I, like many others I’m sure, have a love/hate relationship with social media. I love that it exists to help us connect in more innovative ways. I love that the online world allows us to have global pen pals, and that we have a universal platform to share ideas and get potentially useful feedback.  I don’t so much love that we’re still struggling to figure out how much is too much to share; that we sometimes spend more time behind a screen than we do together in IRL.

I recently read a short blog post by Gwen Bell that talked about a friend of her’s who is losing a husband to cancer. She posed a question to her friends for feedback and that question was: “What do you wish you had to remember your lost parent by?”

Being a “motherless daughter” and someone who has struggled for years with trying to connect to a mother I had in my life for such a short period of time (She’s been gone for almost 20 years now), I know what it feels like to wish your parents had left their life story and all the answers behind in a neat and orderly way.  I don’t know that I wish I had something to remember her by so much as I just wish I’d had more time to get to know the person she was and the person she would have become as I grew out of being a child and into a teenager/young adult/woman.  I’m not sure there is anything she could have left behind to make growing up without her any easier.

So, with the advent of social media is it possible for parents to create “lasting memories” for their children – one’s that may be more powerful now than the bits and pieces of my mother’s life that I come across every now and then? Does or can social media allow us to connect to our loved ones in a more real and complete way?

I honestly don’t know. I don’t know how I’d feel if Twitter had been around back in the early 90s and my mom used it to share her thoughts with the world. I might have been grateful to have those little 140 character nuggets of wisdom or I may have been overwhelmed with those thoughts being out there for all to read.

One thing my mother did leave behind was a tattered cookbook of recipes she made for my family over the years. Learning to cook her recipes – the ones I grew up eating -  has been one of the few opportunities I’ve had in my life to try to sincerely connect with her memory. Yes, I am blogging about it and maybe I am doing in an attempt  to connect with others in a way I couldn’t with her.

So, maybe it isn’t such a far fetched idea to wonder what we’d leave behind, be it online or off, to let those we love know we always will.

Thoughts?