On Memory
I’m watching the show Severance, and memory is an enormous part of the show. The main characters have had their minds surgically modified – their memory is now spatially dictated. But when they’re at work, they know nothing of the world around them. At home, they know nothing of what they do at work.
The main character had lost his wife, and his sister said, “not remembering her for 8 hours every day isn’t healing.”
It’s my reality. I don’t know if my retention of memory is unique to trauma survivors or neurodivergent people, but I don’t remember much. I have isolated memories, but the rest is gone. As I discovered at work yesterday, just a few hours can do that.
I buried a husband in 2009. I remarried, and buried my second husband in 2015. I remember things about them. But their voices, their faces, most of what I felt around them – is gone. I know I loved them, and not a lot more.
I pray my faith in Jesus isn’t misguided, and that I will see them again. Maybe this is part of what Paul was thinking when he wrote to the Corinthians: “For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12, NRSV UE),” Is memory the same? Is it lost in a haze, and one day the fog will clear and I’ll remember everything?
There are things I wish I could forget. There are things that I don’t remember, but I still feel the physical and emotional scars of events now hidden from me. Does a tree make a sound if there’s no one to hear? Is it a memory if I cannot recall it? Can it hurt me if it does not, in fact, exist in a recognizable form?
I read an Agatha Christie quote recently, “One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers.”
I wish I’d kept a journal, all those years. I believe this is what I must do, now, as a way of holding onto whatever there is, of value or no.
The thought that made me pause the episode in shock: the sister’s comment about forgetting not being healing. Is that what still holds me down? I don’t remember much or most of anything, but it’s still eating away at my soul.
If I don’t remember, does it still hurt?
I’m glad you’re here.
If you’d like to support my writing,
Paypal
Buy me a coffee