Memories

What's your first memory? Was it at age one, earlier or later? There was a time, I dimly recall, when I could remember as far back as age three--but nearing the other end of my life I no longer know if those memories are real or inventions of my imagination. Perhaps it doesn't matter. In truth what we believe to have been is all that matters; it is what shapes our narrative and for better or worse our personal mythology--or what some call their life history.

The only reason I can recall a fragment of events at such a tender age is that it is a record of the moment when my infant brother and I were separated. What precipitated that I do not know but an educated guess is that my mother found it impossible to deal with us both, while living in dismal base housing at Fort Leonard Wood in the not so delightful Pulaski County, Missouri. It must have been an enormous challenge, and a cultural shock for my mother, thrust into motherhood again, and displaced to a part of the world very far from home.

I imagine it was explained to me, but it isn't in any memory I recall. One day I was there and the next living with my Grandparents. How long that separation from my family and my brother lasted I do not know and there are various accounts in family folklore but I do know that it had a profound effect on me and my brother. I was vividly reminded of this recently when my brother suddenly and sadly passed away--and I no longer have his memories to guide our recollection.

My cousin reminded me in the midst of this tragedy that the emotional statute of limitations on childhood trauma is over. He is right, of course, and while I lay no blame I cannot deny our separation at such a young age had a lasting impact in our lives. Reflecting on it in the wake of my bother's passing and the effect it had on our relationship well into adulthood I was unable to gain resolution--where memories should have been was only a void, a gap that had me questioning what if any part of our childhood I could say happened the way I remembered?

And that, apart from the grief brought me to the essence of this post. In the present world every event can and often is recorded, if not for posterity than in the belief we will one day relish the opportunity to revisit, to gain some essential truth about our lives or dwell on remembered joys or pains to gain some personal insights. Will it change the way we live? I doubt it. Today we are watching as history, unarguable facts the world at large witnessed and in some cases participated in, are rewritten before our eyes. Wretched moments--because these have their own particular hold on us, vanish into thin air--there was no Holocaust, 9/11 was a hoax, the January 6 insurrection was a peaceful protest, and slavery was never an unspeakable institution.

If we cannot trust our memories and history truly is a mythology writ not just personally but corporately by those who choose to edit what was to alter what will be, then one day we will have no real past, only a collection of manufactured events that will leave us wondering who we are and why. I wish I had recorded my grandparent's recollections when i had the chance, but I was so intent on forgetting what was unbearable, so intent on living in the present I did not see what was vanishing before me.

My charge to you is this. Live in the now--because the past is nothing we can alter and the future is not ours to know--but capture what is, record those defining moments and pass them along so that our children's children will know long after we are gone not just what we experienced, but who we were, and why.