Who We Used to Be
Our psychology teacher, Mrs. Ramsey, pushes play and introduces us to Clive Wearing, a conductor and musician who, at age forty-six and the height of his career, contracted a viral infection that attacked and damaged his central nervous system. As a sophomore in high school, I’m familiar with the classic form of amnesia thanks to movies and daytime television, but the curtain over Wearing’s past was, and continues to be, accompanied by something my sixteen-year-old brain could hardly imagine: the inability to create new memories.
I myself cannot remember a single student from that class. I don’t remember the room or whether we gathered in the morning or during a period after lunch. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually my junior year when, allegedly, I studied the mind and human behavior. Despite having forgotten most everything from the course, I frequently visit my memory of Clive Wearing and replay—as though I was there and not watching a documentary—the moment he opens his diary to record what his wife describes as “the momentous event of waking up.”
“I am awake,” Wearing writes, or “awake for the first time in many, many weeks.”
These and other variations appear repeatedly, often just minutes apart, for hundreds of pages. Each entry notes the epiphany of “first awakening,” the perpetual present into which Wearing arrives, again and again, endlessly confused and without knowing that years of his life have vanished. There’s some consolation, perhaps, in the fact that he remembers his wife, who he greets with surprise and elation each time she walks into the room.
Now in his 80s, Wearing’s memory lasts between seven and thirty seconds. He cannot follow the plot of a movie nor finish the second sentence of a book without forgetting the sentence that came before. What feels like a premise for an old, black-and-white broadcast of The Twilight Zone—an episode we might enjoy and turn off at the closing credits—is nothing short of a living, full-color nightmare for its main character. Wearing’s condition is irreversible, and his story has no end. Or you could say his story ends and begins thousands of times each day. In a documentary made twenty years after the first, Wearing describes his own experience as “hell on earth.”
I’m writing an early draft of these paragraphs while vacationing with my kids at the Outer Banks. We aren’t far, geographically, from where Valerie sat just a year ago with Emerson and Whitman beside the Atlantic Ocean. Valerie should be here now, walking over a short dune or talking among our friends in the shade beneath an umbrella. I imagine her straw hat and see the summer brightness reflected in each lens of her brown, tortoise frame sunglasses. She sips a gin and tonic, a smile curls at the edge of her mouth, and the hassle of the busy world slips from her shoulders down to the careful polish of each toe. It’s incredibly easy—until a cold fact makes it insufferably difficult—to mistake another swimmer for Valerie’s shape in the water.
Now our vacation sleeps several weeks in the past and I’m scribbling across another draft of these paragraphs while riding the train to Columbia College Chicago, where I’m teaching several classes in the new semester. Out my window, the leaves of mid-October have replaced September. And as I write these very words, I’m astonished to see that it’s now November. How is it even possible? I ask myself. And if our sense of time contracts as we grow older, might the journey with grief pass more slowly for those who are younger? Or those without the demands of a busy job? Or those without children?
“I don’t know how you keep going,” a friend remarks, and I reply with what I’ve said many, many times before: “As a parent, you do what needs to be done.” After Valerie died, there was no lull, my sense of time did not come to a stop, and so I did my best to prioritize what was most important while other things fell aside. In the early throes of grief, I marked some days as “wins” for the simple feat of making breakfast, packing lunches for the kids, and getting them to school on time. Emerson and Whitman gave me focus and, yes, some welcome distraction. And so it’s only recently that I’ve absorbed what others have been saying all along: “You’ve been through a lot.”
I remind myself here not to weigh our family’s loss against the losses experienced by others. There’s no scale, no scorecard, and feelings of disappointment, sadness, and grief are valid, regardless of the circumstances: the ache of divorce, getting laid off, or that final year of high school—lunch with friends, the anticipation of prom, graduation—wiped clean by a global pandemic. But wait… A school dance and the death of a wife and mother of two young children? Apples and oranges, it’s tempting to think, but in the end it’s all fruit.
I return to Clive Wearing not because of any mental paralysis or an inability to hold memory as my life moves forward; instead, Wearing comes back to me because his loss, at its core, echoes so many losses, including my own. It’s as though a hundred starlings ripple and swirl against a blue sky, but then—just like that—their ballet turns ominous, lifts your rather ordinary, predictable life, and scatters it beyond the horizon. We walk among the survivors, and I feel a new kinship with Wearing, who was once little more than a case study, an unfortunate thank-God-it’s-not-Me example of amnesia that I learned about thirty years ago.
Fifteen months tomorrow, I scribble in this “now” of Monday, November 8th, 3:22 pm. For a moment, I’m traveling toward our home in Portage Park on a crowded car of the Blue Line. In the next moment, I’ve somehow taught a dozen classes, made sure the kids brushed their teeth each night over several blurry weeks, and now my watch reads November 30th. Part of me has just “woken up” when the present shifts like this, and I feel the same when a thought of Valerie or an everyday discovery—her writing on the post of the kids’ bunkbed—squeezes and twists the air from my body.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes the “vortex effect,” how a small circumstance or series of associations can be dangerous, triggering the memories of her late husband that are too much to bear. For Didion, “a good line of thinking” amounts to gravitating toward those memories that allow worry and grief to slip (initially, at least) from the stubborn center of her life. She describes spending five weeks in Los Angeles, where she and her family once resided and where her daughter, now an adult, lies critically ill. As Didion drives to and from the hospital, she avoids the routes and “venues”—Brentwood, the Pacific Coast Highway, an intersection near her daughter’s former school—that might awaken memories of the past.
What then, I wonder, should I name my willingness to engage with loss, to enter the vortex purposely (or purposefully) by returning to those places that stir memories of my life with Valerie. Before purchasing our home on Linder Avenue, we shared three separate apartments in Chicago. I’ve since driven past our two-flat near Lincoln Square and parked near our three-flat on Francisco, where we celebrated that first Christmas morning after Emerson was born. I’ve circled the block of our apartment on Evergreen, pausing at the fence of the park where we’d let Daisy play with the other dogs. These visits can be exhausting—I’m barely myself at the end of such days—but I find that the past is more salve than it is salt.
And because the stories and poems by countless writers—those living and some long dead—have helped carry me through difficult periods, I want to believe that some essential spark of Valerie’s life will continue if I can offer here the early winter light, those first mornings when we’d pull ourselves from bed, descend the long flight of stairs to take out the dog, then return to the warmth of her apartment on Noble Street. We fill our cups with fresh coffee. Valerie, wearing a loose shirt from which she’s cut away the collar, offers me one of the two matching spoons, keeps the other, and unscrews the lid from a large container of peanut butter.
Or maybe we’ve parked my two-door Volvo outside the Hollywood Grill and have already ordered sides of ham and bacon with our meal. And we should probably add a waffle piled with whipped cream. Also, why not, we’ll share a milkshake in which we can dip… Yes, let’s get a plate of fries!… Imagine our delight, how a perverse pleasure outweighs any hint of embarrassment when at last the food arrives. Can you hear the laughter from our booth by the window? Might the menagerie of flavor that crowds this table turn a few heads? Can you not taste the play of salt and sweetness on your fingers?
I love the daydream, to let the imagination off its leash when we look away from the screens in restaurants and the ones in our restless hands. I equally love the surprise when association opens a door, turns on the light, and awakens a familiar face or that moment when you noticed the brilliance of the changing leaves. I recognize a recent craving for peanut butter at the root of what yields the dreamlike mornings after Valerie and I first met, and a deeper hunger carries me to some afternoon when the two of us sat in a diner and ordered enough food to last for days. In both instances, our excitement for each other is young, our lives ripe with possibility.
“When I pronounce the word Future,” the poet Wisława Symborska writes, “the first syllable already belongs to the past.” Here, Emerson and Whitman have already run through yards to ring doorbells and collect candy. We’ve celebrated our second Thanksgiving without Valerie, as well as both kids’ birthdays at the end of November. Now the nests of squirrels and the occasional hive are visible in the otherwise empty trees, and soon we’ll open gifts beside the balsam fir that stands in the corner of our living room. Meanwhile, the memories of those we love—who loved us in return—gather in this growing library, on these shelves that aren’t entirely out of reach.
Thank you, Michael.