Capturing the Memories – Long Read – Guest Author, Fraser

Just before Christmas 2022, my aunt, my mother’s younger sister passed away. She’d celebrated her 90^th birthday 3 weeks before and died peacefully with one of her children at her bedside. She survived my mother by 5 years and her husband by 11 years.

It was not a surprise as she’d been in ill health for some time and her passing was thankfully dignified and without drama. She died in her own bed in her own home and left this world with grace. Yet it left me feeling unbelievably sad, as she was the last link to that generation of my mother’s family, and all those memories and all that experience had, with a resounding air of finality, gone. 

It made me think of loss, legacy and missed opportunities, and how little we had recorded for posterity with regards to the history of our family. I never knew a grandfather – my father’s father died during WWII (not as a result of it) and my mother’s father died just before my brother was born in 1959. My paternal grandmother also died during the war which only left my maternal grandmother, a resounding extrovert who loved a gin, a Player’s number 6 and ‘a bit of a chat.’ Yet my memories of her are sketchy as she died in 1971 when I was 9 years old. I remember her scratchy chin when she kissed me goodnight and her resounding laugh (enforced by my memory of finding her once on the loo) yet I don’t recall what her voice was like or how she walked or what colour her eyes were. There are photographs of course, but no record of things like how she felt about life, what her politics were, or what books she liked to read. With both my parents and my aunt gone, now I’ll never know. 

My paternal grandfather was a master cooper, a barrel maker, and I still have many of the tools he used throughout his working life, and these are a tangible connection to a man I never met. There are one or two stories about him I know of, like how he was invalided out of the Royal Engineers during WWI when a gun carriage ran over his foot (if he hadn’t been invalided out, he’d have been at the Somme), but they are few and far between. Maybe other stories were told to me as child and I’ve forgotten them, but how I wish they were written down. My sister-in-law has done an excellent job of researching our family tree, so I know where my grandparents were born and who their parents were and so on down the line, but it doesn’t tell me what they were like. 

Two generations after me have the advantage of social media and numerous ways of recording life events for posterity. An iPhone can capture whole conversations and events in detail and they can be stored forever in ‘The Cloud.’ I had numerous conversations with my father about his family, but can remember so little of what he told me. I recall snippets  – he once told me how all his cousins were musical – but those conversations are lost in the mist of time and there’s no way to retrieve them. I wish now that I’d written them down or recorded them.

It’s only after my parents and their families have all gone that I’ve now realised how important it is to keep those family memories and stories alive. Mr father once said to me that your loved ones never really die, they’re always with you in your mind. That’s certainly true, but how much sharper would the memories be if there was a permanent record of their voices and their laughs. My dad died 17 years ago this year, my mum 5 years ago –  I miss them every day, and if I hear certain pieces of music that reminds me of them, I can’t hold back the tears. I remember my mum’s laugh well, my dad’s less so, and my fear is that the older I get the less distinct those memories will become. It’s a truism that you don’t miss what you have until it’s gone, and I’ll always regret not taking more time to preserve the many memories I have of my mum and dad and their families.