Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Katy is represented by
Greg Johnson at
WordServe Literary
Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net
Recent Posts
- Try
- Becoming Brenda Starr
- Off Beat
- Scattered
- That’s It
- So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What?
- The Spoon
- Sciatica
- Sweetheart
- A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose
- However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time
- After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices.
- As with everything in life, balance is key.
- Slow down, you move too fast…
- Yeah, I know. I have issues.
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E me at katy @ ngenius.com
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
Patrick, Katy, Liz McKenna
I wrote this essay when my mother was still alive, when she’d already verbally passed the “Matriarch of the Family” torch to me, when I’d begun to feel the full weight—and privilege—of preserving the memory of her losses. My brother, Patrick Joseph McKenna, would be sixty years old today, if only he’d somehow lived past the age of four. It’s in his honor I wrote this, and in my mother’s and father’s and grandparents’, too. For the longer I live, the more I think that remembrance may itself be the greater part of honor.
————————————————————————————————
I worry sometimes that when I’m dead, no one will remember my brother.
It’s a quiet worry, not one that I’ve ever expressed in words until now. But I guess I’ve carried it in my heart all my life.
Dad, Patrick, Katy, Mom
Do you feel surprised when you open your containers of Christmas ornaments each year? I’m always shocked at the gasps of joy and stray tears of nostalgia that escape me when I see the treasures my children made for me during their school years. They are my most precious decorations.
But there, among these keepsakes, is one I weep over season after season. It’s a tiny red and ivory knit stocking, no bigger than a baby’s sock, with a printed Santa and the words “Baby’s First Christmas.â€
Mom, Patrick
I can’t help how I feel when I hang it on my tree. I can’t help thinking of my parents celebrating Christmas 1951 with their three-month-old firstborn child, unaware that he’d only ever spend three more Christmases on this earth. I can’t help it that I’ve already asked my sweet daughter to become the caretaker for Patrick’s stocking someday.
I’ve already asked my daughter to not forget.
Patrick, Katy, Papoo
Because, you see, my mother now remembers less about her little boy than I do. I repeat back to her the stories she’s told me about his short life, and she shakes her head. “Did I tell you that, really? It was so long ago, like another lifetime…â€
It didn’t used to be like this. In one way, my mother’s whole life has revolved around the loss of this one dear son. But now, so much has faded in focus for her, and so I have become, of my own volition, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.
I know that Patrick’s name will someday—perhaps with the passage of only one more generation—be little more than a brief line in a family tree. A line with no branches descending beneath it. Someday, perhaps one of my own grandchildren will take up an interest in family history and ask about the little boy without a story.
Patrick, Katy
Will the Baby’s First Christmas stocking hang on a tree somewhere for generations to come? Or will the threads finally disintegrate like a mother’s fragile mind? I think I know the truth, but it’s hard to face it.
There are some things I’ll take with me to the grave, but I can still hope my brother’s memory isn’t one of them.
- My favorite poem:
Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of the everywhere into here.
Where did you get your eyes so blue?
Out of the sky as I came through.
What makes the light in them sparkle and spin?
Some of the starry spikes left in.
Where did you get that little tear?
I found it waiting when I got here.
What makes your forehead so smooth and high?
A soft hand stroked it as I went by.
What makes your cheek like a warm white rose?
I saw something better than anyone knows.
Whence that three-cornered smile of bliss?
Three angels gave me at once a kiss.
Where did you get this pearly ear?
God spoke, and it came out to hear.
Where did you get those arms and hands?
Love made itself into hooks and bands.
Feet, whence did you come, you darling things?
From the same box as the cherubs' wings.
How did they all just come to be you?
God thought about me, and so I grew.
But how did you come to us, you dear?
God thought about you, and so I am here. <a href="http://www.want2beslim.com/herbalife-24-c-107.html">herbalife 24</a>Posted by ry on 10/26/11 at 11:33 PM
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