U Unremembered

When you lose your only sibling, you lose much more than the person he or she is now, more than his or her presence in your life.

You lose the only person who shared your childhood and your growing up, the one who has so many of the same memories you do.

When you lose someone, people tell you that you will always have your memories, and in a large way that’s true. But in other ways it isn’t true.

 

A memory shared is a memory enhanced; in talking about it, each person adds things the other forgot, adds his or her own point of view on it. A memory no longer shared is half lost.

And when, on top of that, you lose your only remaining parent to dementia, the damage to the past is multiplied. There’s no one now to whom I can say “Remember that candy store in Chicago Heights and how we used to have to go through a tunnel under the street to get there? Remember the ice cream place where the scoops were square-shaped? Remember when we moved to Rhode Island, and how I couldn’t imagine that there was any place that wasn’t in Illinois? Remember?” Now I remember alone.

This was brought home especially to me when I was cleaning out my mother’s things from her apartment after she moved. She was kind of a pack rat; she had boxes full of old papers, letters, and such. Among them were many of my father’s documents from his service in World War II. My father was a good raconteur and told a lot of interesting and funny stories about when he was serving in Europe. But one thing he never talked about was the concentration camps. It was my mother who told us that his company had been one of first to liberate the camps. Among his things I found some old photos that shocked and froze me: pictures from Buchenwald. I omit the details.

Why had he saved these? Had he taken them, or had someone else? I could understand why he’d never shown them to my brother and me or even talked about it. Yet in looking back I think those pictures might have been a key to some of his behavior that I found hard to understand--mood swings and sudden explosions of temper. How could anyone who saw that not be profoundly affected?
 

Had I known about these photos before my mother became ill, maybe we could have talked about them. I could have asked her why my father saved them. If he had ever talked to her about what he had seen. She always forgave his outbursts when they occurred; did she instinctively understand what those covered-up and unshared memories might have been doing to him?

If my brother were still here, I could share the photos with him and talk about them. Our father had been pretty hard on him at times when we were growing up, yet I know he loved and missed our dad after he died. I would love to know what he would have thought. 

I wish I had had such a conversation with my brother before he passed away, but there never seemed to be the right occasion. I always thought the two of us would have each other after both our parents were gone, that we’d grow old together. I never thought my mother’s mind would fade so much.

I never expected to be the last one left, with memories that will remain only mine and questions that can never now be resolved.