for when your memory is long
Ten years ago. I am in the bigger, stranger hospital. There is a stork painted on the floor by the elevators, and part of the building is under construction, signs are taped show the stairs to take or the hallways that are closed. The hallway we walk down to the ultrasound rooms opens into an octagon shape. The chairs are a dark wood, blue cushions, and no one speaks.
Ten years ago. I am reading Aristotle and Seneca. I am reading chunks of the Summa Theologiae and impenetrable selections of John Duns Scouts. I do this sitting on the bed in the hotel room my parents get for me to use while we move, and I am days away from my first set of exams in philosophy. None of these men I am reading have felt this weight shifting in their belly, perched on their knees as they stare at a computer screen, at a page of typewritten questions, at outlines and quotes to memorize. They have not lain on the cool, white slab of the MRI machine, not for me, but for the child, a soft but unyielding white that I stare at for minutes that inch by, as my legs fall asleep, as they encourage me through a microphone hidden in the white to stay still, good, because he’s active, yes, getting pictures of him is hard.
Ten years ago. I am in that hospital, and the philosophers come around the edges of his crib. I picture them crowding to look, to glimpse what is the summit of all our philosophy - new life, life itself, the problem and miracle of being. Their shadows - their echoes - stand next to each other. There is Thomas Aquinas, there is Seneca, there is Aristotle, there is Anselm. There is me. There is my son.
At the reality of us the shadows have nothing to say.
Can all this have happened ten years ago? Can I be approaching a decade since the last days of my first pregnancy, my first doorway into a self that now only faintly glimpses the one that came before?
Sometimes I think to myself, “surely by now it is in the rearview mirror, isn’t it?” Surely, by now, I wouldn’t be able to drive blindfolded down I-35 and make the exit where they’ve changed the fast food restaurants and go up over the big hill through the lights and pass the new Panera on my right to swing a turn into the teaching hospital, and surely now I couldn’t press the elevator at the far end to take me up, my license already out and ready to be scanned, and I wouldn’t know how to go back through those doors, down, keep going down, unless it’s post surgery then he’s back in the Blue unit, no keep going to the end, the Pink Room, the stable (we hope, we beg) room, the room of waiting to go home. Go in, scrub your hands free of the outside world to the sink at your right, turn left, walk, just a few steps, and there you would be.
Surely I can’t still do that?
No philosopher can give me an explanation that satisfies me, for what this memory is, for what part of me is still there, might still always be there, might find herself walking back, and back, and back again.
It must have something more to do with the reality of us. It must be that difficult fact of embodiment, of memories that get under the skin, of knowing that has no words or propositions or perfect explanations. I can take you there because some part of me is alive there, and she casts a thread forward into this present moment.
This is difficult, sometimes. I feel the worry of those days slink down the thread, all the things that were forecast or predicted. I can get trapped in the past, too, tangled in the wires of ten years ago.
But I hope, ten years in, perhaps this is what I have come to know about it: time does not heal all wounds, time does not undo what came before, time is not a magical potion or a philosophical concept. But time might make us more: more spacious, more ourselves, more loving, more compassionate. As it does this, perhaps, I carry the threads more gently, with myself and others. Perhaps I unspool them less often, perhaps only every once in a while, or every year. Perhaps after ten years the life of that time - our first born son’s first weeks in the NICU, his crib there, his first surgery there, his whole beautiful bright beginning - it softens into me.
I carry it, an offering, a difficult gift.
And the philosophers are my witnesses.