Remembered, As She Was

In the prayerbook we use at my synagogue during festivals, there is a meditation preceding Yizkor that I am convinced was planted by a mind-reader or seer or maybe the god of memoir writers. As I rewrite sections of my memoir now, I find myself focused mainly on two things. The one which is most on my mind got a useful boost from this meditation. I guote: "May my memories of the dead be tender and true, undiminished by time; let me recall them, and love them, as they were." As they were. As they were. In what I thought was the final draft of the memoir my mother, whom I loved to the point where words fail, was not present as she really was. I think how much I loved her may have made me place a scrim between her and the reader, so that only what I wanted readers to see showed through on the page. My mother WAS brilliant, she WAS clever, she WAS brave, she DID love me unconditionally. But she also WAS a very complicated woman, living a complicated life she didn't do everything she might have to make less complicated. In my current rewrite, I am bent on having the woman in my memoir be fuller, as tough and pained and difficult and needy as my mother was in life. That is the woman she deserves to be in my pages. The woman I loved with a love stronger than the love I have ever given to anyone else. Yet the mother I wish had done some things differently. That mother is whom I now try to remember at Yizkor. And in my memoir. Zelya Zam Stein: as she was.