Sometimes it’s OK to Come Unglued, Maybe Even Necessary for Making Progress
Thoughts of a Seventyish Woman
The album of ancestors
I made a photo album for my mother one year. We collected pictures of her ancestors and began with the oldest generation we could find, making a collage of the pictures and affixing labels to each picture so we and future generations would have a record of these people from whom we descend. She was quite pleased with the project. It was nice to have a clear picture of the family genealogy and remind her of memories of each of her great-grandparents or aunts or uncles. The book became especially useful as she began to forget things from her recent life and could at least hold on to the structure of her family through pictures and repeated stories.
But it was a problem when the pictures in the book came loose and fell to the bottom of the page, losing the places near the labels. This happened a few times and then we had a puzzle to find the right spot for Uncle Norman or Granny Applegate so that their name matched. Luckily she still remembered who was whom.
Coming unglued was hard for my mom. She had enough trouble with her mind, and didn’t need the stable things failing her as well.
