Yesterday, during church, the worship team began to sing Holy Holy Holy and tears came to my eyes. It is an old hymn that I grew up singing in the Episcopal church. I love that hymn because it brings back such strong memories of my Grandmother Peaches.
For most of my life, my grandmother was the head of the Alter Guild at our church. Her and my grandfather would pick me up for the service and I would follow her back to the service room to prepare communion. She would put on her robes and prepare the communion elements. She held each challis with such great care, pouring the wine from the glass containers and placing the wafers on the silver plates. I loved watching her. After she was done, she would send me out to sit in the pews with my grandfather.
The Episcopal service is pretty standard. Not much changes weekly and the song Holy Holy Holy was sung as the communion elements made their way to the alter. I can vividly remember my grandmother bringing forth the glass and silver canisters, laying out the embroidered and neatly pressed linens. She moved gracefully around the table as the priest prepared to read from the Book of Common Prayer. The soft lights from the ceiling and the sun shining from the stain glass would make her shine like an angel.
As the worship team sung yesterday, I began to have flashes of my grandmother then unexpecdently, I began to think of my mother and her battle with cancer. And I was very sad, not for me, not for what will be my loss, I was mostly sad for my children.
I was so blessed to be with my grandmother more days than not as a child. She was always around. Every holiday, every event, every weekend. I spent weeks during the summer and school breaks trolling after her in their yard. She called me Mellie and I loved her deeply.
It has always bothered me that my children will not get to know their grandparents the same way that I did. We live to far and they only get to see them once a year. With my mom’s cancer diagnosis the reality is that my children may come to a point where they barely remember her. They won’t have ingrained memories like I do with Peaches. There won’t be a song that is played in church that fills their mind with vivid memories that almost appear to be a movie. Their memories will be snippets, pictures in an album.
We don’t know how much time we have left with my mom. Her prognosis is undetermined but I do know that my children will have a different relationship with her than I did with my grandmother. Their memories will be less vivid and it saddens me that there isn’t much I can do about it.
This summer we will go home for a short 5 days. We will have that brief time to instill some more memories with their grandmother. I have started to think about things that we can do (or not do) that Lu & Eph will remember. It is hard to plant a memory. Memories are made of up personal experiences that impact the individual but if we can just come up with one, that 10 years from now, when they hear a specific song or taste a specific food and a memory will come flooding back to them – vivid, bright and almost real.
I feel the exact same way about the song “It Is Well”. It was my grandmother’s favorite and the tears just flow uncontrollably every time I hear it.
((hugs)) to you. I can’t imagine what a difficult time this is.