Jeff Westover

Memories of Mom — Mom and Mother in Law

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It has been a little more than a year since my Mom passed. Frankly, it is still hard for me to speak of her without getting emotional.

As boys I don’t think we realize the importance of Moms in our lives. But as men we sure do.

There is a bond between Mother and Son that is not quite like any other. I felt it with my mother. And I have witnessed it between my wife and our son, too.

In this installment in our series on Memories of Mom I share the story of the time my Mom actually encouraged me to pursue girls when I was a teenager. I don’t know how many Moms do that, but I suppose I was a special case. That experience is shared in context with a later relationship my Mother would have with the girl I chose to marry.

And that too proved to be a relationship I never really expected:

Jeff Westover

Memories of Mom — Christina Westover talks of Her Mom, Julia

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We begin a series this week we call “Memories of Mom”, which are brief audio clips of loved ones telling a story about their mothers. Not only does this make for great family history but it also gives us a chance to hear from more voices in the family.

First up is cousin Christina Westover who shares a great experience with her Mom, Julia Westover.

Those of us who have been privileged to get to know Julia love her spunk and feisty nature. This is one Southern lady who doesn’t shy away from anything and who squeezes every moment of life for meaning. So Christina’s story here comes as no surprise.

I love to see when Keith or Julia or one their children post up new pictures. You can tell they genuinely enjoy each other’s company and are close to each other in ways that some families never achieve. There’s no doubting Julia’s part in all that. Take a listen

Thank you, Christina for sharing this great story of your Mom.

We have a few more stories lined up to share but we can always use more. If you’d like to participate in our Memories of Mom series you can simply make a voice recording on your smartphone and email it to me or get hold of me and we’ll arrange a call-in where we will record your story. We’ll take written submissions too but as you can hear from Christina’s story I think telling what you have to share really gives a greater contribution to the archives.

Jeff Westover

Seeing Yourself in Time

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My Dad sent me a scanned copy of a newspaper clipping from a school event when I was 11-years old. I’m pictured and mentioned in the clipping.

On the surface, it is no big deal — just a fun moment from my history as a kid.

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But it kind of sparked a bit of anxiety within me.

What of my personal history? What am I leaving behind of myself to tell some descendant of mine hundreds of years from now about my life and times? And what will they discover about me – and will I like it?

We are pioneers of a different sort. We are the first in the age of information and each of us leaves behind a mighty amount of stuff about our lives. I suspect that in the future vast databases of information may survive of our lives that could easily tell of our travels, our food purchases, and even our taste in movies and books.

I thrill in the hunt of discovery in trying to piece together the lives and very personalities that come from our family past. Every new connection I make with someone that provides a new piece of the puzzle makes knowing our ancestors so much more valuable to me.

But it is hard to see my life, my thoughts, and my experiences being meaningful to a future family historian.

I vow, of course, to make it easier on them to find information about me than some of them have left for my generation to discover.

But where do we really begin?

The ageless answer to that question is a journal or a diary.

We have so very few, at least that know, from our family past who kept a journal of some sort. The journal of Albert Smith is a rare example of how valuable such a record can be. Reading it I can almost sense the anxiety he had about Mormon crickets alone. (Don’t know what I’m talking about? Read it).

I have kept a journal. It is incomplete, full of holes and, frankly, embarrassing at times for me to read through. I don’t know, honestly, if I want to leave it behind. I know I should. But part of me wants to burn it. I wonder if Grandfather Albert ever felt the same way?

My mother, who basked in the work of family history, didn’t leave a journal. What her thoughts were for the most part are embedded in my brain and the record of her that I leave behind and that others of my siblings and my Dad make a record of. As we approach a year now since she passed it stings to think that the whole of what my mother was – is lost.

That makes the work of personal journaling and history so sobering. It is important, it is hard, and nobody, honestly, can do it for us.

The Internet and especially social media gives us a giant online footprint that will no doubt one day be considered an invaluable family history resource. In my family, it already is. My mother’s meager Facebook postings are precious to me.

Mom was smart with her social media though. What she left behind is pleasing, inquisitive of her children and grandchildren, and well reflective of her role as mother and grandmother.

My social media is, by comparison, a cesspool of reaction. It is full of political rants, opinions on the news, links of dubious quality, and chock full of endless babble that mean even less in the future than what it means right now (which isn’t much).

It pains me to think that my descendants may comb through a virtual encyclopedia of Facebook and Twitter in trying to figure out me.

That highlights, I suppose, the need to create and craft a personal record. It’s kind of like what J. Golden Kimball used to say about how people would respond to his speeches. He said, “It used to be I could get back to Salt Lake to deny what I said before the people complained. But the damn telephone changed that and now I have to deny what I said long after I actually said it.” Technology, it seems, has long been a burden to the imperfect.

A lot of this, of course, comes from a genuine desire to be seen as a good person – both now and in the future.

The answer is to just be a good person, I suppose. But even better, I think the idea is that we can better craft the record of who we truly are if we take command of the project – and actually write and organize that personal history.

Personal history suffers from the same bad press that family history does. I don’t have time for it. My kids will do it for me. Nobody wants to hear from me. Yada, yada, yada.

For me though none of those excuses stand. I’m going to need a defense attorney. And it is best to get started on that defense now.

Jeff Westover

Creating the Family History of the Future

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Years ago we began a tradition in our family. Between Christmas and New Year I gather all the images and videos from each of the devices in the house and produce a family video that all gather to watch as part of our New Year’s Eve activities. It was never intended to be part of the family record but as we look back at these productions they have become an obvious source of remembering things and a happy accident of family history.

I just completed this year’s video and it tallies more than 50-minutes. I won’t burden you with the whole thing but will share this portion of the video that celebrates the birth of a new grandson and the impact these boys have been on my family this past year:

We customarily start these videos with a brief pictorial overview of the world — we will grab images from news sources and create a backdrop of what was going on in the world while we went through the events of our year. I think this is important for putting some things in context down the road. Then we get into the major events and activities of the year. It might include travel and vacations but many years, like this past year, we can’t do those kinds of things because of other events.

It doesn’t matter what happens.

What matters is that we tell the big stories. This year the stories were of losing my mother, celebrating the graduation of a daughter from high school, welcoming a new grandson and making a move — a huge year and a big story to tell. While I do “narrate” at parts this video is more about my children and their part in it all and I try to use as much of “their stuff” as I can.

My kids are all Millennials — they have grown up with the Internet and screens and devices and they are fluent in the savvy uses of video and images. They take thousands of images. Our videos are primarily their pictures and in the case of this video above I’m particularly proud of their technical work because the very best pictures of my grandsons have been taken by my children, not by me.

It’s now been 8 years since we began this tradition and our videos have become better over time. They aren’t intended for a general audience because frequently they include references to family culture or even inside jokes that would just take too long to understand. And, to be honest, we have pictures that include Christmas morning hair and every day chaos that my wife and children would rather not the world at large see. Later generations of family seeing this stuff after we’re gone is ok, I suppose.

But none of this is lost on me. These slideshows are part of the family history we will pass down. It is a tradition in keeping family records that many would enjoy if they would invest the time. It takes me the better part of a day to produce these videos. I consider it now sacred time.

Jeff Westover

Profound Lessons from Cleaning Out the Garage

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It has been a source of some bitterness to me that on top of all we have been through this year we had to make a move we didn’t anticipate and didn’t want. We literally left our home of the past several years kicking and screaming in protest. And it was a pretty ugly experience – it was done in haste, things were scattered and we have had to adjust to everything new on the fly. Here is it months later and we are still trying to find a home for everything.

So when my Dad needed to move in recent weeks I knew it would not be something I would embrace with enthusiasm.

As is common, I think, for a widower, Dad is saddled with 50+ years of accumulation – stuff that he and Mom worked hard for and that reflect a life together of constantly changing circumstances of both need and want.

They have a lot of stuff.

I have not been the only one who has been involved with helping Dad move. On one glorious Saturday a few weeks ago my sisters, my kids and several of my nieces and other available folks came together for just one big part of the overall project of getting stuff moved. It was actually a fun day, despite the work.

Dad rented a large – and I mean HUGE – storage unit closer to his new home and we have been slowly filling it, trying to organize it, while at the same time trying to thin it out. There have been many trips to the DI, some trips to the dump and plenty of spreading out of useful items to homes in the family. My son Enoch and his wife Angie are just getting started and their little apartment is filling up with some of the remnants of stuff left over from the times and seasons of my parents.

It would be easy, in my mind, to look at a storage unit some 100 feet deep and maybe 20 feet wide filled from back to front well over my head and think, “Wow, that’s a lot of crap.”

I’ll admit to thinking that some over the weeks we have been working on all this.

But as we have dug into the stuff I have come to some different conclusions.

Buried in all this stuff is the progression of individuals and of our family.

I spied some hand-made charts I recognized from family nights long ago. They were outlined by my Dad but they were the artistry of my Mom. “Remember those?” Dad asked me as I pulled one out. “Yes, I do. Very much so” I said, thinking of those lessons where Dad would have his scriptures open while using the charts. Mom said little during these lessons but she would be engaged nonetheless. My memory of those charts was shattered just a bit when Dad commented, “We made those to teach your mother the gospel.”

That’s a huge lesson: Dad and I were looking at the same thing but recalling our own perspectives of what they were. I always thought they were made for us kids to learn the gospel.

My mom was my Mom — I never considered when I was a kid learning from those charts that she learned from them too. And yet here was Dad telling me that he and Mom went to all that trouble to make those charts because he wanted to help Mom, a convert to the church and a recent one when those charts were made, to learn the gospel.

As we have worked side-by-side on stuff there are puddles of evidence from earlier lives of all of us – not just Mom and Dad.

Found were high school yearbooks, report cards, and various items of absolutely no value except in the memories they hold and the time of life they were to each of us.

Of course, having lost Mom, it has been hard not to see her fingerprints on everything.

Mother was a pack rat, you would think, and you’d be wasting your time and missing the point if that is all you see in that stuff.

Mother’s boxes and boxes of silk flowers, her handmade crocheted afghans, her prodigious supplies of scrapbooking stuff, and the crates and crates of Christmas decorations are so much more than the money spent on such stuff. They were the tools my mother used to create our home. My mother was a homemaker of the first order – always working to create a place of peace and warmth – for us.

As I’ve worked on this never ending project – and trust me, it’s going to take years – it has occurred to me that we’re not dismantling the life Mom and Dad put together.

We’re reassembling it and Mother is homemaking still as those items come to my home and my sibling’s homes and into the homes of her grandchildren.

There are teachable things in much of this stuff.

Over the course of the next several months I am going to call the family together again and again. I hope you will all come with your trucks and your minivans and your children, no matter how small, to help find the right homes for all these things that my Dad alone no longer needs.

Yes, some of it will be donated to charity and some will just be thrown out. But what can be used should be used by the family.

But as we gather from time to time to go through this stuff I hope you take the time to consider the story behind the stuff.

Weeks ago I found a couple of old reel-to-reel tapes that had recorded on them the audio of Christmas morning from 1967 that my Dad had made at the time. I was four. Can you imagine that morning of my parents with a 7 year old, a 5 year old, a 4 year old and a 2 year old?

Well today we stumbled upon the reel-to-reel recorder that made those recordings. Dad and I had already discussed it, hoping to find it eventually and he shared with me what that piece of equipment meant to him at the time. “It got me through college,” he told me. I understood what he was saying.

But when we found it today Enoch looked at it and not having anything to compare it to in his life experience had to ask, “What’s that?”

“That’s Granddad’s iPod,” I explained.

Enoch was there to do the heavy lifting and this thing is about the size of an ice chest and quite heavy. Enoch could only remark, “Well iPods were heavy back then!” as he hefted into the vehicle. In my mind, I’m thinking – “Wait until we get that thing going so he can hear when he old man was a four year old.”

Dad right now is very focused. He has been working on his mother’s history and I cannot wait to show you what has become of it. He is also working on my mother’s history, filling in gaps and providing a narrative that I think even my siblings will be surprised by.

As we have dug through the mountains of things the family history stuff has been set aside. There is SO MUCH to wade through, to organize, to scan and to, frankly, rescue.

For those of you who do not know, Dad has cancer. This was learned only about a month after Mom passed. It’s rare, it is treatable but he is in a stage of really not knowing how bad it is or how long he has. He’s hopeful, positive and looking forward.

Next month he will have a crucial exploratory surgery. We hope to know as a result of this procedure more about what he is exactly facing.

This is part of the reason why we are pushing so hard right now to get some order to all this “stuff”. Not only can Dad not physically handle this alone he will need help to organize and perhaps even delegate how our family history is managed going forward. He will need the time and attention of all his children and grandchildren who value their family history to step up and take a part in this.

Some have already begun. Matt, for example, has been scanning and organizing the letters from Grandpa Carl. That’s been a long-time project and he’s tackling it. It will give access to that material to all of us.

But there are other projects waiting to begin. And that is really what this is all about.

It isn’t a storage unit filled with stuff. It is part of all of us.

And guess what? I came home tonight and realized something: I’ve got a garage full of stuff too. It’s not as big and there is not as much.

But it is every bit as precious.

I’m betting you’ve got stuff too.