Memories

My Grandmother

It’s only when you start looking through an old box, you begin to realise the memories you have kept. The things that remind you of where you have been, the adventures you have had and the people you have loved and lost.

Last weekend, at my parents, I found a box. This box contained photos, articles and important papers relating to two generations of my family. Old photos of family members that I don’t even recognise and papers that I had never read before. I’m lucky that my mum is a bit of a hoarder and keeps all of the important family papers together like this. I feel very lucky to have a great sense of my family history and some of the amazing adventures they went on.

While going down this memory lane, I wish I had kept more bits and pieces about my life from the last couple of years. I have some old photos from my teenage years (many I would rather forget after some disastrous hair cuts) and a computer full of things from uni, but I don’t have anything physical, nothing that I can hold or anything that couldn’t be lost by a computer malfunction. I’ve tried for many years to keep a diary and take photos of important moments, but as usual with projects like this, they get forgotten about and left to fester. But after seeing the things in this box, I knew that I have to do something about this and make sure that I have some things to hand down.

The trouble is that in this day and age, we keep everything digitally. We live for the now and don’t plan for the future. We keep our Timeline on Facebook for everyone to see. We record our lives in blogs for people to read and comment on. We ‘check in’ to our favourite places and we adjust our photos to make them look beautiful so that we can share our lives on instagram. BUT, what if one day, the internet broke and we lost everything? Then a lifetime is lost as memories and stories fade away into the abyss.

In our heart of hearts I think we all want to be remembered for something. So my plan is now to keep a diary of my life so that someone in 40 - 100 years time can look back and think, “Wow, Great Uncle Steven did that, he was there when that happened.” I’m going to try and include some trinkets and some photos for people... because this is not about preserving memories for myself, but preserving my stories for future generations.