It is an invisible aspect of our brains and personalities. No one can see it or touch it.

Who do you need to reconnect with, before it is too late?

What is it?

Memory. What a precious gift and part of our lives! It is often something we don’t really fully appreciate and cherish until it is gone or fading.

I hope I can forever remember and value the memories we made this past Memorial Day weekend. We volunteered to take care of one of my husband’s aging aunts so her regular caretaker, her daughter and family, could go camping over the weekend as they have done for many years. I will call this aunt “Lydia” to preserve some privacy.

Lydia is a warm and loving person who hosted my husband many weekends as a young adult when he would visit his cousin (her son) years ago. They would hang out and ride bikes and of course Lydia fed him many meals. She had also hosted my husband and me from time to time after we got married. She and my husband shared a love of old fashioned salted herring which we finally learned how to prepare from her by sharing a couple of “salt fish” dinners in the last couple of years.

As my father also did, Lydia suffers from diabetes and increasing dementia. I had never given Dad a shot but Lydia needed help with that and so I learned to give a shot and test blood. That was by far the most difficult part, pricking her for the blood tests, mainly because it was very hard to get any blood out of her worn fingers.

We soon saw that Lydia couldn’t walk well enough to even go to church with us, so I stayed home to cook dinner for her and some other relatives who were coming to share that day. I was reminded of how tied down people are who care for aging parents or other relatives, and how much they need a break.

Why do I share all this? Because in our time together that weekend, Lydia gave me a wonderful, precious gift that I plan to cherish forever.

Somewhat out of the blue, when everyone else was gone and it was just she and I having lunch, she observed, “Stuart is like his mother.” My ears perked up. I never had the privilege of knowing his mother (her sister), as she died about two years before I ever met him. I said, “Oh really?”

“Yes. He is kind and outgoing,” she said simply.

Lydia had pegged his finer qualities dead on, and it reminded me of two of the reasons I married him. Sometimes we forget those original qualities in the stress and busyness of family and married life.

This insight from his aunt is all the more poignant now. Shortly after we took care of Lydia for the weekend, the family needed to find full time care for her. She could no longer stay by herself as she had been doing three days a week. Going to the adult day care center five days a week would have just been too much exhaustion and stress for the family and for Lydia, who had to get up at 5 a.m. in order to get ready and make it to daycare so her daughter could get to work on time. (Getting dressed and everything takes so much longer with dementia.) So Lydia is now in a nursing home and is very, very confused. When we visited recently, I think she knew that she should know us, but could not say our names or recognize us. Nor could she speak a coherent sentence. This much change in just six weeks.

And that’s why I prize Lydia’s gift to me: words of insight about my husband. I don’t know if we’ll ever hear coherent words from her again. And why I newly treasure the gift of memory.

Who do you need to reconnect with, before it is too late? And remember to thank God for the gift of a clear mind.