When the memories hurt

Isn't it interesting how some things fade quickly into the sea of lost memories while other moments forever etch themselves on our hearts and in our minds.  I wonder why learning to tie with a gigantic ribbon on an ordinary wooden chair in Mrs. Tupper's kindergarten class sticks with me while almost nothing else from five to seven remains.  I wonder why I remember one Christmas where I lay on the floor staring at a candle for hours in my feety pajamas while my parents and their friends talked in the next room, but I cannot recall a single gift from that year.  I wonder why I remember sleeping in our family's camper in the back yard one summer night prior to leaving on a big vacation, but I don't remember a single thing about the trip itself.  Strange how our minds work.

I wish all the things that stick with me were positive or benign.  But somehow the cruelest moments of life seem to leave the deepest and most lasting marks.  I had an uncle, by marriage, who routinely spoke to me with menacing brutality.  His words were harsh and cutting, and I felt helpless to defend myself from them.  Worse, I felt betrayed by the adults around me who failed to protect me from his malevolent taunts.  I wondered why no one rescued me.  Did no one notice?  Did no one care?   Or did everyone feel the same defenselessness I did against such a tyrannical bully?  I wonder still.

With vivid clarity, I remember the night another uncle was lost, a good uncle.  He was young, just twenty-four, handsome, charismatic and kind.  He was everything an uncle should be, fun, easy going and accommodating of the inconvenience little kids can be.  The memory is seared into my mind.  My sister, cousin and I were watching the Love Boat on tv while our parents talked in the background.  A friend of my uncle's came unexpectedly to our front door.  He asked to talk to my mom in the other room.  I can remember her saying, 'Only if you promise not to hit me.'  She was joking, but the blow that was about to strike her took the very breath out of her.  There was screaming, sobbing, bewildered disbelief...we watched in silent horror.  Her reaction left no question that whatever news she had just received was not good.

It was my first taste of real loss.  While others I had known and even loved had passed on before him, they had done so leaving nary a mark on my young life.   But I knew almost immediately that my Uncle John's death was different.  Things were going to be different.  I was going to be different.  My mother, my grandmother, the atmosphere itself...it was all going to be changed because he was no longer with us.  I cry now with an even deeper sadness over his loss.  It is with greater understanding that I now realize the implications of what his life lived could have meant to us all and how losing him changed the shape of each of our hearts to varying degrees.  


That same event sparked another memory of mine that is set in stone.  At my uncle's funeral, I was instructed to go find my older cousin.  He was my father's nephew, but he had found a kindred spirit in my mother's brother.  My cousin had a difficult childhood and was being raised by my dad's mother.  He was 'spoiled' in some people's eyes, but I believe wholeheartedly he would have gladly traded every gift to have involved, interested or even present parents in his life.  And now he met my Uncle John, who in the gentle, kind way he had about him had welcome my cousin Brent into the fold.  They shared an interest in music and motorcycles.  They had a relationship all their own, a relationship my cousin desperately needed.  A relationship with an adult male who had time and a willingness to actively participate in his teen aged life.  But now that man, my uncle, Brent's friend, had been taken from us.  In that moment, Brent's pain surpassed my own.  He was feeling the loss on a much different level than I was.  It was not his first taste of loss, but it was, to date, his most bitter.


I found Brent sitting in the dark beside a dumpster behind the funeral home.  He was crying. I had never seen him show any emotion, ever, so I was shocked to find him crying.  I didn't understand back then the depth of his pain.  He looked up at me and asked, "Why?  Why did this happen?  He was my friend."  I stood there with my eight years of wisdom and life experience and shrugged my shoulders.  I had nothing to offer him in the way of condolences.  I didn't know why anything happened.  What could I say to ease his pain when I couldn't even ease my own?  Then he grabbed me and held me tightly, crying like a baby, saying nothing, just crying.  And I just stood there and let him hug me.  I don't even think I hugged him back.  I don't even think I cried with him.  I just stood there wishing someone else would come looking for us, that someone would help us escape this thing that was swallowing us up.  I know now it was grief that was tormenting us, each in our own way.  But then, I was certain the darkness in us and all around us was going to consume us.


That was the one and only genuine moment I had with my cousin Brent.  He died a few years ago, a drug overdose. I wonder if I had been able to answer his "why", would it have made a difference in the path his life took?  Or did he even remember that moment ever happened between us?  


Funny how memories work, stirring us up over things that were long ago said and done. Interesting what our minds hold onto through space and time.  Amazing how retrospection leads to introspection. To have a moment back, who doesn't wish for that?  To be able to apply today's insight to yesterday's occasion, who wouldn't like to have that ability?  To find peace with those things we cannot forget and yet are unable to redeem, am I the only one who desires such a thing?