It’s funny how memory works. Even those of us who have studied and researched the mechanisms of remembering for decades, can be hit over the head by factors that trigger certain memories when we least expect it.

Yesterday was one such occasion. I was out on a walk through the wetlands, dried out and dusty for the most part. Noticing a lot of white.

White thistle down.

Meadows filled with white Queen Anne’s Lace, wilting with the drought.

White candle-shaped weeds, rimming the path and attracting the bees.

Horse chamomile,

bindweed,

dandelions.

And, just around the corner, some egrets preening, in the last pond holding some water.

A pond visited by a fleet of pelicans, glaringly white, elegant, and beautiful against the sunlit landscape.

I suddenly remembered hearing about a white dress, made of silk. When I finally arrived in Germany a few days after my mom’s sudden, unexpected death, I was told that she had bought it recently and raved about it. They found it in her closet and put it on her for the coffin. Why did my mother, then in her 50ies, buy a silk dress in November? White, no less? She was never much into clothes (in contrast to her daughters) and usually seen in utilitarian dress that could endure her gardening passion, ready to touch dirt.

Why did a friend of her’s know about purchases, although she, too, had no idea about the reason for this fancy? Why were they told what kind of funeral my mom desired, when I wasn’t? A funeral as unbefitting for a gardener as one can imagine – ashes thrown into the sea. At the time, hot dismay competed with the icy numbness of the sudden grief. The anger of a child (albeit a grown one) of realizing the independence of a mother, vast parts unknowable from now on. And that was before I found instructions in a letter addressed to me, to destroy a cache of letters and papers unread – instructions that I honored.

Seeing white on my walk triggered an emotional memory, but it was grief that led to the specific remembrance of another time of mourning. Grief for my friend who recently died, mourning for a beloved mother, missed since 1983. There were multiple sources – the color, the current feeling – spreading activation to a node that called up an associated memory.

There are a lot of people dear to me who are currently in mourning. I wish I could convey that being triggered by environmental or state-dependent cues will never stop, but the quality of the emotional reaction will. I still miss my mother, 43 years hence, but I now think about that mysterious white dress with pleasure, happy that she was willing to spend on herself, grab some beauty. I think of all the love and connectivity she left me with, rather than fuming about what I wasn’t afforded. I think about the “gift” of her early death in the sense that I learned as a young person that grief will not hurt intensely forever, and so have an easier time now, knowing current pain WILL abate.

White is the color of mourning in multiple cultures; apparently Western aristocracy, Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Victoria among them, adopted it both as mourning dress, and parts of her funeral, respectively. In Eastern religions white symbolizes hope and rebirth.

Yesterday, all I saw was brilliant white, or dainty, translucent white, or the white of strong feathers of birds at rest during migration. Nature. Impervious to feeling itself, but making me feel strongly.

Grateful for memories, but more grateful for being surrounded by brightness in the here and now, reminding me that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Music today by Ravel.