He Wanted Her Remembered

One lives a life that is full of accomplishments and failures, high points and low. For most of us no matter how long we live very shortly after we pass we are forgotten and it is as though we had never lived, with the only remembrances, a cemetery plot with a stone that has our name and a few short references. He was feeling that this was happening to her. Her birthday was coming up in a very short time as was the day that she died only a month later with seventy-two years passing in between those two events. Her life was really two lives, one before she contacted her illness that lasted fifty-seven years and one after diagnoses of her progressive illness that lasted fifteen years. He felt she was fading out of the collective recollection of those who were close to her, who loved her and she loved back. He hated the idea that she was becoming irrelevant while he was still alive yet he couldn't really fault those who were forgetting her or whose recollection of her was becoming hazy and all they knew was her last fifteen years of life.

He realized that even he who loved her and still did, was starting to forget the things that were her very essence. He was forgetting her very fragrance. Each of us has a certain smell, some odious some a sweet fragrance, about them. He remembered she had a fragrance about her that he loved yet he couldn't remember the exact aroma itself. She was super intelligent. When she was in High School she got great grades, was honor English, and graduated with the chance of a college scholarship but couldn't go as she had to get a job and help out her family. She was a successful, Gal Friday, something that is called Executive Assistant these days. She spoke three languages fluently and had command of another. She had physical beauty to the extent that she was gorgeous and caught all the guys eyes. She had a laugh that lit up the room. She was a top notch dancer. She really didn't sweat, she glowed, REALLY. When she got older she ran a house that included her brood of seven children and all their friends. Her legs that used to catch all the guys eyes while she danced developed varicose veins because of carrying seven children in eight years. She was vain enough to voice displeasure over the viscosity but she wouldn't trade any of her children to get those smooth legs again. Later in life she returned to college to get her AA degree, graduated with honors. She was all these things and more.

Her last fifteen years on this earth is what many will remember about her, especially her grandchildren as that is all they really know about her through their personal experience. She was in a slow but steady physical and mental decline. Her behavior was becoming erratic as first her memory declined until she could no longer know who she or the people around her were. Finally she had to be placed in a nursing home where her physical health declined in the later years to a degree that she was wheel chair bound. At the end she was in a Wheel Chair that was more like a bed, she couldn't speak, eat or move. The dancing genius lasted only a few years in the Nursing home. In the beginning, the staff would tell him when he came to visit, that at exercise time they did some dancing and she "still had the moves". But at her end she was immobile and struck dumb not even being able to laugh yet somehow she still lit up the room as he wheeled her in. Her beautiful fragrance degenerated at times into noxious smells emanating from her declining body that once was the goal of every guy she met to hold.

He wanted her remembered, especially by the grandchildren but not only the declining days. Yet who was left that could describe her beautiful, vivacious life and person she was for the first fifty-seven years. He wanted, the grandchildren especially, to remember her as smiling, smelling sweetly, intelligent and full of laughter, a person who accomplished great things in her life time albeit not great enough for the world to notice, but he was sure that God took notice and somewhere she was dancing, laughing and having the time of her life.