KristyWes

Remembering Helen

She had four older siblings (one of which was my grandmother) and four younger siblings – the very middle of a set of nine. They grew up during the Depression – nine mouths to feed when food was scarce – raised alone by their mother, after their father ran off to do whatever it was men ran off to do at that time.

Her oldest brother left, too, years later, when my mom was a baby; he went west after the war and never returned east. She lost her sisters: some too young and some in later years, late in life. Then her younger brothers passed, and Helen – the middler – remained, alone of the nine.

She had red hair – whether by genetics or by choice, I’m not sure, but as far back as I can remember it was red, and she kept it red until recently, though pushing ninety years old.

The closest I’ve come to seeing a ghost was when I saw Helen at a family wedding. It was a year or two after my grandmother passed away, and suddenly there she was - my grandmother - standing in front of me. After a moment of shock, I registered the red hair and realized that no, this was Helen – she shared my Mimi’s face, but the signature hair color was all her own.

My mom would call her “a special lady” with fondness and a smile; my uncle would describe her as “a tough old bird” and he meant it with respect. He got a kick out of her. When he visited her in the hospital last year, following serious surgery, he asked if he could get her anything and she replied, “Yeah, get me a beer.”

Come to think of it, the last time I saw Helen she was sitting across from me at the kitchen table that had once belonged to my grandmother, drinking a beer.

Are these, then, my only salient memories of this woman, my great-aunt? It unnerves me a little, to think that I am carrying forward not 88 years worth of remembered struggles and successes, not knowledge of her character or disposition, not stories of what she did during the war or what she thought of Elvis & Kennedy, but rather only…the image of a beer-drinking red-head.

I was about to get all dramatic, bemoaning memories lost to time and the fleeting, transient nature of our personal experiences in the annals of human history and all that jazz. Those lamentations probably stem as much from fear that memories of my own life will one day be lost, as from my uneasiness over missing memories of Helen. But while it’s true that our lives on earth are fleeting, our memories & the minutiae of our lives are not really ever lost, are they?

I may have only been given the beer-drinking red-head image of my aunt to carry forward, but another niece may know a story of Helen’s first job and first car, and her son knows what kind of mother she was, and someone else somewhere else remembers her sense of humor. Certain pieces of our lives – some big, some small – are deposited in the minds of those around us to carry forward. Perhaps a bigger comfort, though, comes in knowing that not one detail of our life is ever lost, but is instead collected, in a treasured sum total, in the loving mind of God.