From Your Minister
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Lately, as my Labrador retriever has been reaching the final days of a long, happy life, I have felt moved to sit with her and share, sometimes aloud and sometimes in my mind, memories of our 14 years together.
Stroking her arthritic, sleeping body, speaking to a dog—so deaf I now sometimes have to tap her even to tell her to get up to eat dinner—I walk back through our times together.
My old dog is happiest sleeping now, and while she enjoys being petted, it doesn’t cause her to do much more than stretch in her sleep when I sit by her. I am doing this not for her joy but for my own, using memory to channel my grief about her slow and steady departure. I tell myself that even now, as she is no longer that frisky puppy I used to know, as she can no longer jump or swim or go on long hikes, she is still the same dog she has been, and I will always get to have our memories.
When my mother died I made a photo album for my then-six-year-old daughter, telling her the story of how much her grandmother loved her. Telling her that story (which interested me far more than it did her) allowed me to cherish specific memories, to create meaning with them, to claim them going forward into an unknown life without my mother, to shape her presence in my new life in particular ways that would give me comfort.
My old friend Chris lost his wife to a completely unexpected heart attack. He had been with her since their freshman year in college and suddenly, almost forty years later, he was making his way without her. Chris begged us to tell him stories about his beloved that he might not have heard before, things she said or did with us when he wasn’t there, things unremarkable enough that neither she nor we might have felt compelled to mention them before. He didn’t say so, but it felt like as long as he was having new experiences of her, through hearing the memories of other people, she was still in some way alive.
I come from a long line of southern storytellers, who would sit around the dinner table for hours and talk about things that had happened decades before. (Or kind of happened. The events described that I had been present for were often told very differently than I would have described them myself, but I learned by elementary school not to argue with the storyteller.) Now, with all of those older relatives gone, I have become the keeper of some of those passed-down memories, and I wonder how reliable I am as a witness, how much the stories I tell might deviate from what “actually happened.”
When my daughter was young, her favorite bedtime stories were the “tell me about when you were a little girl” variety. Through long nights in the rocking chair, I remembered countless bits of my childhood that had lain untouched for decades. No one had ever expressed such interest before; I had never had cause to remember them. And yet there they were, folded up in a dusty old suitcase just waiting for me to shake them out and put them on again. Slipping into them helped me to see the world through my daughter’s eyes, to remember what it was to be small and new on the planet.
Years ago, when my then-partner and I moved from Minnesota to Boston, we took special care to help the three-year-old next door say goodbye. Arthur had run in and out of our house as if it were his own, relied on us as extra parents, knew that he could always count on a snack or a game or a snuggle in our house. We brought Arthur over as we packed, had him help with the cleanup of the house, held him while we waved together at the moving van pulling away from our house.
Yet, his mom told me, later that night he said he’d like to go over and have dinner with us. She reminded him that we were gone, and when that didn’t sink in, she walked him over to show him the now-empty house. When they walked in he began to wail. “Where’s the REAL house? I want to go to the REAL house!”
Sometimes memory is more real than the present. I know that when my old dog is no longer on this earth, there will be times when I will still see her around the corners of the house, still feel her walking beside me or leaning on me, still hear her stirring in her sleep. Those moments will be bittersweet, but they will be affirmation of our life together.
When my daughter was three, and I was leaving on yet another business trip, she cried and said she didn’t want me to go. “I will be right here, in your heart,” I promised, touching her heart. “But my heart can’t smell you, or hold your hand!” she responded.
Memory has its limitations, to be sure. We can’t smell it, or hold its hand. And yet, its presence brings depth and texture to our days that would not otherwise be there. Used well, it is a gift for connection, and healing, and living fully in the present day.
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