Reconstructing a Bad Memory From Grade School: Death of a Grandmother

 

By Dr. Patrick A. ODougherty

This is a Creative Visualization Experience from a photo of my grandmother smiling in Maple Lake, MN.

The Maple Leaf is a symbol of Canada.

 

Upcoming Convention in Philly July 2016:

   In Philly a Catholic family in the medical field could easily have a nurse mother doing the graveyard shift with a back to back shift option written into the contract!

 

Flashback: Catholic Maple Lake, MN

  A bad memory I had as a child was a relative going home to die. I have a photo in my minds' eye of my grandmother Emma Martin ODougherty standing in front of her home in Maple Lake in front of the oak tree wearing a large black flowing gown. The date of this picture was around the time of the beginning of the space program flights. She was keenly interested in the space flight narrative. She had migraine head aches and she was unable to do housework or raise her children as a result. Emma was a small intense brunette and she was rigid, intelligent and perfectionist. Her image and personality type all fit the migraine headache profile. She hailed from Trois Rivers Canada in background and my grandfather met her in the post office in Bruce, Wisconsin while he was teaching in the community.

      It was very difficult for the nine children in her family to have a mother with migraine head aches. Consequently, None  of the family talk about her. They had no source of income and the father Thomas ODougherty died on the way home from school and was found in a snow bank. The eldest son Loyola ODougherty enrolled in Nazareth Hall seminary following the death of his father. Charlotte ODougherty an eldest daughter raised the children and cooked the meals. Shortly after the photo was taken of Emma ODougherty in the flowing black gown, Charlotte who had moved to 432 University Ave received a phone call from her mother, Emma ODougherty and told her she was going to move in with her.  She was dying. This was quite a note to send the children of James ODougherty family who live at 3317 West 44th street in South West Minneapolis. 

A nurse is better than no nurse at all. Charlotte was not a nurse. 

 

Eidetic Memory: you memorize what you read. You posses a photographic memory.

Read this page, memorize it and repeat it by heart.

 

Carl Jung was a student of Freud. The importance of memory is not the accuracy of the memory but what you remember.

Keep Recalling and Adding what you are doing in the present to this memory.

 

Five senses of Emma Martin, smell of home made bread, sight of blue house in Maple Lake, MN, hearing of great conversations, feel of an oak tree bark, taste of apple pie.

 

Exercise:

Meditation is a function of a prayer to ignite memory. My meditating on this Maple Lake photo leads to a flame.

The photo consumes itself in a flame in my mind's eye. A loci of recall memory lane branches out from this remembering.