Tag: memory

My Generational Fallacy

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Maxwell and Finnegan

I am a middle-aged white man. And I can recognize some, but not all, of the societal privileges afforded to me for no other reason than I am a white man. I feel it is important to establish that upfront. I have accomplished things in life partly due to my efforts and partly because of my accident of birth. Accident of birth. What else can I call it? In addition to being born a white male, I was also born in the United States. Again, not of my choosing. But here I am, and I accept the failings in my life as my burden, my fault. I take full ownership of my failures but share my victories as being due to my efforts, others’ efforts, white privilege, and the combination of those factors occurring here in the United States.

The paragraph above is enough to exclude me from the Libertarian party, who believe they alone are responsible for the air they breathe, and they’d like you to thank them for making enough for you like it’s Reardon Steel.

With that backdrop established, let me tell you a little about my upbringing. My first best friend was black. We shared the same first name. When he or I moved away, I’m not sure what happened (I was young and cursed with a terrible memory), my next best friend was Jewish. And the thing is, it didn’t matter. I didn’t care. Or I hadn’t learned from society to hate yet. The only thing I now hate is willful ignorance. I learned so much from my friend about Judaism, its holidays, and the amazing food! I was raised Catholic (as was most of the state in which I was raised). I assumed everyone was Catholic. It wasn’t until much later that I learned Catholicism was itself but a branch of Christianity and Christianity a branch of organized religion.

Throughout my life, until I was probably 30 years old, I assumed that the problems of the past were destined to be solved by my generation. Racism being foremost in my mind and the easiest to solve. It was just wrong! That’s easy to fix, I thought. It was, I thought, the low-hanging fruit of justice, and I assumed I no longer lived in a country responsible for strange fruit (listen to the song). I also thought later in life that gun violence in America would be easily fixed after 26 first and second-graders (and educators) were slaughtered at Sandy Hook in Newtown, CT. In both situations, I learned there was a generational fallacy in my thinking. I assumed my and subsequent cohorts, armed with better information, compassion, and the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, would see the obvious path to social justice. How I was wrong! Chronological snobbery? Maybe. I now believe it is a combination of regional biases and willful intransigence that prevents solving society’s problems.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be 94 years old now if he had not been murdered at age 39 in 1968. What he did, what all who fought for civil rights in America in the 1950s and 1960s, and accomplished, cannot be appreciated using today’s time prism. The Overton Window has undoubtedly shifted on civil rights and many other topics.  What they accomplished then, at great personal risk and, for some, with their lives, is monumental. However, the Overton Window is not a slider moving in one direction but a pendulum constantly swinging between the warmth of progress and the cold intransigence of those benefiting from the status quo. “Make America Great Again” is the most recent example of this philosophical ossification. “Progress” is seen as a threat to their privilege. Equity and equality are, ironically, seen as unfair. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs are seen as nefarious as Affirmative Action. After George Floyd was murdered by the police, DE&I programs blossomed nationwide, and workplaces and communities benefited from new thinking. Unfortunately, today we see the pendulum swinging the other way and DE&I programs being cut in red states all across an even more divided America.

I saw an interview with Martin Sheen recently. He has been arrested for protesting more times than he can count. And it has cost him roles. He said, “If what you believe doesn’t cost you anything, then you’re left to question its value.” He is 83 years old now. And I couldn’t help but appreciate his passion.

I confess to being a West Wing fanatic. I adored that show (especially the first four seasons written by Aaron Sorkin). I think the season finale of the second season (Two Cathedrals) is the best episode of television ever created. That said, and while I remain a devout fan, I also think it ruined politics for me and a generation of those like me. I assumed life was a meritocracy and not the plutocracy and cleptocracy it truly is. I appreciated the sincere debate depicted in the show and assumed that was how politics worked. Today, there is no debate, only sound bites, social media gotcha’s, net zero wins, and tribalism, where a foundation of facts cannot be agreed upon. We can’t even agree on what is a fact!

Martin Sheen lives how Aaron Sorkin writes.

Contrast that with today’s news that 25-year-old NASCAR driver Noah Gragson was suspended indefinitely for liking a disgusting meme laughing about George Floyd’s death. He’s 25 years old. So, no, I no longer believe my generation will solve society’s ills no more than I think my children’s generation (or Noah Gragson’s) will move us forward.

They say the first step in solving a problem is acknowledging there is a problem. We haven’t graduated from that simple first step.  There is no low-hanging fruit when those on the other side will embrace any atrocity rather than let you “win.” And for that, society loses.

My generational fallacy has cost me. Not as much as those in the fight every day. It is a cost for which I feel the need to apologize. It has cost me from seeing the issues clearer. Evidence of that is easy to see. Reread this and count the number of times I say a version of “assume.” However, contrary to the familiar American saying, in this case, it has only made an ass out of me.  I hope to do better. I dream of our country doing better. And now, not generationally.

The Spectrum of Art

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“All art conspires toward the condition of music.” Walter Pater

I agree with Mr. Pater, one of Oscar Wilde’s influences and a proponent of Aestheticism (Art for art’s sake, i.e., neither social nor political).

Artists must create. It is in their blood and must be birthed onto the canvas. I use the word “birthed” purposely. I have seen the great effort artists willingly undertake to create art from nothing. As the blank page stares back at the writer, so does the white canvas mock the artist. The effort required to transform nothingness into art is akin to birth.

I once needed help with where to rank photography in the order of the arts. Artists must labor (pun intended) over their work to bring their vision onto the canvas, but the photographer “simply” captures the world before them. Now, I do not dismiss the intimate understanding the photographer has over their instrument nor the “eye” they must exercise when capturing the scene before them. However, historically at least, once the shutter is activated, most of the artistic influence of the photographer is exhausted. True, in days of old, efforts could be taken by the photographer with the development process (more additive here, more time there) to bump up the contrast or wash out a double exposure. And today, image editing software can transform any photo into a masterpiece with masking, editing, filters, and many other tools. But is that just window-dressing of an existing property? When I was younger, I would have agreed. However, I now believe photography blends perfectly well into the prism of art without hesitation or equivocation.

Allow me to diverge into another art form, music. Here, Mr. Pater is spot on. I have always said musical genres speak to the individual emotions of humans. Whatever mood I am in, there is music that matches it. A sad song can spark creativity in me. Black Sabbath can assuage my anger. Jazz can even out my temperament. Classical can elevate my senses. Smart, clever lyrics can drive me to my keyboard. A David Gilmour solo can transcend words altogether. Unlike other art forms, music elicits emotion from the audience via the ears rather than the eyes. Certain composers can tell a story with their music without the employment of any other sense.

I once attended a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat major, where a fully-fledged story presented itself in my mind. As it began, the piano sounded very playful, almost childlike, not in its complexity but in how it meandered in and out of the string instruments behind it. At some point, I imagined the piano as a child and the stringed instruments as the parents and extended family. The strings would play a piece first, and the piano would respond, often playful but still in keeping with the string direction. It was always strings first and then piano. Sometimes the piano would go off into a new direction without accompaniment as if a child was wandering around in the safety of the family’s embrace.

The second piece introduced the wind instruments (who’d been there all along but had yet to stand out). Because of the increased complexity of the music, I envisioned the piano as a teen beginning to interact with the wind instruments, which I saw as friends/schoolmates/lovers/colleagues. The piano would sometimes lead, and the wind instruments would follow. And then the strings would return with the refrain, telling the piano to come back into the fold and remember its responsibilities.

The third piece saw the ascension of the piano to a full-grown man (I say man because Emanuel Ax was the pianist, it could have been a fully-grown woman). The piano-led, and the strings followed. The piano assumed the refrain to which the strings (and sometimes the winds) would follow, but always with a sense of individuality and playfulness in the piano. It was as if the piano was now the patriarch/matriarch of the family and responsible for it, but it had never given up its individualistic flair. Perhaps I heard what I wanted to hear to make the story fit, but after the first piece, I anxiously awaited the next piece to see if my storyline fit- and it did every time.

By the end, I was in tears, weeping for the story Mozart had told me that day, written 234 years before. I had listened to the concerto over the previous few months, anticipating the performance. Still, there was something about seeing the piano up front, the strings extending as wings behind it, and the wind instruments centered in the back that made the story explode before my eyes. If this all sounds incredibly corny and uncultured, or if I’m missing the true intent of the concerto, I apologize. But as I sat there applauding, tears running down my face, I knew I had seen the storytelling power of music.

Painters can do the same thing with their medium. Stand before a Bierstadt landscape, and I swear you can hear far-off thunder or birds chirping. Stand before a Monet, and I promise you’ll see the wind interact with the haystacks. Stand before a Michelangelo, and I swear you’ll see muscles tense before your eyes.

Ultimately, the difference between painters, sculptors, composers, and photographers is one of perspective. Painters and sculptors offer you their vision. Impressionists do not provide you with a photorealistic version of the scene before them. Instead, they offer you their interpretation of that scene. You, the viewer, can choose what to see in the offering. Stand up close, and you’ll see the artist’s effort, brush strokes, and palette knife sweeps. Stand back, and you see sunlight where a smudge was, passion where disparate colors touched up close. Same with the sculptor. Go to a museum and listen as a docent regales a group with seemingly pretentious interpretations of the work before them. But do listen! Because while you may disagree with things being said or not “get” specific points, they offer you a vision into the artist, a glimpse into their intent.

The difference between viewing a painter’s or sculptor’s interpretation of the world before them and the photographer’s is a shift in perspective. As a viewer of paintings and sculptures, we are a passive audience of another’s life. As a viewer of photography, perhaps because it is easier for our 3D brains to insert us into a realistic 2D scene, we are the center of the world, active rather than passive. We see a photo of the shore and envision ourselves in that place. We see a picture of the mountains and ourselves on the plains before them. We may recollect a memory from a photograph of a familiar subject that fills us with the accompanying emotions. Alternatively, we may inject ourselves into an unknown scene, envisioning ourselves in that space and projecting matching feelings.

Mr. Pater is correct in that all art aspires to the purity of music in that music exists beyond our eyes. But in the end, whether it is photography, painting, music, sculpture, poetry, or prose, they all live on the spectrum of art. Ultimately, the spectrum of art is another analogy for the full scope of human emotion.

Memories in a Bucket

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When I was young, my sister and I were charged with going to the Newport Creamery each night to get my father a pint of Maple Walnut and Walnut Fudge mixed. The bottom half of the pint was Maple Walnut ice cream, and the top half was Walnut Fudge ice cream. We did this most nights. It’s a memory my feeble brain still recalls. My sister is a year younger than me. We lived on the west side of West Main Road in Middletown, Rhode Island. The Newport Creamery was about half a mile away on the east side of West Main Road. Getting there required us to cross West Main Road at dusk or early evening when we were 10 or 12. And we thought nothing of it.

Seeing that road now, both with the volume of traffic and speed at which cars travel, it’s a wonder we saw our teens. And that’s one of the problems with viewing yesterday’s events through today’s lens. When we were younger, speed limits meant something. And while Aquidneck Island was always a tourist spot and Navy town, traffic back then was a fraction of what it is today.

The Newport Creamery holds a special place in my heart. Many an evening, after a Little League, Babe Ruth, American Legion, or High School baseball game, or just on a warm summer evening, “The Creamery” was a welcoming place to celebrate a win or lament a loss. I thought they had the best chocolate chip (and coffee) ice cream. And their Junior Hamburger was my favorite. Two, with a side of fries, please! And then a Turtle Sundae my way (chocolate chip ice cream, hot fudge sauce, caramel sauce, marshmallow topping, whipped cream, and a cherry).

They also have a milkshake made with iced milk instead of ice cream called an Awful Awful. Despite its off-putting name, it is so called because it is “Awful Big and Awful Good.” The challenge on the menu said if you could drink three, you’d get the fourth free. How could a teenage boy not accept that challenge? And at least once, I got my fourth free Awful Awful. Always vanilla flavored (for me), the marginal return on enjoyment waned dramatically on the second and third, only to rally for the free one. And then I’d walk home feeling the liquid slosh around inside me like my stomach was at high tide during a named storm.

The Creamery also sells half gallons of their ice cream in plastic buckets. Every home in Rhode Island has a few buckets holding various items (buttons or ribbons in the craft area, multiple nails and screws in the garage, marbles and toys in the kid’s room). And if I had access to the photographs in every home, I could find a photo of every child with the bucket on their head. I know I have them of my kids.

The Newport Creamery has had financial troubles in the past decade or so, and while I don’t know what the future holds for any of us, despite heavier and faster traffic than when I was a kid, I hope The Creamery exists for a long time into the future. There are many Awful Awfuls to drink and plastic buckets for kids to wear. And while my sister will argue that Frosty Freez is the iconic summer ice cream stand on “the island,” especially given that she worked there many a summer (and I concede to making a pilgrimage there a few times each summer), The Creamery holds many more memories for me.

No one has a perfect childhood or flawless life. But there are idyllic memories of youth and raising children, and The Creamery holds both for me.

Fighting Eternal Oblivion with Squiggles and Cheese

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As I write this, I can watch the gel ink dry behind each subsequent word. Dried into the paper, permanently a part of the wood fiber. Immortal, eternal as long as the paper exists. Put the paper in a vault, and the words live forever. There they will remain preserved, filed, recorded, and likely unread.

The same can be said of humans. As the ink dries, we move on. The relentless marching on of time. Relentless. Never ending, never pausing, never caring. Once the ink dries, it is done. It is the past. It is our past. Our memories. We are the vault. And our vault, memories, and existence exist only as long as anyone who experienced something with us or heard a story about us exists. Once we are gone and those who recall us are gone, so are our memories, the ink, the paper, and the vault. That’s life. Our life. Everyone’s life.

There will come a day when the very thought of us as individuals will be lost. There will be a day when the last person who remembers you or recalls a story about you recalls it for the last time. You will be lost to eternal oblivion. Sure, there are individuals whose memory transcends time. Shakespeare, Caesar, Keith Richards, but for most of us, we will be lost to time, just a number in the ever-expanding pile of humans that once existed.

Is there a way to combat this eternal oblivion? Or is this simply an exercise of someone who just celebrated a birthday and is reminded that the road before him is shorter than the view in the rearview mirror? And, let me add that the road before him is neither clear nor guaranteed.

Clifton Fadiman said, “A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naïve, it may be over-sophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality.” Creativity (the arts) is our antidote, our cheese. Write a book, and it remains available forever. The internet is the newer, better Library of Alexandria. Paint something, sculpt something, and it exists long after you perish.

In episode eleven of Cosmos, Carl Sagan said something I’ll never forget, “What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

Another favorite of mine, again, capable of stringing together words far better than I’ll ever dream of, Oscar Wilde said, “All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.”

So, create! Rabindranath Tagore said, “The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.” So, plant a tree! Paint a picture! Write a story! Write your story! Eternal oblivion awaits us. Leave something behind that outlives you, outlives the memory of the last person to recall you. Will you be remembered for it? Maybe. Maybe not. However, your creation will endure.

As the ink dries on that last word, I wonder if anyone will ever read this. I wonder if anyone will ever remember it if they did read it. Create, people! Our ink is drying!

Eyes

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Grief is a hole carried deep within. It is the oxygen-deprived void, generally unseen by anyone else, living within our soul whose weight varies from day to day, moment to moment, from a quick catch of your breath to drowning suffocation.

Queen Elizabeth II died yesterday at the age of 96. Unless you’re 95, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t sign that lifetime contract today. My cousin died yesterday, too. Life did not afford her 96 years. Absent the global outpouring of tears, her loss is no less devastating than that of the queen to her family. Grief is sure to wash over her family as sure as the queen’s.

Regardless of your feelings toward the British monarchy, whether you feel it is superfluous in 2022, an anachronism to modernity, or the steady hand on the till as time unfolds, the queen’s passing marks the end of an era. She worked with fifteen Prime Ministers throughout her long life, the first being Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill was born in 1874, a mere nine years after the end of our Civil War. She served as monarch for 70 years or about 28.5% of the entire history of the United States.

To remember a time when she was not monarch, you would have to be over 75 or 80 years old. Consider the changes the world has undergone during the time of her reign. Of course, few of us knew her. I can only project my interpretation of the video and deed she presented to the world. However, it seems that, whatever you feel about her, she sincerely believed in the queen’s duty above all else. No doubt, this came at a tremendous personal sacrifice. Whether it was a private life forfeited after her uncle’s abdication, a restructuring of her relationship with her husband Phillip in deference to her role, or the official position she had to take over any maternal impulses she may have felt, forbearance and sacrifice was her duty.

Grief is a hole carried deep within. However, there are occasions when it is visible. Words record the pain she endured at her father’s passing, King George VI, in 1952. Modern technological capabilities captured some insight into her grief after the passing of her husband. As we isolated ourselves in reaction to the savage viral death brought by COVID-19, the queen sat alone in St. George’s Chapel on that day in April 2021. Captured by Jonathan Brady of the Associated Press on that day, here she sits with her grief.

Look at her eyes. That is grief. The hole carried deep within, momentarily visible in her lost stare. I know that look. The paralysis grief creates, the mental gymnastics, and incomprehensible lack of understanding one goes through envisioning a world without a loved one are visible to anyone remotely aware. It is the eyes that expose our grief to others. It is through the eyes that tears flow. It is through sight that we feel sympathy and empathy. And it is through our eyes that grief reveals us shattered and lost.

If we are lucky, time softens the edges of our grief. We catch our breath at a memory, song, scent, or place, but we no longer suffer the drowning suffocation as often. We learn to control access to the most devastating memories; we learn to remember without reliving them. It is not an easy skill to learn.

The queen is gone. So, too, my cousin Gwennie. People worldwide may mourn the queen’s loss as if a steel and cement pillar of our societal foundation has crumbled and left us on infirm sand. Her family and my cousin’s will know grief exposed through our eyes. Be a comfort to those showing the signs of grief’s pain. None of us are immune to its theft of air any more than death steals life. The hole grief creates in its immediacy is devoid of oxygen. Help each other breath.

Field of Memories

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Newport Historical Society Collections Online

Baseball has the ability to transcend time. Look at that photograph. Can you hear it? Ball meeting bat. Can you feel the contact in your hands? Not the connection of springtime baseball, the shock traveling from your seemingly electrocuted hands through your arms and into your teeth, but the solid contact made only in deepest summer. What position are you playing? Are you the batter? The pitcher? Infield? Outfield? On deck? On the bench? Can you hear the people in the stands? Can you smell the grass during the warm summer months? Look up. Can you see the soft white clouds watching the action as they carelessly pass overhead. That is baseball, and this was Basin Field in Newport, RI, in 1910.

Basin Field has hosted baseball games since the railroads backfilled the area initially used as a drainage area for steam engines. It is one of the oldest baseball fields in the United States and a gem.

Bernardo (Vlardino) Cardines was born in Venafro, Italy on November 15, 1895. After his father emigrated to Providence, Rhode Island, and paid for his son’s transatlantic crossing in 1907, they worked as tailors on Thames Street, eventually living with his aunt and uncle a block from what would become his namesake ballpark. Bernardo registered for service in June 1917, was drafted in April 1918, and was killed in action in France during World War I in September of that same year. Initially buried in France, his remains were exhumed and reburied in his hometown of Venafro at his father’s request, who had returned to Italy. Basin Field was renamed Bernardo Cardines Field in 1936. He may have been watching this game in 1910.

Perhaps it’s the story of the Italian immigrant, who, it is said, played baseball at the YMCA, or maybe it’s that baseball field that lives in my soul. It might be remnants of the recently played Field of Dreams game in Dyersville, Iowa, between my beloved Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago Cubs intertwined with scenes from the movie. It might be the link I share with my late father and brother, knowing we all played at Cardines. It could be that I’m just getting older and find myself warmed by the glow of glory days past, thinking of my teammates and adversaries, games and plays, moments and memories. Maybe it’s memories of watching Sunset League games played under the lights as a kid, knowing the 9 pm horn would sound from the fire station across the street and still jumping out of my skin when it went off. Cardines was the equivalent of Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium as a kid. The dream of eventually playing there was the equivalent of playing in the major leagues.

The photograph above struck me as a handshake reaching across time. The players in that photo are long gone. And yet, we share the experience of playing baseball on the same spot of land in Newport, Rhode Island. I know nothing about them other than they enjoyed the game. And that’s enough for us to be teammates and foes, brothers and friends.

Hard Drive

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My heart, like a hard drive, is permanently partitioned. Part of it comprises my 26-year marriage, the raising of my children, the hopes and dreams I had, and the sickness and death of my wife. The other part is unwritten upon, ready for a future I can’t even begin to understand. The problem is that at any given point it can switch between partitioned sections rendering my personal operating system glitchy and subject to crashes.

Such was the case this past week. While performing within normal parameters, my system suddenly switched to the hidden partition, and it has left me grief stricken and paralyzed. There was no warning. I understand that this switch was not the result of bugs or a virus. It is the result of a significant loss and the fact that I know I will never be whole again.

The hard part of all of this is that while attempting to begin a relationship with a woman, my first since I was 22, this wave of grief has me questioning whether I am being unfair to this woman; if I am incapable of giving myself wholly to another given my permanently partitioned heart. The grief tsunami that hit me this week, like all others before it, came without warning. There needn’t be a trigger. More likely, it was a thousand paper cuts, memories rising up during the past few weeks, poking me in the heart, not causing any immediate damage but collectively, over time, shattering my heart again. Now I am emotionally frozen, inextricably operating in a painful past, and incapable of addressing the present or the future.

I like to write because, while I assume that no one will ever read what I write, it usually helps me to understand my position on a topic or my underlying feelings if I put them down on paper (or up on a computer screen). However, while this usually is the case, dealing with grief is a topic no reasoning or processing can vanquish. I was incredibly sad for several days over the past week. It seems that every small event over the past few weeks correlated to something either my wife did, we did together, involved our kids, or it was something we planned to do together. Today I find myself bridging the realms of sadness and anger, perhaps on the path toward processing this wave and getting on with life, perhaps not. Perhaps these steps lead nowhere. Perhaps I will transition back to sadness, or onto negotiation, maybe even onto acceptance. I don’t know how to end this note. All I know is that I am stuck where I am, and no good wishes or caring hugs can hope to dislodge me.

Tony Webster, the protagonist in Julian Barnes’ excellent book The Sense of an Ending comments at one point that he “avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival” and “for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels.” He is a character who, like all of us, has a faulty memory, and has used Time to smooth out the jagged parts of an ordinary life to put meaning to his existence. I have never been one to live in the past. In fact, because of a terrible memory, I remember very little about my past. You would think that would force me to live in the present, to appreciate those around me, to smell the roses and embrace those around me. However, while I did not live in the past, I neither lived in the present. I did not appreciate those around me and assumed daily events had no significant bearing on my expectations of the future I believed would exist. No, I tended to live in the future. Everything I did was for some future date. At 15, I had figured out that in the incredibly far off year 2000, I would be 35, imagining what life would be like. I have always faithfully contributed to my 401(k) in the expectation that I would cash it out at some point and travel the world with Lisa or buy a two-room shack on a beach somewhere to live out our lives together. Now I find that I live in the past. Not the archetypical love of any lost high school glory, but of my life with Lisa. Even after eight years of caring for her as she underwent one barbaric medical treatment after another, and experiencing her withering and eventually dying while our children and I sat around her, I cannot help but to relive the life we lived together as a couple and a family and lament paradise lost and a future that will never be.

And so, awash in memories and residing in the past, my permanently fractured hard drive (my heart) is expected to give over control of the operating system to a brain that understands that life goes on. A mind that knows that while these waves of grief will never recede and will continue to destroy me forever, the troughs between them will, over time, expand, and it is in these troughs that I am expected to forge a new life and build a new future. It all seems so logical for a computer system, but my heart bleeds blood, and my eyes cry tears, not bits and bytes. Makes me wish I were a computer sometimes. I don’t know how to end this note. It just is what it is.

My Shifting Memory

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‘Tis in my memory lock’d,

And you yourself shall keep the key of it.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, iii, 85

In an episode of The West Wing, Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman experiences a breakthrough in his repressed, post-traumatic stress disordered memory when he realizes that the sound of music reminds him of sirens following his being shot during an assassination attempt on the president. Pleased with himself, but wary of any ongoing associations, he asks his therapist why he shouldn’t be worried. The therapist, while packing up his belongings at the end of the long session, replies simply, “Because we get better.”

This scene reminds me that while time goes on, if we’re lucky and listening, we understand ourselves a little better each day. So it is with my grief and the grief of my children following my wife’s (and their mother’s) death 80 days ago. We seem to have undergone, while no one was looking, a transition in grieving. We have all felt it and didn’t know why we were being buffeted by our loss differently than before. No longer are we, exclusively, thinking of the night Lisa died or the days and weeks leading up to that day. Rather, because of daily life, we see the future and are having a similarly difficult time grappling with the concepts of never seeing Lisa again and that lasting forever. “Never” and “forever” dominate our thoughts now.

I don’t know where any of this falls on the great wheel of grieving, and I don’t care. I find the entire Elizabeth Kübler-Ross paradigm, as presented in popular culture, flawed. I do not see it as a linear progression, while acknowledging it was never intended to be. However, society seems to think that you go cleanly from one phase to the next on your way to eventual acceptance and a return to “normal.” Instead, I find that through each step of grieving, as we did in our various phases of Lisa’s illness, we establish a new normal each day. Some days string along neatly with the previous while others strike us as different. However, each day presents us with what we consider to be normal. We get up, we shower, we go to work or school. When we repeat this structure enough, it becomes our “normal.” When our thoughts focus on a specific concept of grieving, that too becomes our “normal.” And so, we each seem to have transitioned to the difficult process of understanding and accepting “never” and “forever.” That is not to say that we cannot, at a moment’s notice recall the last night or last few days, but the details are becoming fuzzy around the edges. No longer can I recall the names of all of the medications on which Lisa was dependent at the end. I can recall their color but not their names.

This transition to a new normal also carries with it significant guilt. If I can no longer recall the names of the medications, which were so important to her comfort and survival, doesn’t that, by extension, mean that I am slowly forgetting Lisa? When details fade, it portends an overall and irrational fear that all will fade. When I think of Lisa now, the first thing I think of is not her death or even her illness, but her smile and her laugh. This reordering of thought worries all of us. The mind is an amazing thing, and we carry memories in our mind the way we think we recollect the actual event having unfolded. And what was critically important to me might not have been important to either of the kids, while something so critical to them might have escaped me and faded in my mind before it settled into theirs. This is another form of guilt. How can I not find the important events in my children’s lives important enough to remember?

Memories are ethereal and, ultimately, shapeable. Just as witnesses to an accident fail to make reliable reporters, so too, I find, that our memories morph into something we can easily recall. And each time we recall that memory we recall the memory shaped in our mind, no longer the actual event. Over time, the recollection of the actual event fades, and we can only recall our individually shaped memory. Perhaps that is why I can no longer recall all of the medications. My memory is being reshaped. I would like to think that Lisa has had a hand in reshaping my memory. Over time, perhaps, she will reshape my memory to no longer feel the horrible pain of her loss. It is locked in my memory, and she has the key.