowledge about his life.  

Family stories give us access to memories, too -- the memories of other people that are given to us in stories.  In our retelling of them, we claim them as memories.  They're not direct memories of our own experience, but we remember our family by these stories.  They connect us to our ancestors.

Preserve your memories; they're all that's left you.