Roses in December: When I Am the Only One Who Remembers
June 21, 2025
“God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
— J.M. Barrie
I have been navigating all of the thoughts and emotions of losing my mom over the past several months, but as she entered hospice last week, those thoughts and emotions have become more intense. Some are easier to name than others. It wasn’t really until last night, sitting in the car with our daughter-in-love, processing our visit with my parents and what is to come (she and our grandson will be leaving Tuesday to visit her family in Wisconsin for a month), that I found a word for this swirl in my heart.
When she gently asked how I was doing, I heard it slip out:
I feel lonely.
Am I alone? No. I am surrounded by a beautiful circle of people who carry my burdens in visible and invisible ways. They pray over us. They bring meals, run errands, clean my house, host groups so I can rest, and they give the priceless gift of simply being with me in the ache.
But there is a different kind of loneliness that helpers, and meal makers, and prayer warriors cannot reach: the solitude of being the last keeper of a family’s memories.
As an only child, I am becoming painfully aware that when my mom goes, and someday my dad too, I will be the only one who remembers the shape of our earliest stories.
There is no sibling to turn to and say, “Remember when…?”
No one to remember moving from Texas to Arizona, a single mom and her 4-year-old daughter. No one to remember cool Eegees (at the original shop), or the year we spent driving every day from Arizona City to Tucson and back so my mom could work downtown. No one else sat on the edge of her bed while she brushed my hair, and my little hands brushed hers, hearing secrets that belonged only to those soft, ordinary moments.
It is more than nostalgia. It is the weight of realizing that the archives of the years when it was just mom and me, or my family’s first chapters, are stored inside my mind and heart alone. Research shows that only children often feel this burden in grief; psychologists note that without siblings to share family stories, the sense of isolation can deepen during times of loss. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly 18% of families in the U.S. have just one child[1], so this is not a rare ache, but it sure feels uniquely solitary.
And it’s not just mine and my mom’s stories. It is also the memories I hold from the early years with PJ, when it was just him and me, before Roger and I got married. Memories that no one else holds quite the same way I do. They sit in my heart like fragile heirlooms, and sometimes the fear comes: What happens to them when I am gone?
It is a comfort to remember that I am not the only one who has felt the deep, holy loneliness of bearing something precious alone. Even Jesus Himself knew the ache of isolation. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). He walked the road of human loneliness so that none of us would ever truly be alone again. Even when we're physically walking in a lonely valley, we have hope that He is always with us. The very real truth that the Triune God chooses not to stand back from our pain and our grief, but steps into that pain and holds us there.
Mother Teresa, who knew a life poured out for others yet filled with hidden loneliness, wrote: “The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.” And yet she spent her life reminding us that even in our most deserted moments, Christ stands beside us. What a reminder that even in our valleys, there are still seeds being planted.
It is not modern writers and theologians who bring this subject of loneliness and pain and the love of God to the light. Early church father Augustine once wrote, “God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.” If He cares so tenderly for me, how much more does He keep these hidden treasures safe in His heart, even if they fade from mine? That is an incredibly powerful truth. My God cares! My God is present! My God carries the memories with me.
So tonight, as I sit with this ache and these questions, I remind myself that while I may be the only one left to speak some of these stories aloud, I am not the only one who holds them. The same God who knit my mother and me together in laughter, on road trips, with Eegees treats, and in whispered conversations still holds every detail with tenderness and care. Even when the voices who shared these moments grow silent, none of it is lost. In His keeping, the garden of memory is never truly tended alone; and perhaps that is where this lonely ache finds its softest comfort: in knowing that nothing precious slips through His hands, and neither do I.
If you, too, find yourself carrying memories that no one else remembers, a lone keeper of your family’s stories, take a deep breath and know this: you are not truly alone in this tending. Every memory precious to you is even more precious to the One who formed you, who formed your mother, your father, your child.
Let yourself sit quietly and name a few memories. Whisper them back to God like a prayer of gratitude. Tell Him what they mean to you: the way the hairbrush felt in your mother’s hands, the silly drive-thru moments, the secret jokes, the quiet tears.
Trust that the Keeper of Eternity does not let even the smallest detail slip through His fingers. You do not tend this garden alone. And when the ache of loneliness feels too heavy, remember the promise of Jesus: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
May you rest tonight knowing that your stories — and your soul — are safely kept.
[1] http://pewrsr.ch/1IjCMwT
Photo by Pema Gyamtsho on Unsplash
