The good and the bad of remembering

I was lying in bed a little while ago recuperating from breakfast (which I nearly always have to do, because breakfast nearly always upsets my stomach), and got to thinking about memory. About how, while it serves the very useful purpose of providing us with our sense of identity, also serves a very negative function, that of making us feel sad.

Whenever someone dies people send sympathy cards that say, in effect, 'May happy memories of your loved one bring you comfort.' But it's been my experience that happy memories of loved ones just make me feel sad that those times are gone forever. And other memories of the departed loved one make me feel sad because they point up where I could have/should have done better.

It's painful to remember the last few of years of both my parents, and of my stepmother. My father and stepmother in particular suffered from very poor health; my father suffered numerous strokes and spent the last two years of his life bedridden in a nursing home, while my stepmother hung on in the assisted living facility they had had to be all but forcibly moved to, when they simply could not take care of themselves or their home any longer. I know many people my age have experienced similar situations with their parents in the last few years. Whatever positive memories we may have about our parents from when they were in their prime, robust, full of energy and opinions, are darkened by the memory of what their lives became, the indignities heaped upon them by a combination of old age and limited funds. And for the vast majority of us there are memories of our reluctance to go see our parents in their depressing (however nice) nursing homes/assisted living facilities. I myself lived only a 2 1/2 hour drive from my father and stepmother, during the last two years of my father's life (instead of on the other side of the country, which had been the case for most of my adult life), and yet I was rarely able to make myself make that drive more often than once a month. I hated seeing my once-proud father having to be dressed by some attendant, fed through a tube in his stomach because he found it all but impossible to swallow. I hated the ordeal of getting him into and out of the car to take him to see my stepmother, which he was always so eager to do...and then to have my stepmother essentially ignore him while he was there (she, the most loving and generous-spirited of women throughout her life, became quite irascible towards the end). My heart would be breaking for Daddy, while I tried to act cheerful and pleasant. THESE ARE NOT GOOD MEMORIES.

Nor are too many of my memories of my husband's last months, when I was stressed out with worry about money (dealing with the insurance was a NIGHTMARE), on top of the fact that my husband was dying of cancer. I remember once getting angry with him because he had washed a load of clothes while I was at work, and dried everything in the dryer, including some cotton turtle-necks of mine that I never dried in that way because they shrank. A truly petty thing to get angry about, considering the fact that 1) he'd made the effort to help out and 2) he was dying of cancer. I was trying to make his last months as comfortable and stress-free as possible, but one memory after another shows how frequently I failed.

So, somebody out there is undoubtedly saying, just don't entertain those bad memories. Concentrate on the good ones. But, as I said, the good ones can lead to sadness, too. I find that the only good memories that it is not painful to revisit, are those in which I have no particular emotional investment. A very successful costume party I threw in the spring of 1983, in Boston (Carolyn W. was a Hershey's Kiss, I was a Jane Austen book, Large Print Edition, Jim H. didn't wear a costume but brought a bunch of his hats that he would periodically change). Micheal and I walking through the eerily silent, traffic-free streets of Somerville, MA following the blizzard of '78. A visit I made to my brother in Santa Fe, the Christmas of 1987...one pleasant memory after another there. Waking up my first morning in San Francisco, Nov. 1966, and going to the window of my room at the YWCA -- which charmed me by being the kind that opens out, rather than pushing up, and by not having any screens -- and seeing my first S.F. fog, to the accompanying clang of the nearby cable car.

In fact, many of my happy memories that carry no ties to unhappy thoughts spring from my travels over the years, but that in itself makes me sad, as I am scarcely able to travel these days. Am I just determined to be sad? Or would I just be better of without any memory at all?

Ah, but then I would be lost.