memory

Memory II

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

In pondering more about revisiting memories and allowing my mind and heart to be open, I find it helpful to differentiate it from rumination. Rumination is more of a closed loop recollection of an event, as I alluded to in my last post. It relies on the mind replaying the same details and outcomes over and over without an opening. So what exactly do I mean by that? If something happened a certain way and I allow for something else to now be a part of that previous memory, I am not just rewriting history?

Rewriting history would mean a deliberate distortion for a particular aim. To make myself feel better, justify behavior I chose in the moment, etc. That’s not what I mean. By an opening, or an open loop, in regard to a grief related memory, I mean the attitude of mind and heart that there may have been more that took place than I was able to comprehend at the time. It’s an attitude that allows that I cannot at any given time, see and hear and digest all the details around me. It is accepting that my memory of something is not the complete picture – not that it isn’t important or accurate or insightful – just that it might be incomplete. That there could be more and finer detail and perspective than my mind was able to perceive at the time. That attitude allows the opening in which the “memory of a memory” that I missed can bubble up into my consciousness. I didn’t see it at the time or remember it because I wasn’t able to. Maybe the circumstances were just too painful or overwhelming. So it must be looked at again in the mind, almost as if with “the eye of the heart,” like the ear of the heart is to the benedictine practice of lectio divina.

Allowing memory visitation is dedication to a belief that some previously unknown insights are waiting for me to catch up. Their existence and emergence can happen with my willingness and openness. Memories can and do ossify, but who decides when and how? As I shared last time, it’s daunting and lonely to show up for a grief practice that has no social or cultural etiquette. I do it because the revelations and communiqués I’ve received have been sustenance to me and also from some urging to continue that I can’t explain. It feels a little dangerous, too, because of all that’s out there about grief from the field of psychology, especially in the last 10 years. Not that I don’t think psychology can be hugely helpful when it comes to grief, it can and has been vital for me. But it also feels very limiting and outcome driven and overly rational to the point of diminishment. Death and grief can be approached and perhaps understood and integrated more without stripping away all vestiges of mystery.

Memory

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

Is memory a thing to be chosen? Are recollections deemed inappropriate or unhelpful, ones that we should banish? And when they visit us unguarded we should distract from them for the sake of our mental “health?”

I ask these questions because of course I prefer to visit my happy memories. Yet, the even the favored ones of my life come with a certain sadness simply because they are no more. A long time ago I learned to call that bittersweet.

If I’ve visited with my happy memories enough to allow them to just be there and allow that it might include some melancholy for awhile, and to stay with that, sometimes the sadness shape shifts. What I mean is that it doesn’t always lead to the same emotional place or to the same conclusions. Many times it does, and that’s what I mean about allowing it to keep coming back for awhile over time. And then sometimes it shifts – not away from melancholy but to another “memory of the memory” that brings an unnoticed nuance into view, like seeing some amazing detail in a photo that you missed before, even though you’ve looked at it many many times. How did I not see that? How did I not remember it?

You can’t get there by not revisiting, though, and you can keep going over the same happy details the memory has always relied on – same characters, places, sequence of events, and outcomes. After awhile I think that lack of an opening for “something else” to show up starts to shrink the memory until it becomes maybe a little trite? Not worth wasting a lot of attention on anymore? I’m starting to think the story is told and the memory revisited so that unseen (and unforeseen) details have a chance to emerge. As though they were hiding before. Waiting for me to catch up. Maybe waiting for recollecting in a group so others can contribute their threads of memory and allowing space for what may always have been there so it can bubble up. Or waiting for questions to be asked that weren’t asked before and for communiqués to come through to our consciousness that we wouldn’t or couldn’t let in before.

So if I apply that practice to the grief-filled memories I’d rather gloss over, distract from, and even forget? Same thing. But it’s harder, hurts more, and is lonelier. Because there’s not much (any) sweet to offset the bitter in the beginning. The other details haven’t had a chance to emerge because it hurts so much and we turn away. And staying with this kind of “memory practice” (grief practice) might even be looked upon as detrimental or abnormal (it most certainly is by our culture) and I’m not suggesting that it’s for everyone. And to make it all the more daunting, there is no formality to it or training or teachers. So why do it? Well, there’s a chance for the shape shifting, some revelation, and maybe communiqués. And I don’t think these are promised or guaranteed. It’s a practice that has no precedent in my memory, but there seems to be hints of it around from people who lived and died before me. I’m listening and I hear them.

The Thing Is

~ Mimi Ray ~ Leave a comment

A wise friend who understands that grief is cyclical—that it dives down deep and appears to disappear, then comes up gulping—shared this poem with me.

That’s what its been like for me these past months. Going beneath, sifting through the shipwreck of my sorrow. A trove is there, lying quietly, waiting for me.

The Thing Is | Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

As time flows

~ Mimi Ray ~ 6 Comments

12 weeks, and they have flown by, since I’ve posted here, Kissie. I’ve traced these months with memories so fragile and distinct; so immense and complex that I feel I’m standing at the sea waiting for the words to rush in and write me. So I go to my pen and paper and scratch out my feelings there, or on my walks in the early light, I speak to you, out loud.  I say your name, and talk as if you are walking beside me, as we used to. I don’t ever want to stop saying your name — in fact, all your names: formal, informal, married, single, and best of all, your nickname. The name I gave you as a child when I couldn’t say Chrissy.

As time flows, no matter the measure, this blog remains close to my heart. It’s one of my ways to love you now.

Also as time flows, I find that I want more ways to grieve you and remember your life, not less. I notice I get angry and frustrated and impatient when I find these outlets lacking, and people unwilling to mourn and revisit the past. So I seek them out, people unafraid of their own grieving, and those weaving their memories into something worth keeping. Those who did not lose their loved ones but who had to, nonetheless, say goodbye and see them down. When I can’t write, or spend time in the company of these fully alive souls, I find that I must cry it out. It’s cathartic for me, and as honest as it gets when words are of no use.

This resonant piece – Death and families: when ‘normal’ grief can last a lifetime – by a bereaved sibling has some excellent observations on the passage of time and the pervasiveness of death phobia.

Every day an anniversary

~ Mimi Ray ~ Leave a comment

Much has been written about the “anniversary effect” and its relationship to grief and trauma survival. As much as death is a certainty, in a death phobic culture it’s reasonable to see how it could be considered traumatic. I see this regularly, even when the very elderly die. We are not prepared emotionally because we don’t even like to use the word death. We say the person “passed away.” Intellectually, we tell ourselves that we accept the inevitability of death, but that’s where we stop. It’s not our fault – we are, to a great degree, the products of our prevailing culture – but we must wrest with this emotional death phobia, I believe, if we are to grieve well, or even at all.

As January 5th approached this year, I started mentally preparing myself for the anniversary effect. Even with forethought, starting right before Christmas, I was hit hard. I was unprepared for the degree to which this fourth anniversary of her death would affect me emotionally. Her “deathday.” We don’t use that expression. Even I don’t. We say the “anniversary of her death.” So why not deathday, like birthday?

Now that it’s March, I can see some of the reasons this year was particularly difficult: I delayed my annual trip to be with the family on her deathday, it’s been a colder, snowier winter this year, I had a really miserable upper respiratory virus, 2017 brought substantial and stressful changes to my life, etc. These considerations have helped me weather the anniversary effect, and so has this thought: every day is an anniversary.

Quite literally, very few days in a year go by without some important recollection, seasonal memory, tradition, or commemoration of our lives together. More frequently, it’s the small, yet significant reminiscences that populate my every day life. Things like gifts she gave me, recipes, songs from our youth, art and poetry mutually loved, TV shows from decades past, cards and email correspondence, videos, photographs, clothing, and ephemera from half a century of living this amazing life in each others’ orbits.

At least once a week, or so, I say something like this to my husband, Eric:  “Today was the day Kissie and I went to…” or “Six years ago this month, we all got together for…” or “Every time I hear that music, I remember how she loved…” He listens, and usually remarks how ever-present our shared experiences remain, be they commonplace or extraordinary.  It’s no surprise, then, that our interwoven lives and the cultural and familial backdrop of the last fifty years, make it virtually impossible not to stop and recall – even if it’s just in the midst of a hectic afternoon –  some aspect of our pivotal relationship every single day.

Every day, an anniversary.

What will I do?

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

BearingtheUnbearable

Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is the author of Bearing the Unbearable, and founder of the MISSFoundation. She lives in Sedona, AZ, a place of special significance for Kissie and me.

To Yearn for You

~ Mimi Ray ~ 4 Comments

Is it okay to yearn, to long for, to pine? And for how long? Some grief research has characterized prolonged yearning as “complicated grief,” which is imbued with negative connotations for social and psychological functioning.  I can’t fathom not yearning for Kissie. I do it everyday, and expect to for the rest of my life. My yearning is a mixed emotional bag, and the extent of it varies from day to day, month to month, season to season. Sometimes my longing for her is a vast and wordless comfort, and, sometimes, it’s a huddled ball of second thoughts and bone-tiredness. My yearning has taken me on hours-long email reading expeditions as I devour our mundane and exultant exchanges, and fueled excavations of long-forgotten photos and the hoped for, glistening memories. My longing for her is part of my ongoing connection to her. And just as I hunger for the company of those I love who live far away, I ache for those who have died, knowing full well that our time as it once was has ended. I find it nourishing to openly acknowledge my longing, and to feel its many facets as fully and honestly as I can.

Is love itself not yearning? Grief, you are all the love I’ve yearned for, and found, and yearn for still.

 

 

Time, and time again

~ Mimi Ray ~ Leave a comment

The passage of time, the marking of it, has never been stranger than since you died. Dates, seasons and their associated import and memory, seem to be tattooed just under my skin – out of sight, but exerting themselves effortlessly into consciousness (or semi-consciousness) at the appointed time. Anniversaries of all sorts – doctor appointments, hospital stays, trips we took, last times we did this or that – especially that last year, are sentinels of significance that I appreciate and long for, even if they’re painful. When I look at the actual calendar and my record of events for confirmation, I think, “ah yes, no wonder I feel this way.”

As I mentally and emotionally move through the chronology of 2013, the turning over and remembering of its defining moments, I’m negotiating, as I must, the present-moment. It seems to me a kind of slipstream time, the present. A time oddly hidden from itself. More like a shadowed or cocooned time. Time that is pulled somehow, largely invisible, and without a sense of perceptible movement, but definitely evolving. A waiting, suspended kind of time the clock-driven world is impatient with, and sometimes I feel like I’m a step behind (or ahead) even while all appears to be moving at the expected and customary pace.

Because time has felt so surreal since your death, it helps me to think about the ancient Greek understanding of time. They defined time as either chronos – sequential, chronological time – or kairos – “a time when conditions are right for the accomplishment of a crucial action.” In short, kairos being a more conditional or subjective understanding of time, and chronos more objective and measurable.  These past three years, this slipstream of time, feels more indeterminate and evolving, more kairos than chronos, even though intellectually I understand it is both. I feel less anxious when I consider the time I’m experiencing now as kairos time. It has a liminality I try to embrace, and it feels especially crucial. Most of all, you seem to exist here. We exist here.

If I Were a Bird

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

mnnov-2009

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
-George Elliot

This quote is so you. When I read it on your party invitation, it took my breath away. And when you tossed those leaves for joy that early November day, no doubt was left, it was your favored season. You must be that bird – the way you’d flit through golden days with all your brilliant gusto – I seem to sense you more intently now. But it could be that I’m the bird, flying about this home of ours, and in every tree and cloud, seeking you.

Echo

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

‘”What causes an echo?” she once quizzed me. The persistence of sound after the source has stopped. “When can you hear an echo?” When it’s quiet and other sounds are absorbed.’
– Mitch Albom, from For One More Day

These are my favorite lines from a short, sentimental novel the author calls a “family ghost story.” Not long after you died, I mentioned to a musician friend that it was so quiet.  Your “sound” seemed to have left the world – the sound of your exuberance, your laughter, the literal vibration of your life. I could no longer identify it in my audible field. Without realizing it consciously, I started then to listen for an echo of sorts – the persistence of you. And I find I can somehow perceive the “persistence of you” most clearly when it’s quiet, or perhaps more aptly, when I’m quiet inside. But not always! Sometimes, in the noisiest of family gatherings, that echo punctuates the party. Just like you did.

Recently, an old friend of ours, cried with me about how terrible those last months were for you. It was such relief to know she grasped some of the enormity of what you endured, and to share the anguish of that knowledge together meant so much to me. Then, she apologized for bringing it up! I’m not sure she fully understood when I explained that I welcomed it, was grateful beyond words that she had spoken of those life-altering events. I think somehow we quiet the echoes of our deceased loved ones when we avoid painful memories – and even joyous ones – in well-meaning attempts to spare each other more sadness. We also stifle an opportunity for grief to be expressed in community, and the easing of sorrow, however temporary, that it brings.

This week I’ll be reunited with several of our long-time friends. With a few, it will be the first time since your memorial. Your name will be spoken freely, and your photo will be prominently displayed on the mantle. We’ll use some of your serving dishes on the table, and your favorite music will be played. Stories will be told. Echoes will be heard.