Cherish Memories but Don’t Yearn for Them

On a Saturday afternoon, I sat next to my maternal grandmother near the oval-shaped table in the kitchen of their small home. My mother grew up there with her parents and her three siblings.

Some years early, Grandma Dee (Delores) had suffered something like a stroke that confined her to a wheelchair. Additionally, one of her hands was frozen with her fingers mostly extended. The other hand with her fingers mostly curled toward her palm. If I massaged her hands enough, those curled-up fingers would approach straight and her extended fingers mostly curled.

Early on, I believe her doctors hoped she would regain some mobility in her fingers which is why they said the massaging exercise was so important. Eventually, we all realized that she wasn’t going to regain the use of her hands but the hand-massaging “exercise” became something of a ritual for us.

We would sit and talk while I rubbed her hands.

Grandma Dee wasn’t always the happiest grandma. In fact, to us as little children Grandma Dee seemed to be grumpy most of the time. She was fastidious about keeping her house clean which was, I think, a source of some of the grumpiness she projected on her grandchildren. We weren’t exactly Marie Kondo in our play or cleaning up after ourselves.

After her illness set in and she was no longer able to keep the house clean, she softened considerably. My uncle and aunt — her two oldest children — did a great job staying on top of the house chores which freed Grandma up to spend more time sitting by the window watching life outside or talking with whomever happened to be visiting.

In my later teenage years, I came to love my Grandma Dee tremendously. I would often drive myself to her house to visit, independent of anything the rest of my family was doing.

Which brings us back to that Saturday afternoon. Grandma Dee and I were talking about faith in God. She wasn’t a believer. I wasn’t sure I was either. That day, that conversation, was a pivotal one in my own faith journey.

The whole experience and that conversation make up one of my most cherished memories. It happened almost 30 years ago, but is still something I reflect on often. I’ve shared that story dozens of times because of its impact on me.

Grandma Dee passed away about 2 years later on New Year’s Eve 1996.

I love words. Yearn isn’t a word that’s used a lot in everyday conversation but it’s such an expressive word; there’s so much feeling just in the sound of it. To yearn is to have an intense feeling of longing for something, typically something that one has lost or been separated from.

Apropros.

Joe Bolton, in The Last Nostalgia Poems wrote:

We who loved [in] the world must learn the language of absence: days foreshortened, empty rooms, the irrevocable distance between the goodbye and the letting go.

There’s no sense in holding onto the notion of what might have been. I believe that’s what Mr. Bolton meant when he said, “the letting go.”

As in my case, those cherished memories often define us. They are memories that become our moral compass. They also become the framework through which we see the world and make decisions. So many decisions in my life have been based on who I felt like I became in that conversation with Grandma.

There are times when I yearn to have conversations with my mother and both sets of grandparents again. I feel very fortunate to have had awesome relationships with all five of those wonderful people.

Yearning becomes dangerous to our mental and emotional wellbeing, however, when we spent too much time yearning for the past or potential future. Intuitively, I think most people understand that the present is all we have. We can’t go back and relive the past or change it. Nor can we arrive in the future any faster than the hands of time allow.

In contrast, cherishing (keeping with care and affection) is an attribute that can be present at all times. We can cherish the past, present, and future without needlessly attempting to live outside the present moment.

In the words of Thomas S. Monson, “The past is behind, learn from it. The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here, live it.”

True joy is found as we cherish the past and live in the present. In great measure, those two things define how we show up in the future that’s just around the corner.