Memory isn’t the facts of the past. It’s a tumbled river stone, sharp edges blurred with years of remembering, retelling.
March in the woods, and for weeks, on the daily morning walks with the dogs, I scour the ground, looking for the kiss of jack-in-the-pulpit and wild ginger pushing up from the dark earth.
My husband Paul and I had spent days ripping out invasives, mostly Amur honeysuckle and garlic mustard, and shearing choking vines, but I worried we had disturbed the natives. I searched where I remembered the Jacks and ginger blooming, but with all that we’d torn out, the woods looked different: the path was wider with pockets of disturbed earth and stumps where the honeysuckle was so thick we could only chainsaw it down to the base. Without the towering honeysuckle, more light flooded the woods. I was disoriented, though I know the little six-acre loop intimately. But some markers were gone: where the honeysuckle tunneled, where the spice bush branch tugged at sleeves, where the rotten tree had hung up mid-fall. I couldn’t remember if this was the bend, or if the bend was 15 yards farther. I was dizzied from the bright sun, and shadows lurked where they didn’t exist before. I wasn’t sure I was even looking in the right place for the budding natives. I felt lost.
My high school girlfriend Amy posts a photo of the notes her daughter Katy wrote when Amy suffered memory loss as a result of a concussion. On small, square, ripped scraps of paper: “evry one is ok,” “i am 7 eliza is 5 jude is 9,” “casber did two days ago,” “we have seen the grand canein,” “we did not get in a car accident,” “it is not late,” “you will remember,” “you will be ok.” Some s’s are backwards; there are no capital letters; words are misspelled, and that all feels so right when writing about memory loss.
My own mom—while in the emergency room with my dad who had been admitted for congestive heart failure—suffered an episode of memory loss in August 2018. One minute she was telling me and my husband Paul about what had transpired since they’d arrived at the hospital, and the next, her face dropped open, and she said, “I’m not right.” Then she started a series of questions: asked in the exact same order with the exact same words, repeated multiple times a minute.
Once Mom was admitted into her own room in the ER, Paul had the idea to write out a timeline not so different from Katy’s notes. My brother, Travis, my sister-in-law, Hadden, and I added specifics: “We’re in the hospital,” “You drove here,” “Dad is okay,” “Anne Webster died,” “We came home from Canada yesterday for her funeral.”
These notes to our moms, these desperate offerings, were a kind of prayer. A cry for a return to normalcy—a crude attempt to reassure, remind, reconstruct. The 8×11 sheet of paper—the only thing we could give Mom that brought any comfort—is strikingly similar to Katy’s notes. Simple. Clear. Necessary.
But unlike Katy, we revised: our own answers unreliable. We crossed out information we misremembered, deleted details we thought would add clarity, but instead added confusion—details we would have included if we were telling a story, but specifics that were useless to recreate a timeline. This was not story time. Mom’s questions were imperative, primal. Her need was desperate. She was insistent. If one of us didn’t answer right away, she turned to the next person. The questions came fast; they were a pounding staccato-ed hunger. When she took a sip of water, we took a breath. The urgency resumed instantly.
We took turns answering Mom; we had to. Her questions came in rapid fire. My brother timed the loop. Twenty seconds: “What happened? Where are we? Where’s Dad? How did we get here? Why are you wearing funeral clothes? Who died?” Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Her hammered questions demanded nails for answers, something to be sunk with one blow. She had to know the answer instantly and was asking the next question before we finished our response. It was a base layer conversation. Something that would never exist in a short story or novel, because there was no subtext, no switching of topics or ignoring of questions. Everything, for once, meant just what it meant.
We were told she was having a stroke or suffering an episode of transient global amnesia, something none of us had ever heard of and was only cursorily explained. My only reaction, in between answering her questions, was silent pleading: No, please, no, please.
Fairly quickly, probably within a couple of hours, the doctors felt it was probably amnesia. This was good, very good, but still Mom persisted with her repeated questions. At the time we didn’t understand the episode would be short-lived. I’m a writer. I know the word transient, but there’s nothing “short” about time when your loved one has lost her memory.
Instead, what was in my mind were synonyms for the noun: hobo, vagrant, vagabond, street person. How had my mom, who the day before had yelped and giggled when she caught the biggest lake trout of the day on a steely Canadian lake, become this other?
To distill it down to Katy’s words— “you will be ok”— the prayer, was all we could do.
I’d seen memory loss before: my paternal grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and my maternal grandmother suffered from dementia. But these were creeping losses, built of a different kind of methodical grief, searing for its relentlessness and the knowledge that time will only make things worse. But that time also allowed for adjustment, for reckoning. Mom’s loss was instantaneous—a head injury without the injury.
And just 17 months before that awful day in the ER, my father-in-law, 64, a brilliant man who traveled the world promoting fiber optics before anyone knew what that was, and with several patents to his name, died as a result of glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. He was cursed with perfect memory, probably until the day he died, but his tumors were in the left frontal lobe, the center of language control. This electric man, who was the white-hot center of every gathering, who made a story from nothing, who talked to anyone anytime and left them smiling, was locked. What is it to have memory but not be able to share it? So much of memory is the exchange, the back and forth, the conversation. Without it, memory echoes for one. This, too, a kind of memory loss.
When I couldn’t find our wild ginger, I searched along our rural road where I knew it grew. I squatted down, bent my head so that it was parallel to the ground and found it, just emerging, its green leaves still a tight wave. I had been rushing the season as I often do, my memory not reliable. Now knowing what to look for, I took the dogs to the woods loop. I worried I still wouldn’t be able to find the ginger, but there, just off the path, its leaves beckoned: tried and true, just as I remembered.
It is obvious that my husband started Mom’s note because he created a timeline, whereas my version would have been scattershot notes all over the page, a confetti of thoughts. In the end, it was mostly Paul and Hadden who wrote on Mom’s map, my brother and I talking to nurses and doctors in Mom’s room in neurology and Dad’s room on the cardiac floor. Both Trav and I trying to reassure Dad that Mom would be OK, silently begging and pleading the same for him.
Of Katy’s notes, the negative statements are particularly intriguing as they reveal conversation: “we did not get in a car accident.” The questions aren’t necessary because the answers reveal what they were: I can see Katy’s mom Amy in her hospital room, worried but not sure why. Around her, all of the signs that something is wrong, but no memory of what that is.
In the hospital, our clothes—the same we had worn for my father-in-law’s funeral 17 months before—were what made Mom ask, “Who died?” At first, it was horrible to have to keep telling her one of her oldest and dearest friends had passed. She relived learning the tragic news again and again, but then her brain seemed to turn itself off, though the questions kept coming. It was like she knew the answers but had to ask anyway, that only through our exchanges could she relearn the missing memories.
And now, more than five years removed from that day, I see that’s often how memory is. We need the stories, the markers, and signs—how our parents first met, when we were born, how we caught the big fish, when we totaled the car. The remembering intertwines with the retelling, enriches the original, lays the foundation for the next big fish.
Once a friend of mine accused me of creating my own narrative for our relationship. I was stunned into silence—and all these years later, I’m still not sure if she’s right or not. Isn’t that, at least in part, what a relationship is? An arc? The retelling of our stories to each other and ourselves, and the way we feel about the story of us is what a relationship is, I think. How could it be any different?
Memory isn’t the facts of the past. It’s a tumbled river stone, sharp edges blurred with years of remembering, retelling. It’s the tree once hung up in branches that now molders on the ground, the imprint of a fox pad melting in the snow, a rubbed raw tree trunk beginning to heal itself: an impression, a fact, now changing.
My mom was released from the hospital after 36 hours. When we saw her the next morning, she was coming back to herself. She clutched the timeline between her fists, studying it. She didn’t remember coming to the hospital, but she remembered we’d celebrated her birthday six days before because she recalled the red-topped, plastic storage containers she had asked for and that my brother had given her. Initially, she didn’t recall her other gifts, or the big trout she caught, or the drive down from Canada, but later all that would come back too. In the end, she would get all but about 24 hours of her memory back.
My dad was still in the hospital, would come home three days later—his life changed—but saved by outstanding doctors, nurses, and their care.
Mom threw out the timeline, wanted no reminders of a time where, for a while, she considered herself weak and frail, not at all the fisherman wrestling the trout, not at all the woman she really is. She feared a repeat occurrence, feared the episode foretold a fate similar to her mother’s, but all the follow-up revealed the event for what it was: an episode of transient global amnesia triggered by what Mayo Clinic calls “acute emotional distress.” Mom is a retired nurse. She’d been scrutinizing Dad for weeks, witnessing the compounding symptoms in the remote wilds of Canada, the closest hospital 60 miles away. They’d discussed seeing a doctor, but wanted to wait: Paul and I joining them in Canada for our annual week of vacation at the end of August. And then one of her closest friends died unexpectedly.
Now, my own memory of these events is hazy at best. That horrible day is just flashes: talking to Mom, watching her face change, answering her questions, and then finally getting to see Dad for the first time in the cardiac ward, helping him order dinner from the hospital’s menu. Other than that, it’s the sound of my heels on the hospital floor as I walked from one unit to the other. What stays, of course, is the terror.
When I remember: I hold my breath. It all could have gone so differently. We were so lucky.
On the woods loop again, winter this time, and the dogs fly over the ridge that borders the creek. The wind is up, but I pause to hear if they splash into the water. Then I see what they smelled: the fox, 80 yards up the path, loping towards me. I freeze, and he closes the distance between us: 50 yards, then 30. He’s so close that I see his black boots are muddy from the rain. At ten yards, I hear his paws on the wet leaves. When he’s just three yards from me, he veers off through the winter woods, where I track him until he disappears.
I let out my breath, replay the encounter in my head. Again and again for the rest of the day and the next morning and still, I have the padding fox on wet leaves in the strong breeze.
After the earliest largest snowfall on record, a week after my encounter with the fox, I follow his fresh footprints in the snow, and I experience them both as memory and as something new at the same time. A moment returned to, a moment missed but still shared. “we have seen the grand canein.” “We came home from Canada yesterday for her funeral.”
The very idea of memory has changed for me. Of course I mourned my grandmothers: they were both strong, loving forces throughout my life. They taught me to roller skate, bake cookies, bait a crab trap, fish. It was certainly difficult to visit when they no longer remembered me, but I could understand; there’d been clues coming at us for years. Mixed up in my own heartache of those losses was the sorrow I felt for my parents and their weighty grief: I listened to the wistfulness in their voices, valued my own memories more. Near the end, my dad’s mom’s childhood memories, the only that would survive. It was as if he never existed. A frontrunner to his own death: him—his story—forgotten.
But my father-in-law’s diagnosis and demise altered my understanding of memory. A brilliant, active, engaged man transformed and taken, silenced in a matter of months. Our shared memories—of hanging wood duck houses, learning to ice boat, playing cribbage and Farkle, swimming in the middle of the lake, discussing the spark of creativity late into the beery night—all of those recollections taken, but before he was gone. We could tell him our memories, but then it was just telling—not sharing.
And then my mom’s memory loss, and though my dad was coherent the whole time he wasn’t under for surgery or procedures, his prognosis of congestive heart failure, so much scarier than hers—the possibility of loss of both of them, compounded by the loss of shared history—it changed everything. Always I’ve been frightened to lose them; the notion appears in my fiction again and again. But to lose memories with them is a whole other kind of loss.
When we’re together, I consciously catalogue experiences as we’re in the moment. Memorizing and filing. Inscribing. Dad and I catching native brook trout on the little creek that borders Paul and my property. Mom teaching me how to cook softshell crabs. Both of these acts so intimately tied to memories we already have—the countless fishing trips we’ve all been on together—the food we’ve eaten, sometimes from our own catches.
I worry, at times, I’m too much trying to make the memory and not enough living in the moment. And even while memorizing, I know I won’t remember it all. Only shards, and those will wear down to cobbles. But what else is there?
And isn’t the point of being in the moment—noticing everything? Gathering, collecting—so that there can be recollecting? I tell myself this. Sometimes I recognize my obsessing is inhibiting the experience. But also each gathering is a chance to remember and build. Life is a layering: new memories sifting over the foundation of all of those days on lakes and streams and oceans. It’s as it is when we fish one of our favorite lakes above our cabin in Canada. Every single time: we call to the granite bear-shaped boulder, “Hey Bear,” point out the sole pine on the tiny rock island, and note the huddle of white birches where an old friend used to say that if we passed them and hadn’t had a bite, we might as well go home. If we didn’t share in the rituals, it might be bad luck. The fish gods would think we don’t remember. And we very much do. We very much do remember.
Memory: this fragile, faulty, precious gift. This mark of being and living, giving and receiving. This tumbled stone we carry with us—until we no longer can.
The generosity of the natural world is, in part, it’s timelessness. And when it changes, often it provides evidence of the change. The rotten tree falls into the lake, but its branches still show. The spring’s turtle nest is no longer in use, but the egg shells remain. The seed pods from the lady slippers reveal where flowers bloomed. The markers remain if not the original.
At home, the woods is both timeless and how I track time. The changing leaves, the emerging Jacks and ginger, the thrush’s return. The deadfall hanging, and I swear the tree will come down that day, but it hangs for years until finally it’s down one day, and I can’t remember if it still hung the day before.
I anticipate the changes, want and need the reminder of the passing of time.
On the woods loop in fall, the buck has blazed a rub into a small maple: the bark is peeled back, the tree’s white meat a beacon for where he’s been. I wonder if he’s the same buck who made the scrape deeper in the woods—a cleared round patch of dirt, free of leaves, a few onion grass bulbs dislodged. He may be one of the deer that has been bedding down in the back-east corner of the woods, where bits of hair lay with leaves. All these signs, markers of history, come at me in much the same way as memory. Fact and fiction: the evidence of a track or a scrape paired with the story of what that animal was in that moment under the moon or in first light.
Paul and I talk about his father, his inventions: a new solo paddling system for canoes, the collar to help dogs walk with a loose leash, new homebrewing tools. We see inventions and laugh about how excited he would be about them, how much he would have loved to call the creator, and we talk about how he would take any idea we’ve ever had and explode it out into something way more complicated, but way more sophisticated, too. He’s with us, of course. The way he was, and in new ways—our memories giving him to us in the present.
The morning Cal died, a bald eagle flew over the house as his wife Nancy and son Seth waited for the coroner. The eagle, we tell ourselves, was Cal. And every eagle afterwards, for all of us—and for many of our family and friends with whom we shared the story—is Cal. The story continues, new memories layered with old.
Once, Paul and I were walking in his hometown of Minneapolis when we saw a boy on a bike blow through a stop sign and get hit by a car. His body somersaulted into the air, and when he landed on the pavement, he didn’t move. We ran and were the first to reach him. I knelt to him and took his hand as others called 911, grabbed towels and ice, diverted traffic. Still he didn’t move. His helmet was untouched. Finally, he blinked, and miraculously, tried to sit up. We made him lay back down, and he started to cry. I told him he’d be OK and asked him his name, and on the third try I understood—Tyler. I told him the ambulance was on its way, to hold on, and then he passed out again. I whispered, “You’ll be OK.”
After Tyler was whisked away—awake, talking—one of the cops asked if we thought Tyler had lost consciousness. Though the event had just happened, and I knew for a fact he’d been in and out of consciousness, I couldn’t answer, I couldn’t remember. Paul, gently, said, “Yes.”
Memory: this fragile, faulty, precious gift. This mark of being and living, giving and receiving. This tumbled stone we carry with us—until we no longer can.
When I first saw Katy’s notes, I couldn’t stop myself from reading them again and again. I knew the horror and tension in that room, the desperate need to answer the questions because it was the only thing we could do. The prayer the answers became.
But memory isn’t the hammered, urgent need Katy and I saw with each of our moms in the hospitals. It is sedimentary: layers and tracks, returning ephemerals and morphing shadows. It is buck rubs healing over, mushrooms fruiting on dead oaks, listening and retelling until the moment blooms beyond itself: transforms.
