Grieving as an Impediment to Historical Accuracy

Within a few months after my mother died I started to worry that I was losing her in additional ways beyond the enormity of her death.  Memory is a fluid medium, subject to reinterpretation, changes of focus, and loss of detail.  Memories carry meaning and sentiment but that sentiment is dulled each time the memory is replayed.  It has been thirty-eight years since her death and I greatly question whether my memories, my heavily reworked and rerecorded memories, are authentic anymore.  

From time to time some token from the past manifests itself.  Most recently it was a large business envelope full of receipts and dated 1982 that I received in a box from my brother shortly before my father's death.  Sometimes patterns emerge out of the past.  Sometimes realizations come to me.  In this case I realized that the envelope had been a work in progress, a progress that was interrupted by my mother's diagnosis of lung cancer in late 1982.  She died in early 1983.

It was a message from the past that had lain in a drawer rarely touched.  After thirty-eight years my grief was made fresh, possibly shared with someone who could never discard an object that unintentionally became filled with powerful emotions.  It became a memento of a life shared for thirty-eight, then held in a drawer for thirty-eight years of separation.  A life interrupted.

Yes, I still remember essential details about my mother.  I am lately surrounded by her images, images now enriched by an adult's perception of what they mean.  If I have it wrong it is way too late to change or fix my memories now.