Missing Memories

I am haunted by things I remember and by things I don't remember. Perhaps the latter is even more disturbing because those things I can't recall sit just on the edge of my grayed out memory and taunt me.

Stark, life-altering memories are jarring in their clarity. I have spent decades of my life expunging the threads of events which determined my life course, I didn't want to remember everything...that was made obvious by how painful the memories were when restored. But remember I did, losing and gaining almost simultaneously. Grueling work to go through the process, but now, as those memories have moved back into the tapestry of my life, existing as facts but not in control my every move and thought, I look to the periphery.

The periphery contains the forgotten things, those events which touched my life but were not remarkable enough to be engraved for future recollection. Yet here I sit, futilely scratching the sand to release the details.

Emma Valenteen and Reginald Stabilit

My mother talked about her parents, the grandparents who were gone before I was born. I didn't listen, I guess. I try to pull up the details and there are none. I have pictures, but not stories.

My father told us how his father and stepfather were brothers. Not all that strange a circumstance in families in the early twentieth century. My grandfather died of tuberculosis (or so I think), and his brother stepped in to care for his sister-in-law and married her. That's all I know and it might not be the whole story or the right details at all. I just know my grandmother is buried between two men who have the same last name.

Residing in that gray area is how I ended up at Gettysburg College over others closer or less expensive. No one I knew chose Gettysburg, but that decision changed my life in so many ways. It led to a choir tour within the United States each spring; a month-long choir trip to Europe in my sophomore year; and such diverse courses as Eastern Religions, Music Appreciation, Sculpture, and Albert Camus seminars, all choices made in a nod to comprehensive and diverse education within my English major.

www.isolatecyclist.bostonbiker.org/

I remember I biked throughout college, but have no memory where. As a young mother, I left the apartment often, to escape the cooped-up feeling it gave me, but don't recall where I spent my time or how. For all the journaling I have done, these bits of life didn't make it into those pages, and while not life-altering, the fabric is torn, incomplete, unsatisfying.

I often wonder what determines those things we remember and how we remember them. Trauma has dictates all its own, but the commonplace, the normal....where do those things go to hide? I am at a point in my life where I want to recall the days playing in ocean waves, the random exploration of shops and restaurants in small towns I would pass through. I need to put a face on the woman who shared her heart-wrenching story of losing her first child to stillbirth, a story that changed forever my empathy for people suffering loss.

I won a cooking contest once. I remember the recipe, the surprise, but have no recollection of the cooking event, the interview, the other contestants, and the fleeting notoriety. I owned a cake decorating business, have photographs of many cakes, but have little memory of the long work days and client appointments, creative design sessions and delivery and set-ups. I want to remember.

Will memories continue to pile up just outside the edges of remembrance? Or maybe it is normal that even significant events can be blurred, then forgotten. As a writer, it would seem I should have known which ones to capture and hold, which ones to set free, and have been the keeper of that decision. Of course, we don't always know the importance of something until it is gone whether a memory, a trauma, or a feeling.

I will continue to reach into those recesses in the hope of shining a light. All of these things are a part of who I am and I need to remember, to connect the threads, complete the picture.