WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND

Family memories have, rather naturally I suppose, been tumbling out of us during this past couple of weeks. From the unpleasant to the bizarre, and the happy and the sad, they've been pouring out to a degree that I think has even surprised us, given how "complicated" the various relationships within the family have managed to get over the past couple of decades.

There have been a few surprises along the way, too, chiefly discovered from sorting through the "stuff" that my mother left behind in the drawers and behind the doors of the various bits of furniture in her last home. All those "Teaching English as a Foreign Language" notes and exercises; All those snapshots from outings and holidays which I'd forgotten her even going on; Those menus from cruise ships; All those old Christmas cards so carefully put away for not looking at ever again.

Then there were the more chronologically distant objects, the ones from generations once or even twice removed. Like the little keepsake box which my Grandmother set aside containing a sprig of heather from my mother's bouquet, and a napkin from some long forgotten Golden Wedding in 1949, or those little autograph books with scribbles made nearly a hundred years ago now by people I never knew.

Then there were my Grandfather's holiday diaries which will hopefully finally make sense out of some of those boxes of slides from holidays on cruise ships which were inexplicably filed away only by the name of the ship leaving me with just a lot of puzzling landscape views of places which really could have been anywhere.

I have rarely thought about my Grandparents in recent years. They've been gone a long time and most of the memories were not, to be honest, all that fond, but they've resurfaced over the past couple of weeks and I've actually found them far more interesting than I, at least, ever thought I would, as we have thought about the life of their only daughter and what, if anything, it all meant.

Some might say that none of us ever really get to know what any of it means, just as we can never wholly know another person no matter how close to them we are, and some will even tell you that all of our lives means nothing much at all...

One of those people might even have been me, as I've pontificated from time to time, but as I've never really been much of a one for researching "family history" finding all of that stuff quite so fascinating has rather come as something of a surprise.

But what we leave behind sometimes defines us in ways that we ourselves might never understand. We might think ourselves to be the loveliest human being who ever lived, but there's probably more than one person out there who remembers us as being a bit of an old git, even if it's just the cashier who you were grumpy with on a wet Monday morning, a wretched moment which you've perhaps regretted ever since whenever it comes to mind.

So, after we've gone, what is it that remains of us?

What are the footprints in the sand that a life leaves behind it?

Sometimes I think that it might even surprise the most cynical of us to find out how much someone can be still touching the lives of others so long after breathing their last.

There are always those memories, of course, stored in the minds of those who once met us, and they will last for as long as those lives are being lived, and those memories can be passed on through the generations, but there's always a diminishing sense of what the actual person was really like, even in this age where every tiny event is photographed and recorded far more than it ever used to be. Unlike those pre-technological generations, we can record voices, take movies and photographs, and have the most intimate thoughts of even the most lowly of us, which is something that we still can't know for certain about even those giants of history; A king like Henry VIII might have been the most notable figure of his age, but we can not say for certain what really looked or sounded like, but we can for just about anyone nowadays, although those "saved messages" on answering services do tend to vanish after just thirty days...

Pictures in photograph albums seem to be getting a little bit old-fashioned now, but they can still trigger the strongest of memories although there comes with that the occasional surprise. In the middle of my grandmother's box of photographs, we found this photograph of a respectable looking gentleman reading the daily newspapers of a long-forgotten ordinary day in the life and we're not exactly sure who he was, although it's a fair bet that he was actually one or other of our great-grandparents, there's nothing written on the back of the picture to confirm this and we'll have to dig a little bit deeper into the archives to find out for sure.

He might, of course, just be a random gentleman sitting on a bench and reading the papers, but it's quite interesting nevertheless, and put us in mind of a Graham Greene novel for no particularly good reason.

Sometimes it's just the stuff which we leave behind that most defines us to others, even though, of course, most of it really is just "stuff" that may mean a lot to us, but might actually mean very little to those tasked with getting rid of it after you've gone.

We did feel very guilty about recycling the cards sent to both my grandmother and mother after the funerals of their respective spouses, our grandfather and father, especially as they had been so lovingly retained for all those years, but, in the end they were just the stuff and clutter and sympathetic signatures of lost generations which couldn't really mean all that much to us, although, of course, we kept the letters.

And when it comes to what's been left behind, tucked inside a drawer, tied with a ribbon, were the love letters written all those years ago between my mum and dad, and it was a very difficult decision to decide quite what to do with those more intimate thoughts written before either of us was even a twinkle.

I think they've been preserved, and I hope that they'll be treasured. Reading them might just help us to understand them better, too, and pass their memory on again to at least one more generation, even if it seems as if it's perhaps not quite right to actually read such intimate thoughts that they shared between them so very long ago.

At least not yet...