Lately, I've been forced to mine the past in order to make sense of the present.
This is a game the mind plays on those faced with the mortality of someone they care about.
It goes something like this: to reckon with the end of someone, the mind works feverishly to anchor that someone to a place in time relative to ourselves. Maybe it's a desperate grasping to feel solid ground beneath our feet at a time when the surreality of the situation has stripped us of our mental gravity and we're floating in emotional space.
Actually, I think of caves lately, not space.
The brain goes spelunking into the deep recesses of abandoned caves whose openings were once wide but have since been covered. The mind discovers such a cave, hacks through the crawling vines of time and memory, and enters a cold place.
It is a provocative enterprise, fraught with the slippery peril of memory's unreliability. You step on stones you think are solid facts, only to slip and fall waist-deep into a mire of contradictory truths.
Did I go with my brother to the drive-in on a Saturday when I was 10, sitting on the hood of our parent's Plymouth Station Wagon while the girls flirted with him? No, I was 12 and it was the GMC pick up. NO. It was the Plymouth. But there were no girls at that time. Wait. There were always girls. I think he bought me an Orange Crush soda. Or maybe a root beer, because I went through a root beer phase when I was 10. But not 12. Then it was grape soda, the summer I spent at Ganderbrook Christian Camp when his presence as the camp swim instructor inspired me to be baptized later that year. The last year before he began to spiral down and I unfairly replaced him as a hero.
And on it goes, this chipping away for those rare rocks called facts that we overvalue for the sake of the common minerals called truth. And in the middle of this, we come to our senses and ask "Why the hell am I here? This is too damn hard. I'd rather just not deal with this. Take me back."
But I swing the pickaxe anyway, because I know I have to.
Perhaps it's because I identify myself as a writer and that my mind naturally goes for the connection, the metaphor, the meaning in the tether between the tiny particles that shape my life. Of course we all have those, but writers are geeky ant collectors when it comes to them. We trap them on the page. We look for the patterns. We study the meaning.
So it has gone, these past months, while I write a memoir about my relationship with Woofit. The inundation of memories has had me spiraling and faltering, spinning and crashing on a daily basis. The ground falls suddenly away at the unearthing of a forgotten memory, and then comes back at me hard and fast when I consider the truth behind it. I think of 1982, when I was 14 and perhaps at my most vulnerable and how that singular year spun me out in ways I would not understand. Not until 1992, anyway, when holding my daughter Fallon for the first time, I broke down with her in my arms because I could not get her to stop crying whenever I held her. I was a failure as a parent, I insisted. My parents were parents in 1982, when they cried for a child they felt they had failed.
Boom. Connection made. Thanks for coming. And oh, by the way, it was probably 1983.....
I sit in between the silences of the night, lately. Those folds of quiet in which one finds comfort in the stillness but is nevertheless on edge for the impending sound, the sound of screams in the head when the future gets here at last. The sound of an avalanche of memories loosened.
Twice a week I watch my brother during these silences. Guiltily I jot down, as quickly as I can, the fresh new stone I've unearthed with the dull pickaxe of memory. All the while the co-inhabitant of this particular mine is dying of brain cancer and I have nothing to give him except my meager presence.
So in my twisted way, I reason that by writing this memoir, I give myself permission to keep mining, no matter how deep the vein. I solicit justification and I find it in a simple, striking realization: Woof and I have both mined here together, as partners. The relationship we form with others creates a singular cave filled with common, almost ugly stones of memories. Yes, there are precious gems. And they sparkle and tempt us into the belief that they represent some sort of truth. When, in reality, the small, seemingly useless memories, the ones with all the dirt and moss on them, are the bedrock of real life. And Christ doesn't it hurt when you drive the pickaxe home and one of them flies out and strikes you between the eyes.
The haul from our endeavors - 46 years of it - has created something of significant value between Woof and I. And by bringing them up out, into the light, I in no small way have solved the riddle of my recent days: how do I keep my beloved brother alive.
I give you our truth, our imperfect stones, the foundation of his immortality.
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