Your most poignant memory

That is a lovely memory

For some reason this memory popped in my mind. It is kind of silly:

I sneezed in elementary school, a big huge snotty sneeze. I was mortified. XXX XXXXX saw it and covered it with his shoe and stood there for the next 5-7 minutes while we all casually talked. After everyone walked away, I thanked him and he said "I'll always cover your boogers, nobody should laugh at you"

He ended up moving when we were in sixth grade. But he was right, Nobody should laugh at me

I had just separated from my 2nd husband and we were losing our home. I had to move with 24 hours notice, on my birthday/Mother's Day. It was going to suck in every sense of the word. My oldest daughter, then 13, texted me at 8 am that morning that she loved me and we would be ok and she didn't care I couldn't get her presents. And then this:"the universe must have messed up or something because you could be a chef or a model. I love you mom."

Lifetime lump in my throat, the universe messed up.

I don't know that I have a poignant memory, I would need to think about that.....but this just made me weepy. so beautiful.

My mom was so sick. She had fallen 10 days before & had stitches on her face. That day I had to get her to her dr office to get the stitches out & it totally exhausted her. I got her home & was helping her get into her nightgown & into bed so I could run to the pharmacy to get med for her nausea. She was so tired, she couldn't even unbutton her blouse. As I was helping her, she said "I don't know what I would do without you." I got her into bed, she rolled onto her side...gasped then was gone.

I'm so thankful I was there. And thankful I had the opportunity to take care of her those last few months.

Yes, it was truly a gift. I felt peace with her passing. I know my sister, who didn't spend much time with mom, has a hard time. I spent years taking care of mom while she lived in her home. Then 5 months living in my home. It was precious time.

I'm glad you had that time with her, zookeeper.

I'm already crying reading your memories.
I'll add my tear-jerker so I can cry sone more.

DH's sister was a very dear friend to me and many of my most poignant memories are around the weeks before she died from melanoma. We live in GA and they were in PA. Over the course of about a month DH and I had each flown up separately to see her. We got a call from her DH saying we needed to come right away if we wanted to see her before she was gone. We took a flight up the next day. We spent 3 days with them and so many awful things happened, but more amazing ones within our family. Anyway, we left and got the airport and our flight was delayed like 2 hours. We were both very quiet and emotional already, neither us wanted to talk about any of it yet. We went to a restaurant To get a drink in the airport to kill the time.

The song Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol came on. We were both just sat there listening to the song. When the verse came on that said 'Forget what we're told Before we get too old Show me a garden that's bursting into life' we both just started bawling. Like ugly, snotty crying. I got up and walked around the table to him and we just stood there hugging and crying in the middle of a busy restaurant. I'll never forget that day, and that song just haunts me. She was so young and still had such a beautiful life to live. 
About 6 months later we were in TJ Max and the song came on the speakers. I immediately left where i was and went to find him. Sure enough, he was standing in the men's section silently crying (and he is not a crying type guy). I can't listen to the song now.

My aunt was shot by her husband, I guess I was around 6 or 7. We drove for hours to get to their town and meet all the rest of the family there. We gathered all in the same house even though 2 of my mom's other sisters lived there and had homes nearby, they all just wanted to be together. The preacher even stayed all night at the house with us.  The call came in the wee hours of the morning that she was gone. My grannie started keening. I had no idea at the time why she was making that noise, but I will never ever forget it. The absolute pain and sorrow in that sound still chills me when I think about it all these years later.

The first thing that comes to mind is when my grandmother passed away in the fall of 2009. She died three days before my birthday. So on my birthday that year, I was flying to St. Louis, getting a car, driving to Hannibal, meeting with my family there and attending her calling hours that evening.

Her casket was at one end of the room, and we family members were sort of lined up on one side and then on the other side, on the other side of the room. I couldn't stand next to my dad and mom...I was feeling very alone in my grief and my dad is not a super comforting guy. And I didn't feel like I could comfort him. I had a hard time relating to him at that time. (My brother was standing with him, though, so that was okay.)

So I was over on the other side next to my uncle Carl, Dad's younger brother. We're not super close, but he was a big part of my childhood when we lived out there, and he is a very calm and steady person (unlike my dad, lol.) So people were coming through the receiving line, and most of them I didn't know, and he would very gently put his hand on my back and introduce me each time and we would listen to people tell us what Grandma meant to them and it was just unbelievably comforting just to have him standing next to me and touching my back from time to time.

Uncle Carl's birthday was the next day, and that was Grandma's funeral day. So we both had sad birthdays that year. But so many memorable things happened around that funeral, I was comforted several times from the oddest small things.

My mother had cancer and was staying at a nursing home (by choice). Unfortunately, it was about an hour and a half away from me, but close to one of my brother's homes. She had various scares that would have me rush over but was doing well one day, so I met my brother and we went for lunch before our visit. This was before cell phones and they had been calling and calling me because my mom had told them that she felt like it was going to be that day. When I arrived, they were helping her to the bed and the nurse said, "Oh Stephanie, your mother was so afraid that she was never going to see you again." My mom was so happy and she and I sat at a little table. Usually, she was all about her grandchildren, who were also there visiting, but she just sat and talked with me, holding my hands and at one point, touched my face and said, "You're so pretty." When I left, she hugged me hard and said, "I'm so sorry to leave you, honey. I wouldn't, if i didn't have to." She lived for about another month, but that day was our most special together.

My 21 year old brother died unexpectedly when I was ten, about a week before my birthday. On the day of the funeral my dad, who had late stage cancer, was too ill to even go.   I remember getting dressed for it and going past their open bedroom door where he was sitting in an easy chair, and calling out to him, "I love you, dad!"

We got home from the day's events with all of us emotionally wiped out and totally exhausted. My aunts and uncle had gone home when my dad started failing. My mom was up with my dad while my older sisters and brothers were making phone calls to them to come back (and this was in days long before cell phones, so they had to get all the way home before they could get the call) and to the doctor and paramedics, followed by frantic praying of the rosary. Before long, my aunts and uncle were back, and were shuffling us younger kids down into the boys' bedroom in the basement because the paramedics had arrived. He couldn't be saved. I remember being completely shell shocked having just laid my brother to rest and losing my dad in the same day. It didn't occur to me until later that the last thing I ever said to my dad was that I loved him. 

I have another one, forgive me. I am up late and PMSing and all vrklempt.

We were home this past May for my nephew's high school graduation. My dad had been battling brain cancer for about 18 months at that point. Mom decided to invite all his siblings (including my aforementioned Uncle Carl) to come out for a little reunion that weekend, too, most of them hadn't seen each other since Grandma's funeral in 09. Dad was happy to have everyone there, but he was not well and not himself at all. It was hard to see what the cancer and the treatment have done to him.

The weekend before that, my 28-year-old cousin committed suicide. So we ended up coming home a day early so we could attend his funeral, and then we moved into the happy times of the graduation, etc. So it was a HUGE emotional roller coaster of a weekend, and I had held it together pretty well until we all went to church on Sunday morning, and my mom and dad were reading the scripture in the service. And when they got up there and started reading, it was a passage that has some emotional resonance for me, and seeing Dad up there with his poor bald scorched head, because he had just finished radiation, and I just fell apart. I stepped outside and just sobbed for a while.

When I came back in, a dear friend of my parents' met me in the lobby, I think she had seen me step out. I grew up with this woman's kids and I just adore her and her husband, they are very special people to me. She asked me if I was okay and I started sobbing again, and she just sat with me and asked all the right questions, said all the right things, told me she loved me, and oh so tactfully steered the conversation to lighter things as the sermon wound down and the service was coming to an end and she knew I needed to be calmed down before everyone came out of the sanctuary. It was like sitting with an angel. This is one of my treasured memories of this really difficult year.

So just sitting and listening with an open heart--it can mean so much to someone. I'll never forget that.

The first time my husband came home from a deployment! It's funny now, looking back after 20 years and 5x to Afghanistan, his pre 9/11 non combat deployment seemed like such a big deal at the time, and so long as newlyweds! I still can picture the day, what I was wearing, the emotions, the reunion etc. They only got harder, especially with kids, but that first one was in a class by itself!

I spent many days and nights with my mom during her fight with cancer. She was on so much morphine that who she was was gradually slipping away.

She still asked to watch Star Trek Generations every day, which would not havebeen my choice, but I came to love it.
One special day the plot involved Picard being kidnapped and injected with an entire lifetime of memories on a doomed planet.
The message was that you are not gone if someone remembers you. I'm teary now just thinking of. It.

As I sat with my drugged up, frail shell of a mother, dying at only 53, I learned the important truth that those we love live on in our hearts and minds.