Remembrance Of Grandma Quotes

The only four times this word anamnesis is used in Scripture, it is in reference to the sacrifice that Christ made and is “remembered” in the Last Supper (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24, 25; Hebrews 10:3). The little clay-sculpted loaves in my hands feel like a memory I’m starved for. Like a memory become real between fingers. I had read it once that anamnesis was a term used to express an intangible idea moving into this material, tangible world. The philosopher Plato had used the word anamnesis to express a remembering that allowed the world of ideas to impact the world of our everyday, allowing something in another world to take form in this physical one. That was the point: remembrance, anamnesis, does not simply mean memory by mental recall, the way you remember your own address—but it means to experience a past event again through the physical, to make it take form through reenactment. Like the way you remember your own grandma Ruth by how your great-aunt Lois laughs, how she makes butterscotch squares for Sunday afternoons too, how she walks in her Birkenstocks with that same soft heel as Grandma did, her knees cracking up the stairs the same way too. The way your great-aunt Lois acts makes you remember in ways that make your grandma Ruth real and physically present again now.

Grandma's memory had overflowed like a springtime river escaping its banks, and her stories lapped over me. They say a flood makes the world look as it did in the beginning, before the dry land emerged. It seemed to me that her outpouring of memories had dissolved the wide gulf between us and the past, that beside her I could glimpse her grandmother, and her grandmother's grandmother, and all the worlds each of them contained. I had understood how the war severed my grandmother from her everyday life, relegating it to the bygone and the lost, but now I saw it had also carried away her past - not only loved ones but also advice and instructions, proclivities and inside jokes, books and recipes, trinkets and keepsakes, all her rightful inheritance. For a split second, I saw an infinity of forgotten details dancing across history's dizzying expanse. Folded into remembrance is the knowledge of all that cannot be recalled: I realized that when my grandparents passed away, I would carry within me not only the memory of them but the memory of their memories, on an on over the horizon of being, back to the tohubohu before the waters parted.