11/25/98

Giving Thanks for the Memories

I've often wondered why there are gaps in our memories and why some memories are so vivid and others so vague. I found it puzzling, for example, that I could recall the names and picture the faces of every one of my elementary school teachers except one, that of my first grade teacher. Oddly, I had no recollection of the first grade at all, even though memories of kindergarten, Bible preschool and other early places and events were crystal clear.

A few years ago I decided to try to find out what was going on in my family when I was six years old. My father told me that back then my mother had been experiencing unusual physical symptoms of fatigue and weakness in her legs. After several medical tests were completed, a tentative diagnosis was made: Multiple Sclerosis, a progressive, incurable disease of the central nervous system. As symptoms persisted and the meaning of the diagnosis sank in, my mother grew increasingly frightened and despondent, while trying to hold onto hope that the doctors could be wrong.

My parents decided to seek a second opinion from specialists in Cleveland, where my parents grew up. During the weeks Mom was away, my father stayed with us in Michigan. It was such a traumatic time for my four brothers and sisters and me, that not one of us remembers a thing about it. Each of my siblings told me that they had blocked out the same period of time from their minds, despite the fact that our father drove us to Cleveland to bring Mom home. On the other hand, my mother's siblings, who still lived in Cleveland then, remember her arrival and hospitalization as if it happened only yesterday.

After several conversations with my father and mother's relatives about events of that year, I began to experience wave after wave of buried memories, a kaleidoscope of early images of my mother... brushing and braiding my hair ... teaching me how to "snap" the blossom of a snapdragon ... and helping me learn to read my first sentence, "How big I am!" even before I went to school. Those memories, accompanied by the sound of her melodious laughter, are precious to me beyond words.

I have since met several of my mother's relatives (and mine), who have long been but names on the family tree. Now they are part of my life and the lives of my husband and children. My mother came from a family of eight children, who scattered across the country over the years to raise families of their own. After my mother's death from MS, which occurred when I was 20 years old, I had gradually lost touch with most of them. I have never met many of their children and grandchildren. Reconnecting with them now is changing all that.

Filling in my first grade memory gaps has given me a sense of continuity with my past. It has also led me to wonderful, loving people who knew my mother when she was a child. They have taken me to the neighborhood where she grew up and shown me some of her poems and paintings that I never knew existed. And, best of all, they have welcomed me and my family warmly into theirs. All I did was wonder, out loud, about a year lost from my memory.

LINK:

MEMORY: The phenomenon of recovered memory:
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/psyc/fitzMemory/contents.html

Please send questions or comments to bbruno@snet.net.