Photographic Memory

A Facebook friend just posted about not knowing what to do with a lot of old memorabilia left behind by the long ago owners of a house she purchased. I guess she'd ignored the stuff as long as she could and is now dealing with it. But in the thread someone mentioned rescuing photo albums from the trash of a seniors' residence and it put me in mind of my mother, who, not long after moving in threw all her old photo albums in the laundry room trash of her seniors' residence.

Fortunately, another resident saw them and took them out again and suggested to my mother that she might not want to throw them out.

So my mother, not wanting to interact any more than necessary with another resident, took them back and stuck them in the closet, where they remained until we cleaned out her apartment after she had to move into the nursing home.

But I remember on one visit, when she was in the hospital recovering from a fall, and I was staying in her apartment, I decided to look through her photo albums. They were of her travels, and I was shortly into my look-through when I came across a photo of her staring at the camera. And I stared back at that person staring at the camera because suddenly, I had no idea who she was.

Who. The. Fuck. Are. You.

It was a quite a discovery for me, that I really had no idea who my mother was outside the context of me, myself and I. She was absolutely a stranger, that woman in the photo, staring at the camera. So I looked at more photos and, sure enough, not a trace of my mother. Just some stranger in Hawaii. Or Australia. Or Greece.

And she'd thrown out the photo albums not because she was depressed, although she was, but because she couldn't see the photos anymore. She was losing her eyesight. Besides, I'd never once known her to look at a photo album even though she made many of them. I used to pour over them when I was a kid because I loved those old photos of her as a WREN or WAC or whichever it was. She always looked to be having fun.

Anyway, my point is, I have no idea where those photo albums are now. And although I'm really glad I saw that photo, and so can live on knowing that we never really know our mothers, I'm gladder still that I don't have responsibility for storing them - or not.

Because I'm pretty sure the resident who handed them back to my mother has passed on now and I can't just knock on her door and hand them back.