Our Life... and its forgetting...

Our last family portrait, taken at a fundraiser for my husband - August, 2017

​Our life... and its forgetting.
I'm forgetting. Are you?
And the kids?

The forgetting is keeping me anchored,
here and now, I suppose.
Helping me miss you less.
Or, if not, maybe it's bandaging unhealed
wounds prematurely.
Wounds that can never truly heal.
At least not while I'm in a body.
This body. This heart. This wound.

So the forgetting.

What songs did we love together?
That's my latest grasping.
We both loved music and there are
many songs that sing "us."
But my memory can't find them all,
and my heart so desperately wants to.
To string together our story - our kaleidoscope
of stories - into a continuum of remembrance.
But there are gaps on the string.
As there were gaps in our life.

The life I envisioned anyway.

And some of the songs are heavy
with those shattered times.
And those are the memories
I'm not sure how to remember.

I only want to remember
the joy and perfection, bu the
chaos splatters across the images.

The forgetting, I guess, is not just
human, but seems to be my
coping mechanism. A habit
I incorporated early.

Your memories of your childhood were
always so crisp, corporeal and
brought with them the aroma of
homemade cookies. I remember your
stories as if they were my own.

But our own thirty-one years together are
fading, sometimes in chunks.
And it scares me.

Will I have the courage and
wherewithal to capture it in writing?

I once tried. I wanted to honor
you so, yet the pain of telling
our story was too great, my grief
too raw, all of it much too fresh.

So I look at that canvas. Of all
of us. I remember the bittersweet
day it was taken. A fundraiser
for you.

You couldn't button your own
pants that day. I did it for you.
You also recognized the challenge it
would be to get around using just
a walker. So, on a moment's notice,
a friend rounded up a wheelchair
from a thrift store and you were
held.

Held safely by a wheelchair, by a strong
community, by me and the kids.

And, as much as the day
remains in my heart, the
pockets of forgetfulness seem
to be growing.
And I don't know exactly
what to fill them with.

Inspired from a line in a poem by Li-Young Lee: "our life, and its forgetting"

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