In Living Memory

 

It was a simple scrap of paper.

We were in her bedroom. I was looking through bags that hadn’t been touched in ages, pulling out odds and ends. She was still well enough to sit in the armchair and watch me through shallow breaths. Her lungs had been filling up with fluid since April, maybe March.

She’d saved all sorts of things over the years. Notebooks, old clothes, newspaper clippings. And this one little scene I’d scribbled in a notepad so long ago, doubtless in a moment of inspiration. I’d forgotten all about it, hadn’t thought of that character in years. But she’d kept it.

Bemused, I showed it to her. She looked back at me steadily.

“You don’t write anymore,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say.

I had written, you understand. A few blog posts here and there, long paragraphs in online forums. Thoughts about the pandemic, about civil unrest, about a game I’d been playing and the feelings it evoked. But I’d also been busy with work and personal problems and managing my own emotions. This year I no longer wrote most nights, not even for weeks at a time. I hadn't opened my fantasy novel in months. The lockdown, my birthday, Mother’s Day. Calendar pages racing by, counting down the time we had left.

She passed away six days later.

***

It’s been nearly two months now since my mom died. We’ve passed the forty-day mark, returning to our normal routines. We’ve begun to move on. This slow forgetting, it bothers me. I don’t want to leave her in the past. And yet I must. The past isn’t meant to be lived in.

My mom used to tell me about my ancestors. Our Kadazan heritage with some Chinese blood mixed in, and my father’s biological mother back in the US; she compiled part of my grandfather’s memoirs from World War II. I was never interested when I was younger. It was all so far in the past, after all. But now that she’s gone, it hits me that this is how my children (when I have them) will know her: through the stories I tell them. They won’t have anything else.

That phrase, in living memory. Now I understand how much it means. At what point is someone gone forever? When everyone who ever knew them is gone too?

You could say that death is the greatest motivator of all. What is the building of a legacy if not the desire to leave something behind? Is it because we know how little anything lasts? We live our fragile lives and then it’s over. The people that we were, the memories that we cherished. All those joys and loved ones and struggles and sorrows. It hits me now, so horribly real: this is what will happen to my mother. And to me someday. It will happen to you too. We will all be forgotten.

It’s funny. Until this point in my life, the present was always better than what came before. I rarely looked back and longed for the good old days. Now I do.

I want so desperately for her life to mean something.

***

I went to a local performing arts event the other day. It was inspiring, all the different performances and the raw emotions on display. Something else that spoke to me, though, was advice to the performers from an audience member afterward. A long-time participant in the local arts scene himself, he had this to say: don’t stop. Someday you’ll get to a point where you’re tired and wonder why you’re doing this. You’ll feel like you need a break from it all. And the people who walk away, sometimes they don’t come back.  

I felt that in my soul.

Sometimes I get tired, depressed, unmotivated. I feel like nothing I do makes a difference. But she was a writer herself. She wouldn’t have wanted me to stop. Not when there are experiences to share and stories to be told.

Perhaps this, then, is her legacy. Here I am, still trying to shape my thoughts and feelings into a form that others can understand. I’ve always wanted to inspire, to share what little wisdom I can. To talk about the things that matter.

I still remember walking down the road to the town library with my mom as a little boy, under autumn leaves and a New England sky; and all the other libraries since. All the years we went for lunch at a pizza place that shut down back in March due to the pandemic. Fitting enough that I’ll never go back. That time we waded in the ocean and watched the sun set over the islands. Going to the movies, walking through the forest, flying halfway around the world and back. All the travels and adventures and memories, happy and poignant and bittersweet.

All the ways I can try to put my love for her into words.