Weekly Writing Challenge: I Remember My Father Passing

This is for the Weekly Writing Challenge: I Remember

The assignment

THE CHALLENGE: I REMEMBER

You’ll need an egg timer or a some sort of stopwatch for this challenge. Set a countdown timer for 10 minutes, choose one of the writing prompts below, and just start writing. Whatever you do, don’t stop for ten minutes. Keep your fingers typing. Write what you remember. It need not be accurate — it’syour memory. Do not judge. You got this.

• Your earliest memory. Capture every detail. Document the quality of the memory — is it as sharp as HDTV or hazy and ethereal, enveloped in fog? Write for 10 minutes. Go.

My Earliest Memory

Although if I thought about it longer, I probably could remember something earlier but this one comes to mind the most vividly.  My father passed away at the early age of 45 and my brothers and sisters and I were very young.  In fact I was not six years old.  My early memory about this time was coming out to the family room in our house and seeing so many people.  I probably couldn’t tell you who was there but I know in hindsight that it would be the majority of my father’s family.  He had five siblings, a sister and four brothers (one being his twin).  I was the oldest of three girls and I had two older brothers.  In this memory I only remember looking up to all the people in the house all being bigger than me.  That is it, just a house full of people and looking up at all of them.  At the time I would not have understood and plainly by this memory, I did not.  This makes me wonder how the children see the grownup world.  I think the television show, the Rutrats kind of showed that aspect, the big big world.  We just lost my uncle, my fathers twin.  Talk about a different place and time.  Two brothers raised in the 1920s and 30, World War II veterans and passing away 45 years part.  My uncle lived about twice as long as my father.  That is my earliest memory.