Before my Mum died I happened to buy my first digital camera
and I happened to record a short 13 second video of her sitting on the couch
and waving her arms around as she did a little dance for the camera. She
doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t look very well either as she’s just
started a second round of chemotherapy to try to fight of the cancer which had
come back, but I treasure that video with all of my heart as it was the only
thing I had to remember her by that showed her alive and moving. Photographs
are wonderful, but you get so much more of a person from even a tiny little
short 13 second video clip.
As I’ve spoken about before, my Dad died a little more than
a year later and in that time I had gotten a much better camera because I
realised how important it was to take photos of things you wanted to remember.
Unfortunately my Dad was the kind of person who would just make a silly face or
hide behind a newspaper the minute you pointed a camera at him, so I never got
a video of him before he died and that upset me. But I figured there was nothing I could do about it, just like I
couldn’t change the fact that Mum never said a word in the one I was so very
lucky to have of her, so I spent the last 7 years only ever seeing them move
about or talk to me in my dreams, and getting upset by the fact that the sound
of their voices had started to fade from my waking memory.
That all changed today.
I have been working on clearing out the attic for a while
now, getting rid of all sorts of clutter that has been saved for one overly
sentimental reason or another. Mum was always the one who could take a Zen like
frame of mind and periodically decluttered the whole house when I was out at
school or university. She took charge of the problem that was my Dad’s hoarding tendencies, the fact he couldn’t throw away anything that might be useful some
day, and that problem doubled when I came along and inherited his hoarding gene
filling the house up with even more knick knacks and trinkets with sentimental
value, assorted geekery collectables or craft supplies. Things squirreled away
from holidays over the years, things that whilst dreadful or tacky I just
couldn’t bring myself to part with. Especially true after their deaths and I
was left as the heir and protector of all that remained of the lives of these
two people who were no longer here to protect it themselves.
For seven years so many boxes have lain unopened, their
contents a mystery and now that I am at a place in my life where I am less
dependent on the past and able to begin to move forwards, letting go of many of
these boxes and their once precious contents.
Today I got to a box which contained a few stray VHS tapes,
one an old cartoon compilation tape I got for Christmas when I was probably
only 6 or 7 and a video we bought on holiday in Gran Canaria when I was about
13 or 14 years old. I took one look at
the tapes and very nearly just threw them both into the bin, there was nothing
of value there, just some childish cartoons and a video which triggered one
thought “oh god not that awful video".
You see, that second video was
part of a tour my parents and I did, where we went out to a banana plantation,
followed by a local alcohol distillery of some sort out on a ranch in the
islands sand dunes where the tour ended with a trek through the sand dunes on
camels. The tour promoters filmed the whole camel trek and then charged us
extra money for their poorly shot and incredibly poorly edited video of the
whole thing. Both my parents and I thought this video was dreadful and watched
it only the once and yet it ended up being protected all this time thanks to my
Dad and I hoarding away things with even the slightest bit of sentimental
value.
I have never been so grateful for
this shared trait and that dreadful video until today, because seconds before I
put the tape into the bin I realised that this awful thing had been hiding a
wonderful gift all these years.
Video footage of both my parents
I jumped down from the attic
faster than I have ever moved in my life, and for the next 30 minutes I sat in
front of my television crying catching little fleeting glimpses of my parents
here and there. 5 seconds here, 10
seconds there, another 5 here but this time they were smiling, 5 more and I was
watching them laughing… all the while listening to the cheesiest music playing
over the footage with no other sounds.
I hadn’t been so happy or
grateful for such a long time, I had cried so many tears of joy I didn’t know
how I still had any tears left to come out.
Then as the video was nearing the
end, the most unexpected thing happened. The cameraman walked right up to my
Mum as she was getting off the camel and she was suddenly right there in the
middle of the frame, practically looking right into the camera and started to talk.
Just three little words, that’s
all, nothing spectacular, but way more than I could have ever dreamed of
hearing again in my lifetime.
It has been 7 years and 25 days
since I lost my Mum, probably another week or more on top of that since I last heard
her beautiful voice and today, when I had long since given up hope of ever
hearing her voice again she spoke to me and told me…
“That was brilliant”
