After his father died, my friend said he had been struck by “the finality of forgetting,” the way people disappear when the last person who knew them passes away. He tried to tell his children about their great-grandparents, but could only give them a sense of their ancestors’ lives during the Depression, not who these elders were as people.
He and I shared the sadness of not being able to give people we love our memories of other people we had loved, in the hope they would love them too. “It’s as if earlier generations die a second death when the last generation to know them forgets about them,” my friend said. I knew what he meant. It’s a part of growing older I didn’t expect, the fading out of a past I’d thought I could pass on into the future.
I thought of that when my younger sister, and only sibling, died eight years ago. She had lived with my parents for years before they died and spent a lot of time with our maternal grandparents. (My dad’s parents were killed in a car accident when I was very small, and I don’t remember them at all.)
She remembered a lot more about them than I did. But her memories were not so much of them as people in a story, but stories told in the way a biographical dictionary gives the details. She had that kind of mind. She remembered every phone number everyone she knew well ever had, and even the minor characters in a complicated family history. She mostly gave me facts, but they were facts I didn’t have.
Had I lived the life my sister lived, I would not have remembered nearly so much detail, but I would have remembered a lot more stories. I have a storyteller’s mind, remembering the narratives, the stories one can share with others.
My sister’s memory wasn’t entirely reliable. When she told stories I knew, I could see how she shaped them, made them too smooth and tidy to be completely accurate, and so I listened to her tell stories I didn’t know with some (hidden) skepticism. She remembered and I didn’t; but the way she remembered often made the memories feel more distant.
Even when my sister was alive, my memories were already a little distant, a little blurred, a little faded, and I had forgotten many. I had the subject lines but not the body of the text. When she died, it was as if most of the books in my library had been taken away in an instant.
Carrying Memories for Others
Like many people, I’m guessing, I don’t care for the memories for myself so much as for the people I remember and the children I know: The first as a kind of tribute and the second a gift for my children, given in the hope that they will connect with their history and with people who had loved them.
My storytelling doesn’t really do that, though. I can tell stories well, but I can’t tell the stories I remember in a way that makes the people I remember alive for my children. I can describe some things my parents and grandparents did, but not what it meant to be there when someone I knew and loved did them. My children respond to the stories with real interest, but I know from their response they don’t see what I see. I feel the temptation to invent details to make the story more effective, but I resist it. And I know my grandchild, now 3, won’t see anything of what I see.
Worse, they hear the stories I tell as my story, a story I’m telling about my own life. No matter how vivid I make the picture of these memories, what they’ll remember years from now, if they remember them at all, is me drawing the picture—the way you might remember not so much the painting but the painter standing in front of it painting.
Their children and grandchildren won’t even have that. They’ll have the picture of their mom or dad painting a picture of a painter and his painting, the painter and the painter much less detailed. I’ll eventually be as forgotten, as lost to memory, as my grandparents. So will my wife, their grandmother, a loss that disturbs me even more. What might remain will be something like an old-fashioned slide show. Ten slides? Twenty? Probably not more.
That’s not a happy thought, but it’s the way things are. I want the people I love to know and love one another, even as memories, but they won’t. The communion of saints seems to me the only hopeful answer. The beloved dead are gone, lost to memory, but not forgotten. They and the beloved living will never be connected in the way I’d hoped. But God binds them together. They are all perfectly alive to him and we can hope he will someday introduce them. The forgotten dead have disappeared, but not forever, and even those who never knew them will meet them and know their stories.
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