Another anniversary

I was talking with someone I know about the deaths of our respective parents. This person’s parents died four and six years ago, and I got the sense they still feel it fairly strongly. My mother died twenty-five years ago today. I thought I’d feel strongly about the twenty-fifth anniversary my mother’s death, but that hasn’t been the case. Of course I still think about her. But twenty-five years is a long time. She died so long ago now that I don’t really remember what she looked like, I mostly just remember what photographs of her look like. And I don’t really remember what she sounded like, I mostly just remember the one audio recording my younger sister made of her. Then too, she had dementia the last few years of her life, so some of my most vivid memories of her are from that time. So, for example, I remember sitting in my parents’ dining room talking to my mother. She obviously had no idea who I was, but was very polite to me. My father walked by, smiled at her, she smiled back. When he was out of earshot, she turned to me and said, “Who was that man?” That kind of memory is more recent and more vivid than most of my other memories of her. I often feel that my memory is unreliable, and perhaps this is one reason why: the memories I wish were most important, and thus most vivid, often seem to get obscured by other memories.