One of the tasks I’ve been working on since my wife died is a big house clean-out. I’ve been sorting and donating things no longer needed in this truncated household. It feels useful and it keeps me busy.
But it’s an ambiguous exercise. One that flips rapidly between being happy for what was and sad for what is no longer. Among other things, I’m sifting through lots of old photos. The kind printed on paper and kept in albums. So many photos! I haven’t looked at them in ages. They are from the lost time before the age of digital photos. My digital photos are easily sorted, viewed, and edited. But these old photos feel more like memories trapped in Jurassic amber, at once remote and close. Time grants them a special legitimacy. Time decorates them with ticklish, aching melancholy.
If someone close to you has died, you too have received cards that say something like this: Your beloved isn’t gone. They are still present in a thousand ways. It’s one of those things that’s true and not true. On the one hand, don’t tell me they’re not gone. They’re gone. There is no solid warmth to draw close in an embrace, no cheek to place here against my own. My cat looks in vain for the missing lap. The absence of the departed is indisputable. But their presence is also true enough. Look at all these photos! Every one of them rekindles a memory.
Image by Midjourney
There we are on the beach in Jamaica. And I remember this picture outside the restaurant in San Francisco. We look happy, but I remember we were both hungry and tired and we were about to have a fight.
These photos make the past seem more present, more legitimate than the present. It’s a hazard, because intoxicating nostalgia can cheapen THIS moment, this now. Your loved one is still present, says the card. But we forget to flip this around. If those impressions radiate from the past, then so must we all be radiating into the future. You’re doing it right now! You’re distributing yourself into many futures. Uploading yourself into the timelines of everyone you know. In photos, in the forward recollections of others. We are forever busy shipping memories into the future.
Listen: Everything depends on this moment. This sweet, solid, pungent moment. This legitimate moment. Five years from now, ten years from now, the people we become will look back at the people we are now. What will they make of us? What will they see? They want to believe in us. Now is the time to be worthy of the stories they will tell.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 