Layers (and memories)
I’ve told your story many times. It almost feels like someone else’s story now but when I pause to feel the scars, I remember it’s yours. And mine. It belongs to us and anyone else who is a part of it, even by way of simply knowing it.
The other day I read that memories are a little like computer files and each time we remember something the file gets a little corrupted. Memories change the tiniest bit each time we remember them. Even the traumatic ones. I’m surely not the only one who has complicated feelings about this.
I recently visited southern Utah where mesas sit tall on flat plains. I couldn’t take my eyes off the layers of rock. They looked so bare and exposed. I thought, how vulnerable to share those markers of change. With no thick layers of dirt or trees and vegetation, we see how the wind, water, shifting earth and many, many years has changed them.
In contrast, we humans often bury those layers, hidden in the folds of our brains and corners of our souls. What can we let go so we can be more vulnerable?
Each September your memory (however true it is) prompts me to excavate. I open up my grief and compel myself to share these thoughts with my community in an act of rebellion against my tendency to bury them and our collective tendency to forget that grief is a process, not an event. Grief (a complicated gift) continues to change us, so slowly sometimes that you can’t see it. Like the wind and water shape mesas, grief erodes parts of us, maybe just enough to expose hidden layers. And it also gives us a new shape.
I think I’m okay with my memory of you continuing to corrupt if I can still get at those layers.
My wish this year, on what would have been your 7th birthday, is that we all feel a little more vulnerable. A little more willing to expose our layers.