Life Part 1: Ma and Me

I've been thinking a lot lately about life and what it means to live, and I've come to the conclusion that, for me, life is about memories.  As I grow older, I look back, and I remember.  I remember Ma, and I remember times with her and Dad and Glenn and our friends and our pets.  I look at pictures and remember the good times and banish the bad times from my mind.

I have a lot of good memories, and for that I am grateful.  I remember rockin' out with Ma in the living room when I was very little.  Liz reminded the other day how many of my memories of my mother are attached to music, and to album cover art.  I miss album cover art.  I can trace specific times in my life to the music that my mother was listening to at the time.  I remember the cover of 'Tattoo You' and 'Sticky Fingers' by the Stones, and 'Eat a Peach' by the Allman Brothers, and 'Arc of the Diver' by Steve Winwood, and 'Layla' by Derek and the Dominoes (why do I feel like I always spell that wrong?  whatever) and the list goes on and on.  Every year, on my birthday and Glenn's birthday, Ma would play 'It's Your Birthday' by the Beatles.  Ma was a total Beatle maniac - she saw them twice in concert, once at Shea Stadium and once at the Atlantic City Convention Center.  I can't imagine.  That was one of Ma's good memories.

I think that Ma had some not so good memories of growing up.  She was the oldest of five, and I think she felt underappreciated.  She once told me that no one's eyes ever lit up when she walked into a room - how sad.  But I think as my mother got older, she decided to take matters into her own hands and make her own good memories.  When I was 12, she decided that she was going to visit her best friend from college.  For two weeks.  In England.  She didn't really ask Dad, she just sort of bought the tickets and went.  And I kind of think that was a breakthrough for her.  She had been beholden to so many people up to that point in her life - her parents, her siblings, my dad, me and Glenn.  And all of a sudden, I think she said to her self, "It's time to start living for Sue."  I didn't understand it at the time, but I think I do now.  And that was a beginning for my mother.  A good one.

As my brother and I got older, Ma became more independent.  She had a job, and for the first time in her life, she and my father were financially stable enough that she could buy what she wanted.  And by 'what she wanted', I mean shoes and earrings.  :o)  But she also went to movies, and museums, and concerts, and she traveled.  She traveled with us, she traveled with Dad, she traveled with her friends.  She went on day trips, she went on long weekends, and she went for a week.  She went to the country, she went to citites, and she went to Europe.  And she made herself some good memories.

It's interesting; I look back, and I realize that my parents were pretty broke when Glenn and I were little.  But we never went without.  I thought that all people went on vacation every year, because we always managed to do so.  We visited grandparents and aunts and uncles, and we visited places simply because they were pretty.  We went to Maine and Virginia and Minnesota and Kansas and Illinois, and we had a really good time.  I remember once when I was ten and Glenn was six, and our parents took us to New York City to see an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Van Gogh.  Glenn was bored, and so my father told him he would give him a nickel for each painting he could find that had a sun in it.  My parents were, and are, creative.  I remember walking out of the museum, and my parents talking excitedly and pointing.  An interesting man was talking to another man on the street.  The interesting man was dressed in black, and wore a backpack, and I remember his hair - it was cut in a pageboy and was white on top and black on the bottom, and he wore glasses and had pale skin.  Who's that? I asked my parents.  It's a famous man named Andy Warhol, replied my parents.  Why don't you go say hi?  I asked.  You don't just go say hi to Andy Warhol, said my parents.  But honestly, how cool is that?

I just found out that I have a 50/50 chance of developing a disease in the same family of diseases that my mother and grandmother died from.  Their diseases were most likely caused by a mutated gene (either tau or progranulin, for those of you who are interested), and this gene is dominant, so if I inherited it, I'm getting some sort of brain-wasting disease somewhere down the road.  You know, unless I get hit by a car or get cancer first.  I can get a test to see if I have the mutated gene, and I think I'll go through with it.  I need to know, because if I am going to get sick I need to make sure that everything is in place for Terry and Susannah. 

When first learned of this last week, I was stunned.  How can this be?  Why us?  Why me?  I could get sick in five years, or I could get sick in thirty or forty years.  There is no way to tell when and how it will begin.  I thought to myself, how will I live my life differently, but then it occured to me, should I live my life any differently?  What if I don't get it?  Does that give me the right to sit back, relax, get lazy, and take things for granted?  No way.  So regardless of my diagosis, I'm on a mission.  I'm on a mission to make good memories: for Susannah, for Terry, for Glenn, for Dad, for my friends, and for the rest of my family.  And most important, for me.

So no more 'why me'.  From here on out, it's going to be beautiful.  I'm sure I'll have my moments now and again where the 'why me' creeps back to the forefront of my mind and rears its ugly head.  And I'll allow it to do so for a little while, and then I'll beat it back down and let beauty and grace and gratitude take over.  I'll let the good things shine through because my life is good, and life in general is good.  I have a wonderful daughter, a wonderful husband, a wonderful father, a wonderful brother, and so on.  I might get sick, I might not.  There is so much to enjoy and experience and appreciate and love in this life.  And that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to begin by getting off this computer and doing something productive.  I still have goals to work toward, like becoming a teacher and cleaning my house.  No giving up the daily stuff.  I have to keep on plugging away, and I'll be happy that I can keep on plugging away.  I'll be back soon.

Go enjoy your life, and make some good memories of your own.