On Tuesday I had the pleasure of working a dream with Billie Ortiz, my dream sister and the founder of “Dream Camp,” where I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting my dream family. One of the symbols in my dream was a refrigerator, and Billie offered the projection that refrigerators are metaphors for memory, because we put things in the fridge to preserve them, the way we store memories for use later. I had some big “aha” sensations with her projection, because memory was “up” for me that morning. Before I went to see her, I discovered my computer had a bit of malware on it that we dealt with a few months ago. My physical response was one of pure fear—adrenaline, hot flashes, the shakes. My rational brain knows that malware on the computer is not the same as being attacked by a large predatory animal, but wherever that fight or flight response is triggered, the malware pushed a button there. And, as Billie helped me discover, the button is about memory.
It is, I realize, a privileged problem to have, that I store so much of my work on a computer. I am diligent about back-ups, but not obsessive. And the work I store on my computer is a kind of external memory—bookmarks, word documents, photographs. The fear that gets triggered with the potential of a computer crash is the fear of loss of memory.
So, once I know that, I’m curious about where that fear comes from. There are two obvious places: that there is Alzheimer’s in my family, and I’ve witnessed the utter transformation that it brings about. So there’s a fear of loss of self, of a kind of oblivion, of the horror of having my world become unreliable as my memory fails. Yet I remember that when my grandmother got to a place where she no longer remembered that she was forgetting, she was happy again, living in the moment, letting her sweet self shine through. So my imagining is not without a kind of hope, that if it happens to me, I’ll be happy enough at some point on the journey.
The other thread in my family history that is about (at least at one level) fear of loss of memory is the pack rat gene. This is on the other side of the family from the Alzheimer’s, and is the reason I have boxes of family archives dating back generations. As a historian, I understand the vulnerabilities that paper and print archives have; in England when my dad asked the pastor of a small church if he could consult a book of parish records from the 1600s, the book in question was found being used as a doorstop. Flood, fire, neglect, insects, rodents…the Earth finds many ways to reclaim the works of human beings. And yet I preserve the archives as I can, the collective family memory too precious to let go.
Memory helps us construct who we are, how we interact with others, how we move through the quotidian tasks of living. Memory anchors us to family and home, to friends and community, to objects and places. It connects us to trauma, and joy, and helps us grow our conscious awareness. As someone who lives a lot in my head, the potential for memory loss is a big hot button.
There was a button in my dream as well, or at least a button-like object. It was made of metal (which made me think of mettle), and was an example of the things our enemies had been hitting our armies with. Sometimes, even when working a dream with another professional dream worker, the most obvious meanings slide by. In this case, neither of us brought up getting our buttons pushed. The dream reminds me that my buttons will get pushed, as an invitation to explore the response more deeply, and in the process learn something about myself.
Since the family archives moved to my house from my parents’ house, I’ve grappled with the see-saw of desperately wanting to preserve it and honestly feeling my dad’s desire to let it go. There’s a sense of resignation, knowing that when I’m at the end of my life, I will let it all go, and so the wanting to hold on to it is futile. But there’s also the sense that my work with it isn’t done, that there are treasures in those boxes for me to discover, and one of the most important treasures will be understanding myself and my family’s history more deeply. And since understanding, in my experience, always leads to compassion, that’s a good thing. I just pray for the grace to accept what comes, to remember, at least with my heart, that the most important thing is to focus on love.
3 thoughts on “Memory”
I really appreciate this discussion of memory, what it means for you in the present about who you are now, and how you let it connect you to the past. You have a full refrigerator!
Is it terrible of me to say that the image of the parish records from 1600’s being used as a door stop secretly thrilled me? One of the most wonderful and powerful experiences I’ve had is hiking in Turkey. There were these large objects imbedded into the walking path, and after hoisting myself up on them and taking huge steps down time after time, I realized they were big pieces of old pottery and ornamental architectural bits. At first I was horrified, stopped, and consulted our guide. She assured us that this entire region was just full of these ancient ruins, and that you simply couldn’t avoid treading upon them. Sure enough, I noticed these riches everywhere and ended up enjoying the close, working, living relationship we were allowed to have with the past.
Wow. As you can imagine, this really resonated with me. I hadn’t made the connection that in dealing with your computer and with the Alzheimer’s situation you were dealing with the same issue from two different directions. And the refrigerator insight is amazing. I suppose the surface image was there partly because the person with Alzheimer’s is hoarding food.
I remember when our uncle died how his diaries seemed a treasure at first. Sixty years of daily entries in sixty volumes. Wow. I photocopied the first half dozen, the childhood entries, and that alone took reams of paper. And it turned out I never read most of them. Those reams of paper sat in a file cabinet drawer for years before I took them out and stored them somewhere in my house that I can’t locate now. It came to me that one diary (like the WWII diary of Howard Fogg) might be an inestimable treasure, but a whole bookcase full of diaries is often little more than a burden.
I remember reading with horror the story of what happened to family histories in China. It was the custom to preserve thousands of years of genealogies, because of the importance of ancestors. (I assume this means the line of the fathers, because otherwise it would soon get impossible.) Even the humblest of families would have such a record kept through hundreds of generations. Anyway, the Communist authorities ordered the people to destroy them, and millions of such records were lost. And I imagined being someone in that situation. Would I comply? Would I pack my family book in a jar and bury it, hoping it would one day be found again? How would I feel? Would it be like losing a huge part of myself? Would I be able to go on? Would I be able to acknowledge that I could still love those ancestors even if I didn’t know their names?
After thinking about our uncle’s diaries, I started looking differently at my own journals, especially the dream journals. I had been keeping them electronically and printing them up and making backup electronic copies. But I realized that no one but me is ever going to care about forty years of dream diaries. One volume, maybe, but not a dozen or so. So I started keeping them by hand in yummy journals, which gives me great pleasure. Could they be lost someday in a disaster? Certainly. And I would be sad, but I hope I would move on.
I’ve started to include some of my childhood experiences in the novels I self-publish, and I think half a dozen novels in compact book form on a shelf have much more of a chance of being interesting to my descendents than dozens of volumes of diaries and journals and dream-diaries.
But even if they’re not, even if, as is entirely possible, I have no descendents past the generation of my children, it has been valuable to me to catalog those memories. I may lose my own memory someday, and at that point I may lose the ability to read and enjoy my own writing. But until that time, I find pleasure in it. And I expect those childhood memories will be the last to go anyway. I’ve watched relatives with dementia reliving happy childhood memories right to the end.
And beyond? I don’t know what I believe, but I like to imagine what CS Lewis said about heaven, that not only our long-lost beloved people will be there, but also our long-lost beloved things, the house that was torn town, the meadow that was developed, etc.
As long as we have our memories, that is true. I can close my eyes and be back folk dancing on the skating rink under the stars with Jim and his accordion, even though Jim is long gone and so is the skating rink. I expect it will be there with me on my deathbed. But if not…
When I made up my list of the Ninety-Nine Names of God, one that I included, and the one that often brings tears to my eyes when I do my prayer beads is this: God is the One Who Remembers.
Thank you both for your thoughtful responses. I love the image of climbing over the ruins, Kim, and what that says about a culture so rich in history. Karen, the dream I had with the refrigerator came before I knew about the food hoarding, so that surface link wasn’t there for me. I love the name of God as the One Who Remembers. I’ve often thought that, but not that concisely. It helps me let go of the regrets I have about not getting all the family stories recorded while I could.