My Mom turned 80 last Saturday. A sister-in-law's family celebrated her Mom's 80th the month before and did a really neat present. They also have a huge family so they collected 80 memories and put them in a jar for the Mom to take out one a day and read.
We recreated the idea with a few switches. Mom and Charlie are on a cruise, and since we did not plan ahead, we have to electronically get it to the ship. We did collect 80 and we did get it delivered to her on the boat by her birthday. We did not tell Mom to only read one a day. That would be really hard to do!
I don't know about you, but I don't really NEED anything. This idea to collect memories might be nice for other than major birthdays. What if yearly on a birthday we remembered that person by sharing a memory?
The interesting thing about my siblings was the different memories the older kids had from the younger kids. It is also interesting to see how we remembered the same thing differently. There were a few duplicate memories.
I would have liked to be with Mom on her special day but I was there with her by email and by having sent the memories along. I also had memories of Dad come up during the collection. I wish I had been able to send them to him while he was alive.
In the Unitarian Universalist tradition we have memorial services, and have a part of the service where stories are told about the deceased. I think it is a shame to wait until someone has died to tell the stories and relate memories. May there be a few more major birthdays, that we can send Mom more memories.
1 comment:
Thanks for sharing this great idea. I especially like the notion of how the storiea differed from an age pwrspective.
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