A woman has shared a touching story about keeping her mother’s memory alive visiting her former home on Google Maps.
Sherri Turner, who goes by @STurner4077 on Twitter, wrote: "I look at my mum’s old house on Google maps street view, the house where I grew up. It says ‘Image captured May 2009’.
"There is a light on in her bedroom. It is still her house, she is still alive, I am still visiting every few months on the train to Bodmin Parkway, her little pink car will still be in the garage, but I will have taken a taxi from the station and when it arrives she will be standing in that doorway, smiling and waving, smaller than the last time I saw her.
"We will play Scrabble and watch Tipping Point and there will have been no pandemic, no other deaths, no as-yet-undiscovered illnesses.
"And I won’t know how perfect it is and I wouldn’t go back and say, even if I could, because sometimes it’s best not to know.
"I take a Screen Print of the house, with the light on, because it won’t last forever, and one day the Google van will go back down that street and replace her house with someone else’s and though there may be a light on in the window it won’t be her."
She later added: "Thank you for all your comments on this - so many I'm not keeping up - sorry! My mum would love that you are all reading about her x."
She added: "And in case anyone hasn't seen the comments, you can actually see old versions of street view by clicking the clock icon top left. It will only appear if there is more than one image and is only available on desktop. So if the van does come back, the image isn't lost after all."
One Twitter user replied: “This was so moving. I did this many times with my mum’s house, which was my childhood home, but the image has now changed. You don’t just grieve for [the] person you lose, but everything that goes with them, the past you had and the future you won’t get with them."
And a second wrote: "Last sentence made me tear up. After my grandma died (it’s been many years now) I made the mistake of looking at the sales ad for her house. I broke down crying then, because it was her house, a house I visited so often since I was a small child, but now it was empty and cold."
