Memories

 

Words of comfort offered over my brother's death included someone advising me to take time to mull over the good memories. Since I often find it hard what to say when someone I know loses someone they care about, I've filed this phrase away for future use with deep appreciation at the thought given me. 

The problem with bringing out my good memories of playing ping pong on the porch or croquet and badminton in the yard, are dimmed by neutral or negative memories. I'm sure he would counter me, recounting the time I ate his last cupcake after I told about his knocking me down the stairs with a suitcase.

As adults things were better. We would talk at family meals although he thinking W was too liberal and me a leftie. Politics was an area we never agreed on. 

We handled my mother's dying and settlement of her estate not just with ease but total teamwork. 

We even shared some meals between ourselves although when I spoke French to a waiter, he wanted me to speak English. 

But there's a memory that I'm now in possession of alone -- the house we grew up in has been replaced with another. There's no one else left that will be able to talk about Saturday nights when we all sat at the round maple table to play games. No one else remembers the china closet that covered one dining room wall, or where we put the Christmas tree.  Forgotten is how Uncle Bill would fix the TV when a tube blew. How we did jigsaw puzzles during blizzards and school was cancelled and where the puzzles were kept in the linen closet over the stairs. 

It's not that these memories belong in history books or even in memoirs. We were just a family living on a piece of land that once housed indians. My mother used to find arrowheads when she was a child. As a teenager three of my friends and I thought we should find bones and dug up a mound. We didn't.

All of us live on a planet that has existed for zillion of years and humans have occupied the area for a far shorter time. Each life is a speck. Probably each human thought there time occupying the space was important, and they probably were to others living at the same time.

Being less philosophical about it all, I will always regret that my brother and I didn't have a better relationship. Over the past few years, I did make overtures to which he didn't respond. He could be funny, intelligent (eliminating his attitude toward W) and he was a great cook. I have no idea what he thought of me. 

Regrets are worthless. The past cannot be undone. 

From an indian arrow that has to be from the 1500s to the high tech equipment that exists in the house that replaced our house, we are all specks with little significance in the vast and complex universe. I think of Shakespeare who said, "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 

Still, while I'm here, I want my speck to have value to others as others have value to me if only for a nanosecond in the universe. I don't want any more regrets.