Today is Friday, October 18th, 2024. Today would have been my grandmother’s birthday. She passed away at the top of last year after a few years of dealing with dementia. We had five generations of us with her around and now we are down to four. I grew up with her in my household. She helped raise me from a child to an adult. I was one of those kids who asked questions, loved to hear stories, and loved to look at pictures. They were pictures from the past before I was born and during the early days before my memory formed.
One of the stories I can remember her telling me was of her getting in trouble. When she was younger, she had a friend attempt to give her Shirley Temple curls and it damaged her hair. I even heard the stories of misbehavior that included my mother and her siblings when they were younger. I saw pictures of relatives I had never met including my grandfather who died just before I was born. When I think about these memories of mine, I think about how the new generations won’t have memories like mine. Socialization within families have changed due to technology. Pictures are not even printed and put into picture books as it was done in the past.
The current generation of the oldest people we have living in this world now may be the last who lived most of their life without technology at their fingertips. The idea of gathering memories from the older generation is going extinct. This is scary because these are the ways to carry on one’s legacy. Even in thinking about the whole book ban dilemma here in America, these books are stories of our history. Most are the stories of real people, and if it’s factual, why not.
On this day, that I honor my grandmother’s legacy, I am wearing her shirt, I will remember the good times together, the stories that she told will come to my mind, I will see pictures (mostly those that Google generate on my phone as a memory), and I will remember that she lived to see four generations of her family being born. I know we have this cloud that keeps our records. My hope is that we all think about making sure the younger generation know the stories of the generations of family and friends they were too young to remember or not around to see. I hope some of the pictures from our phones get printed and put into books to pass down to the newer generations. May the younger generation realize these memories are important.