Unexpected coincidence recaptures stolen memory

The coincidence was a “Kodak moment,” a snapshot of a time long forgotten. For a grieving daughter, the unexpected encounter brought a vivid picture, one captured through the eyes of another.

The timing couldn’t have been better.

“I got called to jury duty — every year I get called — and 160 of us were sitting in a dark room with bad coffee,” Dana Berry of Aurora, Oregon, said, smiling as she recalled the tedious wait. “I started chatting with a lady a couple of seats away, and she said, ‘You remind me of someone I know, but I can’t put my finger on it.’” Connecting the dots as they chatted was a good way for Berry to push back the gray sadness that day. Grief had felt close in the damp winter. The loss of her mom had come after years of caring for her parent while watching memories fade with Alzheimer’s disease.

“It was about 10 years ago that my parents started having problems,” Berry said, recalling how her dad was diagnosed with dementia and Parkinson’s disease, then her mom with Alzheimer’s shortly thereafter.

A final goodbye to her 74-yearold mother only a year after her dad was gone had left an empty place in Berry’s heart. Remaining were photo albums, reminders of a beautiful life.

For Berry, now sitting in the jurors room, remnants of her sorrow were eclipsed as the two women explored possible links to each other. Berry had been in the music industry in California and later in Portland. A semi-retired Realtor with a son and daughter, her network was complex. Then an image emerged. “She asked where I grew up,” Berry said, adding that she had told her the rural street name when she discovered the woman had lived in the town she knew well. “That’s when she said, ‘You remind me of a lady that lived on that road, but I haven’t seen her in years. Her name was Linda something.’ “

Berry’s world stood still. “Weaver? That’s my mother!” Berry had exclaimed as myriad questions and never-heard stories followed. Suddenly, this daughter was transported back to a Sunday morning decades earlier.

Berry remembers how she had just finished singing with the church worship team when a woman from World Vision was invited to the podium. The presenter told the audience that she and a small team of ladies were planning to go to Africa to empower women. They were looking for one more “great woman” to join their effort, Berry said.

“My mom, who had never done more than sit in the pew and go to a tea I forced her to go to, leans over to me and says, ‘I want to go to Africa,’” Berry said as she remembered her astonishment and skeptical thoughts. “This woman who has lipstick applied perfectly, clothes perfect even before she goes out to check the mail, ‘You’re going to go to a Third World country?’ “

By November 1995, Berry’s mom was on the plane to Mauritania, Africa with a group of seven women, including the wife of a U.S. senator, the wife of World Vision’s then-president and a National Geographic photographer.

“It was one of my mom’s most treasured experiences in her life. She adored all the women she traveled and worked with over there,” Berry said of her mother’s mission trip from more than 20 years ago.

Now as Berry sat in the jury room side by side with the senior director at World Vision USA, the attentive daughter saw the trip — and her mother — through another’s eyes.

“She told me, ‘One of the things we so loved about your mom was her leadership, the way she prayed and how she touched the lives of the women,’” Berry said, reflecting on the effect of this astonishing tie with one person out of a room filled with 159 others.

In her typical humble way, Berry’s mother had never shared that part of the story. And as the years passed and her Alzheimer’s disease had progressed, the memories were forever lost.

“To hear that,” Berry said, pausing with emotion, “it wasn’t like my mom did amazing things, but in Africa it was amazing things for her.”

A bigger picture of her late mother that filled the empty spot in Berry’s heart with a long-lost memory — in God’s perfect time.

Lucy Luginbill is a career television producer-host and the Spiritual Life editor for the Tri-City Herald in Washington state.