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Decluttering Revisited– What About All Those Memories?

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We have memories throughout our lives.  My youngest granddaughter, about to turn 8, talks about them often – a particularly engaging dream in the past, a game that we used to play when she was “little” (last year) but don’t anymore, something that she used to be but is not now (meat eater to vegetarian).  Like me, she enjoys reading books and looking at TV shows that she liked earlier, with even a hint of nostalgia, as if enjoying a piece of childhood that is slipping away. 

Sound familiar?  Since childhood I have kept memory storage bins, each of which is like that huge box of family photos that you don’t want to throw away and can’t bear to sort.  Many are chronological, labeled high school, college, married with children, etc.  Others are topic-centered – friends, lovers, places, peak and low experiences. Significant memories are in multiple bins.  I know that these “keepers” are barely sorted…

Richard Rohr describes aging as an opportunity to return to a “second simplicity” in which we can discard useless complexity, mental, and sensory overload in favor of getting down to basics:  Who am I?  How have I been in the world?  What do I want from my relationships with others and with myself?

I confess: I am skeptical about whether a simple identity, with all the compulsions and desires of my earlier years stripped away, is within my reach.  Although I am retired, life still feels busy and complicated.  But I am willing to give it a try because I am drawn to the path…

But is it that simple?  Do I just need to Marie Kondo my memory files, finding those that give me joy or, alternatively, those that Rohr calls “bright sadness.”   And what happens to the increasing complexity that I become aware of when I unearth “old stuff” that has been buried for a while?

I could stop rummaging and just read more – friends talk about how reading is increasingly a simple pleasure.  But I like fiction, and great novels tickle my memory.  Any woman who has lived through a failing marriage will be moved by Anna Karenina, even if their own story is not an exact parallel.  I need Jane Austen to relive the way in which the constraints of our own culture shaped my earlier self – and how I prevailed (or did not…). And new books – I just finished Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood – propel me to reflect on my life, which adds rather than detracts from complexity!  I am not going to stop reading, even when it makes me dive into yet another storage bin…

But some files are dusty, and I have avoided them for years because they are
complicated.  One could be labeled “Random Regrets.”  I should just pitch them in the trash without looking…but, like the old box of unsorted family photos, the temptation is too great. 

discarded memories

Photo by Julia Oberhauser on Unsplash

At the top are moments of deep embarrassment, usually where ignorance or bad behavior stripped away a carefully constructed façade.  I still cringe at the time when I forcefully claimed that Austria was no longer a country…to a friend’s parent who was in active service in Europe in WWII.  I could put that one in the “No Longer Need” bin.

Less embarrassing but more poignant are regrets about people who were once in my life but are no longer. This hit me again as I was fumbling around in another file labeled “Living in London, 1967” and unearthed Jonathan, who has not come to mind for at least 40 years.   He was a typical, slightly damaged product of bad food, cold showers, and bullying in what the English call a “public school”.  Handsome enough, well-read in the Oxford kind of way, he could out-vocabulary me on almost any topic.  And I allowed him to kiss me when we went out and said yes when he called. 

But I didn’t really want more – I was willing to go out with him only until I solidified my relationship with a tall, rangy, and bright-eyed Cambridge graduate with floppy hair. He had recently returned from sailing across the Atlantic in a small boat and had an explorer’s spirit, only somewhat tamed. 

Jonathan was a spare. 

As I write that, I know it is true, but the discomfort is what Rohr calls a “bright sadness.”  I can see recurrent patterns of casually using people that escaped me at the time, perhaps because they were so frequent.  The memory of Jonathan (who was in my life for a short time) induces thick discomfort about how the thoughtlessness of the young adult me, whose need to be right, popular, and a bit of a smart ass, overcame my desire to be kind.

When I rummage around in the regrets file, I know that I cannot afford to toss everything if I hope to be on the path of second simplicity.  As I refile Jonathan into a new “Bright Sadness” bin, I am reminded of my increasing humility.  I still make mistakes, but I want to avoid old patterns that are inconsistent with the simpler me who gets up each morning asking how I can make that day’s actions more consistent with a loving universe.  Yet I also know that Marie Kondo-izing my memory bins is needed to reconcile with my less compassionate side, which I can now call “the Jonathan problem.”

Photo by Jonathan Francisca on Unsplash

The path to a second simplicity does not feel simple, nor do I think that Richard Rohr expects that.  To walk that path I need to confront, with humility (and often uncomfortable humor), who I have been.  No polished version; just me, warts and all.  That is closer to the curious wonder that I remember from my elementary school years than to the gravitas that I later labored to assume. 

Returning to a simpler but wiser self – a complicated job that requires regular housecleaning? 

Through a Tiny Door….

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My children and I disappeared down the rabbit hole with Alice and into a parallel world through a closet in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, while in the surrealist comedy, Being John Malkovich, a door leads John Cusack’s character into the eponymous actor’s mind.  But not all portals are doors: Peggy Noonan claims that, when she read War and Peace, she “entered another world”.  According to Arundhati Roy, the Covid pandemic should be viewed as a portal to a changed reality. In all of these, a portal is metaphor for an insistent call to experience the world differently.  Most people have had at least a brief glimpse of déjà vu, where you know, absolutely, that you are in a situation that you have lived through before…a portal. 

We can hunt for portals, but they usually appear by chance. I had that experience this week as I dropped a small pen and ink drawing off at a framer’s shop.

— East Heath Road–Google Maps

The drawing is of a street in Hampstead, London where my parents and sister lived in 1965-66, and where I joined them during the spring of my junior year of college.  I bought it several years later when I was again living in London and wanted to get my mother something special.  Then I didn’t  think about it until it ended up in my possession after she died.

But when the door of the fame shop clicked closed, I panicked.  No picture of the drawing?  Had I left it with a perfect stranger who would be holding it for two months? Racing to my next stop (which I distractedly drove past), I was struck:  the drawing was an unacknowledged portal to accumulated experiences that shaped my life. 

My excuse for leaving college was to research a senior thesis – on the improbable (invented) topic of the influence of the Spanish Civil War on the British Communist Party. I managed to secure access to the old British Museum Reading Room where, like all the “real scholars”, I could order my well-kept books and have them delivered to me on a daily basis. When I went to the more obscure Marx Memorial Library, guarded by a single elderly gentleman and embedded with decades of dust, I encountered for the first time the excitement of not only consuming knowledge, but also discovering it…a life-changing event, whose significance was revealed several years later when I decided to get a PhD in Sociology.

Somehow my parents agreed to let me travel by myself to Greece during that summer. Other than briefly meeting two friends in Athens, I took boats, busses and donkeys for three weeks, choosing where next to go based on the Guide Bleu (I hoped that it would improve my French).  I hitched rides with local young men on their motorbikes in Crete and shared retsina with elderly families on boats between the islands.  I left feeling adventuresome, brave, and that I could probably do whatever I wanted.  This was a new feeling for me and stirred my development into real adulthood.

I also fell in love with another undergraduate working in the British Museum Reading Room.  He introduced me to Cambridge, Indian food, and his London, ranging from Soho to Golders Green, and including most of the museums and bookstores.  At 20, to experience another country with a person who knew it inside-out, it was a revelation.  Since then, I have rarely wanted to be a tourist but instead to know another place through the eyes of people for whom it is just daily life.  That urge shaped a lot of the choices that I have made.in work, friendships, and what I like to read. 

I have relived these familiar stories many times, but until I dropped off the drawing I did not connect the dots.   Yet their linked temporal proximity clearly fashioned much of what I became:  I chose a life of discovery. International Karen (as my husband calls that side of me) became purpose rather than play.  I sought every opportunity to do research with colleagues in other countries, to discover what our cultures share and how they are  different.  I lived in other countries when I could, celebrating the small adventures of daily life more than the great sights.

Ok, I wasn’t spit out into a ditch in New Jersey like the John Cusak character.  But to take my insights from the Hampstead portal seriously, I must acknowledge that that my emergent purpose shut out other opportunities– like feeling rooted or having a home place, and exploring the fascinations of my own country.  What I need to consider now, without regret, is what I need to let go of.  A trip into a portal should be a stimulus to see the world differently and cannot be allowed to become a drag on whatever “future me” is emerging….

I am reframing the Hampstead drawing for my sister, who has always liked it.  My recent experience of it as a portal makes me even happier to give it to her: It has served its door-opening purpose for me. She will have her own version of the stories evoked by our flat in East Heath Road…or maybe she will be presented with a different portal.

Memory and Story

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When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past (William Shakespeare)

A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity…(Oliver Sacks)

Much is made of the way in which memory erodes among the elderly – a group to which I am beginning to concede that I belong. Memory loss is considered normal, and it is true that my ability to recall information – the name of a restaurant that I loved in New York in 1970 or even the names of some of my childhood friends – is not immediate.  Now, my husband and I say that we are lucky to have two brains, which allows us to come up with a missing piece of information sooner.  Sometimes I kick myself when it is some simple, common word that has, slipped my mind.  Slipped my mind – memory is such a slippery thing indeed.

Recent research suggests that the slipperiness that I (and most of my friends) are experiencing is not the whole story.  We may have mild forgetfulness, but we are actually wiser:

“Some brain areas, including the hippocampus, shrink in size. …These changes can affect your ability to encode new information into your memory and retrieve information that’s already in storage. On the other hand… connections between distant brain areas strengthen. These changes enable the aging brain to become better at detecting relationships between diverse sources of information, capturing the big picture, and understanding the global implications of specific issues.” Harvard Health Newsletter

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This may be comforting to some people, but memory is still important to me —  Not the name of a restaurant, but the people who were there, the conversations we had that made us laugh, and how the evening created a friendship and endured for years.  I want to be able to summon up not just the grief that I felt at my mother’s funeral and any wisdom that I may have acquired about how to anticipate and live within grief (wisdom?), but also to remember that my cousin Butch played “When the Saints Go Marching In”, what words were spoken by whom, and even what I wore.  I want both to feel it very specifically AND to connect it to other events of loss in my life.  But I can’t remember what I wore….yet. 

The older I am, the more memories I carry and the more I need to make sense of these past events, feelings and images in the context of my life today.  This is what the practice of telling our story, whether orally, by journaling, or in a memoir, is about.  Oliver Sacks argues that “Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” But given my capacity to invent a past out of whole cloth, I have to work hard to prevent my story from being fiction!  In addition to reconnecting with past feelings – anger, grief, lust, joy – I want to give them additional color, and come closer to something real, with specifics. 

Recently, Karen Storm and I attended a writer’s retreat, where we planned to spent a chunk of our writing time working on the Karensdescant blog.  Instead, I woke up before the workshop feeling unnerved and vaguely remembering events from decades ago. By the time I got to our idyllic hermitage, I knew that I had to write about it – but my memories were fuzzy and still unsettling.  Karen Storm came with a less clear idea of what she might want to noodle on in addition to the blog, but was struck on the first evening with two old memories of her own that called her. 

In the end, we never talked about Karensdescant.  But we both happened on something more important – something that those increasing, branching, interlinked dendrites in our brains – the privilege of being old – demanded we attend to.  We wrote like maniacs, multiple pages infused with both tender and crushing details about important events falling into our computers,  connecting past events and people and finding new links with our present lives.  We were recalling information, pulling out succulent details that were not immediately at our fingertips, and making new stories out of past circumstances. 

In my case, it was clear that my memory of a very old relationship was encapsulated in a very short story that that I repeated so often, both to myself and others, that it seemed to be as real as the door to a room or a book on a shelf:  “We met and loved in wonderful places.  But it was too complicated.  It ended.”  But there’s the rub:  when I open the door to a room in my mind, I am amazed at what lies behind it that is unexpected – or what isn’t there that I was sure that I put away a short time ago.  When I open a book to reread it, there are sections that I don’t remember, while others that I starred on the first reading no longer seem as important as they did.  Anna Karenina is like that for me – it has a different meaning in every decade of my life.

It is not that my memories about that particular relationship are especially elusive – it’s the details that I have left out because they were (deliberately?) buried, or seemed trivial, that demanded some major rewriting. The editing included dredging up more information, but also a desire to make sense of old, lost relationships in the context of the life that I have subsequently woven, together with many others who I did not know or were not yet born, in the decades since.

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

During the retreat, I wrote a different narrative that is much longer and has changed the way that I think, not only about that relationship, but all of my relationships with people  I have loved. This was not the Shakespeare of Sonnet 30, who descends into rather weepy nostalgia, but an urge to reorder my house to see that old things that still intrigue me are put into places where they connect with others parts of my life.  I can almost feel the dendrites communicating with each other. 

Friends who have worked with hospice patients talk about how they observe people holding on for a few more days to make sense of some aspect of their life that feel unfinished.  When I ask myself (or am asked) to remember more details, I find connections that I did not make in the past.  Or, I remember something that was said that changes the way I need to tell the story. What is different for many of us as we age is feeling a need to make sense of our lives more deliberately, with more care, whether we are writers, talkers, or scrapbookers.  When it comes down to it, we are all just trying to make a little more sense of this very non-linear project that is life.