sept. 9 marked 22 years since my grandfather has been gone and i didn't even light a candle, as my grandmother always did. everyone in my family has different views of my grandfather. he was a soldier, a veteran and a strict man. yet, i remember him as the man who sprinkled me with sugar and told me that I'd be sweet forever. i remember bringing him bread to the hospital. i remember "tetya motya" and the red calendar pages. on a recent family trip, i learned things about my grandfather that i didn't know before. my memories of him remain unchanged.
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Yesterday was 6 months since my grandfather passed, and until reading this post i didnt even remember. I think of him everyday, and maybe dont want to remember how long hes been gone cause it already seems like a lifetime. I am glad you have your memories with your grandfather, as few as they are, and knowing how you feel about him i just want to say one thing- never listen to anyone about how they view other people because no one person is the same to everyone, you know what you feel, and why you feel it, thats all that matters- now was that not the longest run on sentence on this blog?
ReplyDeletep.s. so little and already pointing in the right direction...
ReplyDelete"Fortune, fame
ReplyDeleteMirror vain
Gone insane
But the memory remains"
- Metallica
Memories are so interesting especially since several people can remember the same person or the same event in so many drastically different ways.
When a person passes away a much more interesting phenomenon occurs, in most cases in the time after the loss, people will remember the fondest stories and warmest memories and sometimes even make that person a saint, but as time moves on and people start to forget or move on, the other memories come into play some that paint a very different picture of the person who is gone.
What I'm getting at is this, if you have fond memories of a person close to you who is no longer with you don't let anyone try to change them for you. No one is perfect we have all done things that we are not proud of, however in most cases we still did a lot of things right and thats something to remember.
In regards to the picture in which by the way I can clearly see the father/son resemblance. Today we all have thousands of pictures, birthday pictures, vacations, outings and so on. Some pictures are good, some are bad but none of them ever show the bad times or the times we did something that we shouldn't have because those are never the moments that we want to remember.
Forgot to sign up for updates.
ReplyDeleteNow, I'm pissed, I just wrote an essay in response to your wonderful comments and it didn't post!!!!
ReplyDeleteSo here we go again. . .
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I'm such a comment whore, not to be mistaken for a common whore :-)
On a serious note . . . I forgot everything I wrote . . .
The opening line of one of my favorite movies, Great Expectations, is "I'm not going to tell the story the way it happened, I'm going to tell it the way I remember it." We all remember things that we want to remember and sometimes those that we want to forget. Our memory works in interesting ways and usually in the extremes.
The authors Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Kraus (both discussed in prior posts) use a very interesting technique in their writing. They use three voices to describe the same story. As I've always said, "there's his side, her side, and the truth." The problem is that the way we see "truth" is very different from the way someone else sees the same "truth."
The true talent of photography is to freeze a point in time. Whether it's a child stumbling, a bride screaming, a groom crying, a bird flying or a wave crashing, it's hitting the shutter at that split second to capture the emotion of that moment. We don't normally carry a camera to a funeral or at the time that a friend goes through a breakup or a child falls of his bike for the first time. The images that become engraved in our minds are stronger and more vivid than any photograph ever taken. For interesting photography (including hospitals and funerals) check out the work of Annie Liebovitz.
My previous response was a lot better, but this will have to do as I have to get back to work.
Thanks for the response, I would respond with something intelligent but I am also at work and besides having a million things to do I have also developed a minor writers block at least for the response to this post. Perhaps we should discuss a new topic, if only there was one :)
ReplyDeleteIs that a hint? :-)
ReplyDelete