Do You Remember When?
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The whole time between Thanksgiving and Kwanzaa is filled with days of remembrance.
In the weeks around the winter solstice those of us in the Northern Hemisphere remind ourselves that we live in a universe where light will push aside the dark, where seedlings will sprout after their long cold sleep, where hope springs into the world unexpectedly, unlooked-for. It is a season of gathering for many, and a season of memories.
What are some of yours? Spirited family debates over a Hanukkah first-night table, the smell of frying potato latkes in the air? Grateful eyes as a present is opened that tells someone they are truly in your heart? Champagne, chocolates and laughter on a long-ago New Year’s Eve? Candles, prayers, and the solemn joyous celebrations of religious holidays?
These are times when stories are told, and old traditions are pulled out of beat-up boxes from attics and garages. We remind each other of details, revising our own memories when someone says: “No, that’s not the way it happened…and that was my bicycle you crashed.” Maybe there’s a pause as we speak of those who have died, and they take their place in the web of remembrance we’re weaving.
Not all our memories are warm and candlelit, of course. You might remember the hushed year when Mother was so ill just before the holidays. Or the years of bitterness when the family was all too angry to be in the house together. Or that frightening year when your parents’ friend who drank all the time just stayed and stayed. For some of us every childhood holiday was an occasion for tension, for fearing the peace would be broken, for being reminded of everything we were not. These are memories we don’t return to gladly, and yet slowly we come to terms with them, acknowledging that they are what they are, and we can’t change them. We forgive where we can, heal as we must.
All of these memories—the images and smells and sounds, joyous or troubled, fond or harsh—all of these are part of each of our stories.
James Hillman, who wrote a book on the spiritual journey of aging, The Force of Character, says that we “re-remember” the story of our lives again and again, reinterpreting and even revising old events in the light of new information, experiences, and insights. “Now I see what really happened.” “That’s what she meant.” “I didn’t realize until just now what that must have been like for you.”
Memory and imagination intertwine, Hillman says, with memory supplying the raw material of our experiences while imagination draws connections and conclusions about the world and about ourselves. Our identity is a narrative we create out of those raw materials and connections over time: What have we seen? What have we done? Who did we seek, or find? Who have we been?
Memory is the key to our ongoing, developing identity. Until it isn’t.
It’s Christmas morning. Some of the adult children and grandchildren are gathered around the parents’ tree. Presents are unwrapped; hugs and kisses and thanks are exchanged. The father watches his wife open presents. He grows still and withdrawn. He begins to look under the tree; he moves things around, looking under piles of paper, looking under the blanket around the tree stand. He swears softly.
Someone asks him what’s wrong, and reluctantly he says, “Did anybody see a little box wrapped in silver paper? I know I put it under the tree last night. I can’t find it.” It’s a necklace he’s looking for, the perfect necklace he found weeks ago. He’s hidden the box from her…somewhere. Everyone searches. It’s nowhere to be found. His face is stiff as everyone tries to help him get past this moment, let go of the search, give the memory time to come back to him.
It never does.
Years later, I know all too intimately what my father was feeling in those excruciating moments. Where could that thing be? Is it possible I didn’t bring it out last night? Am I sure I remember wrapping it? How could I have possibly forgotten this?
Medical testing has assured me that I’m not—currently—on the same trajectory that eventually left both my parents debilitated and dependent on others for their every need. I am not an expert on the topic of memory loss. But I do know what that kind of moment feels like. I know some of you do, too. And I suspect everyone is close to someone who does.
It is extraordinarily frustrating, that moment when the thought, the word, the recollection we’re looking for just won’t come. It’s frustrating and it’s frightening. I know intellectually that in my mid-50s I am a very far cry from where my parents were in their eighties. Still, emotionally, I am confronted by the specter of my own diminishment. Amnesia is my family legacy.
One year I took my father out for a drive. I talked to him about places we’d been, things we’d seen, memories such as this one: My parents, my sister and I are standing on the edge of the market square in Nürnberg, looking through a cold evening mist at the oldest Christkindlesmarkt in Germany. It’s an annual event that’s part bazaar, part Christmas party, part street fair. We are deciding we won’t go into the market itself in spite of the half-hour my father spent finding a place to park, because my mother and sister are miserable in the freezing damp.
To this day I know exactly what roasting bratwurst on a foggy night in a busy city smells like, mingled with cinnamon and nostalgia for a half-invisible five-hundred-year-old Christmas carnival I don’t think I ever really visited. I’d like to say “I’ll always remember that night,” but it probably isn’t true.
It seems especially poignant to think of holiday memories fading, the precious images and experiences slipping away. “Do you remember when the baby took her first steps right into the Christmas tree?” “Do you remember when Uncle Michael told that joke in Yiddish and all the old folks were howling and we never could get them to say it in English?” “Do you remember that year when it was so warm right through December that the daffodils started coming up in January?” Think of your own memories; think of how special they are for you.
If memory is the key to our identity, then loss of memory feels like a loss of self. Blessed and cursed with a vivid imagination, I can picture my holiday memories along with all the others fading like photographs in sunlight. I know this is a long way off; I even know it may never happen at all. Still, who will I be if I’m no longer the teller of my own story?
In his book, Remembering Whose We Are, pastoral counseling scholar David Keck writes about religion in the context of Alzheimer’s’ disease. Religion relies on memory, he says, because religions narrate a coherent story of existence and offer us a way to find ourselves in that story. The memory religion relies on, though, is more than what each of us remembers. Our personal memory is just as fragile and fleeting as our individual life, but our community’s memory is long and strong. Keck invites us to imagine the community gradually becoming the memory of the Alzheimer’s patient. He calls this keeping faith with memory. We are held in the community and in the world because the community and our loved ones know who we are. They remember us into the world.
I believe we are surrounded and sustained by an abiding power that urges everything toward connection and creative possibility, a power I call love. That abiding power is our faithful companion, always accessible to us. Love does not forsake us, no matter what the circumstances of our lives. Even when we forsake love ourselves. Even when we can’t remember what it is.
If you want to know where to find that abiding love, look into communities of faith like this one, look to partners and children and parents and caregivers. Look anywhere people are caring for one another, anywhere people are holding their loved ones in the world by keeping their memories alive. “Remember that you are all people and that all people are you,” Joy Harjo writes on the back page of this issue. “Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you.”
And if you can’t remember, don’t be afraid. It will still be true. And we will remember for you.
- Do You Remember When? - October 1, 2013
