Essay: The Grips of Memory

One of my earliest memories on Iowa Ave. was of Great Grandma Voorhees. She was in a white hospital gown with some sort of small print on it, maybe little blue dots. I remember two things about her: I remember her lying in a bed in the living room, and I remember her calves, they looked so dry and tired coming out from under that gown. I think I was sitting on the floor, or maybe I was just that tall--I must have been three or four at the time. Now her legs remind me of Gramma Renaud's, who also died on a bed in the living room. Gramma Renaud took care of her mother, until her mother died. Gramma outlived her sisters, and her husband and her husband's siblings. As the last of her generation I imagine what finally brought about her passing wasn't the fluid filling her lungs, or her failing renal system, but rather the exhaustion of being a caretaker not only in St. Charles hospital, but also to her family. "Long-suffering" is the term Ronnie uses, and I find it a fitting one for Gramma. When she met St. Peter at the gates, I imagine they had a lot to talk about--a home that shelters three generations doesn't sit quietly through the decades.

Houses that see a lot of life see a lot of death. 11 children grew up in that house, some of us are Grammas to our own grandchildren, some of us have young children that are forming memories of their parents and grandparents now, memories that will be erased and re-shaped, painted over by the stories their aunts and uncles and moms and dads tell them, and then stretched out into long narratives that aren't really their memories at all, but nonetheless make up swaths of their identity. Do I remember swimming in the lake at the summer house in Wisconsin when I was five, or did I invent that memory because I have seen pictures of myself, swimming in the lake when I was five? Do I remember Grandpa sitting in the chair in the living room, watching t.v., or do I remember Gramma telling me her chair used to be Art's, and so I filled an image of him, one taken from photographs, into that spot in the living room? I believe I loved my grandfather, but I don't really remember him at all and become deeply sad when I think about him. But what I am thinking about is regret, not Art Renaud: I get choked up not because I miss him, but because I can't remember anything about him to miss.

However lacking the certainty of my memories, my identity is shaped by my connection to him, the connection drawn for me by his children. I know I was his "little buddy," he took me fishing and let me go with him to the grocery store, he let me take the keys out of the ignition of his light blue station wagon every night. I know he helped save me from the orphanage. His daughter Cathy tells me the story one summer afternoon, while standing in front of my grandparent's grave, that at his funeral I was holding her hand, and as the casket passed I said, "I'll be seeing ya." And I do, I see him in my last name, and am proud of the family he helped build, the family he tried to keep together, even when his son was suffering terribly from schizophrenia and threatening his life.

When I wear flannel, I think of Grandpa, but I don't remember him in flannel, it just seems like a grandpa thing to wear, so the culture, too, the culture of grandfathers, ties me to him. And the stories about him are charming: his father, an orphan in France, adopted by a priest, traveled the countryside parish to parish, later turned stowaway on a ship to America. These are not Art's stories, directly, they are his father's stories. But I imagine Art must have stood on his porch at 609 Iowa and looked out at the sun setting in the west and wondered about his father tucked away in the bottom of a ship crossing the ocean. Here, in America, Art worked in iron, married Elizabeth, fathered 9 children, and outlived one of those children. That death, of my uncle Michael, cracked open my family in a way it was never able to repair; it shifted the foundation in the way only the death of a child can shift it, to a point too far gone past restoration.

I am tied to Michael, too, although no one ever told me any stories about him. His death is too painful, and the rippled after shock his death had on the family has caused too many abuses, too many violations, too many violences against one and other to fully understand as a child of the last born. My mother, Michele, was the one Gramma was pregnant with when Michael died. The similarities of these names, Michael and Michele, are not lost on any of us and betray the deepest kind of remorse any human soul can bear, the kind of sorrow felt when a child born cannot replace a child lost. Decades later stories of Michael are still too painful to relay, and so some of us choke back the trauma of a lost brother with alcohol, some of us ignore the trauma of that loss coming out through our parent's actions with denial. We spend our lives erasing our lives, and recreating them, and imprinting them on the lives of our children.

I had scarlet fever once, when I was a child, and all I really know about Michael was that he died of scarlet fever*. I was terrified, and didn't understand the difference in medical treatment for me from Michael, and thought I would surely die from the disease. There was a picture of Michael, it looked to be perhaps his school photograph, in the corner of a shelf in the kitchen. I looked at this picture every time I went out the backdoor, and, in my own way, was haunted by it. This little boy that I never knew died. He was supposed to be my uncle, and as a child my uncles were grown men, how could this little boy be my uncle? And if he died as a child, was I safe? Couldn't I die too? It was this lack of understanding, of information, that made Michael's picture so chilling to me. It was the presence of too much information, of knowing Michael so well, and then losing him, that haunted the rest of my family.

The loss of Michael is the kind of suffering that doesn't diminish with time. I'm sure my grandmother woke every day of her life, and next to the joy of her grandchildren, and the pleasure she had in watching her family grow and survive, she held the deep despair that only a parent who has lost a child can know. I don't know what it is like to lose a child, I never will, and I don't pretend to know what my grandmother was thinking. But in Gramma's humming on the porch, her low singing as she picked weeds, her highest laughter and sternest lectures, there was always a current of sadness, one so strong I could see it even as a small child.

We hope, so deeply, that there is a place in this universe for a return to the joy we knew before the crushing losses changed who we were into someone new, wholly different. Because we lost a child, we struggle to regain the innocence of childhood, but time only moves in one direction. This sorrowful action of constantly looking back, the futile effort to remain in the past, destroys the present. We all experience these different kinds of loss throughout our lives. We mourn for our former selves, our lost loved ones, a kind of life that no longer exists. Some of us find these things to mourn for in Vietnam, some of us see them in a cancer found in our own bodies. But we live in spite of loss: we believe in heaven, we go out dancing, we make paintings, we write essays to our families because we want to believe some part of us can go on forever.

ER

* Cathy told me today that Michael died of Rheumatic, not Scarlet, fever.