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Preserving Memories and Beginning New Family Traditions

When you lose a parent, preserving memories or starting new traditions may not be something families think about because the other parent is here creating new memories.  However, when both parents are gone the reality of this loss can be heartbreaking and find yourself seeking ways to keep memories alive.  I would like to share with you how my siblings and I preserved the memories of our parents and started a new family tradition.

This year my parents would have been 90 and 91 years old.  Dad died in 1986 and Mom continued to live in our childhood home until she died in 2007.  My siblings and I decided to sell the house, but first, we had to decide what to do with everything not specified in her will.  Between open house garage sales, family and friends selecting keepsakes, and some good old-fashioned“pitching” it didn’t take long to clean out the house.  We found a way to evenly divide the remaining items like her cookbooks, family pictures, Dad’s military pictures ( he was a WWII and Korea veteran) and even her jewelry with very little debate.  I can proudly say the handling of her estate with my siblings went without any animosity, hard feelings or emotions that plague some families and ruin relationships.


Preserving memories - ringMother’s Ring

While we were able to divide most of the possessions three pieces of jewelry couldn’t be equally divided – her mother’s ring and their wedding bands.  As young adults, we gave Mom a mother’s ring for Christmas that she proudly wore the rest of her life.  Now, what do we do with the ring?  You can’t divide it equally, and removing the stones didn’t make sense either.  One sister suggested share the ring and every year pass it on to the next sibling in the birth order.  So a new tradition began and every year the ring passes to the next sibling.  I wore it last year before passing to my middle sister at Christmas.  Wearing the ring reminded me every day of her and how she is missed.

Preserving memories - pendant

 

Wedding Bands into Pendants

Also left were their wedding bands and Mom’s engagement ring.  Again, how do you divide these equally?  My sister suggested having the stones removed, the gold and silver melted and cast into four pendants, one for each sister.  My niece designed the heart-shaped pendant and another sister found a custom jeweler to create the pendant using the gold, silver, and diamonds from the rings.  The pendant is beautiful and preserves another memory of our parents.

 

Preserving memories - sistersSister’s Trip

Mom and her sisters, before they married, loved to travel across the US and after retirement spent 10 years in a row going to Las Vegas.  Mind you, they were penny and nickel gamblers; they enjoyed Bingo and Keno and could stay up for 24 hours straight!  So on the first anniversary of her death, we traveled to Las Vegas with one of her sisters and exchanged the ring for the first time.

Our plan was to have an annual sister’s trip, but sadly, life gets in the way, and after the second year we have not been able to arrange another trip.  Recently we talked about reviving the sister’s trip and agreed one trip we would love to recreate is their trip to Havana, Cuba.  In 1955, Mom, two sisters, and their friend drove from Michigan to Key West then hopped a plane to Havana for 3 days.  What an adventure for these young women of the 1950’s.  I have this picture on my bookcase of them sitting at the bar at Sloppy Joe’s Bar.  Now that travel restrictions from the US to Cuba are beginning to ease, we hope in the next few years to recreate their trip and place ourselves in the very same spot they did 61 years ago.

Creating new traditions or preserving memories doesn’t have to be elaborate, keeping it simple allows for greater flexibility and easier to make happen.  What activities, family keepsakes or traditions make your family unique?  Then let your imagination create new ways to preserve memories and start new family traditions.  Enjoy your memories and the chance to make new ones!

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Lurene Reck is a Certified Senior Advisor (CSA)®. She is the Owner and Care Manager at Seniors Helping Seniors® in-home services, Chesterfield, Virginia. Seniors Helping Seniors fosters relationships between seniors seeking employment and seniors who require help with daily non-medical personal needs and household tasks and chores to continue living in their own homes.