The Flickering Film of Memory
Like so many, I had a crash course on loss and grief in 2020. How could we not, when everything about our existence has been destabilized and altered without cessation. Even if one was blessed enough not to lose someone to COVID, we have all lost the semblance of what was “normal’ for us, in our routines and our expectations. No doubt we have experienced deep grief even if we don’t perceive it as such. Hopefully we have also gleaned more authenticity in the moments of joy and gratitude as well. Surely we have had to relearn how to “be”, and to find new original patterns of behavior and activity. Many of us have never felt this challenged before in our lives.
I had already been contemplating the relationship of grief to memory, but it became an ever-more pressing question for me to delve into when seeking innovative ways to help navigate through these times of profound loss. Memory can be a double-edged sword when we lose someone or something precious. Our memories can assuage our deepest sadness, reconnecting us back to feelings of love, joy and wholeness; but memories can also conversely torment us, cause us more suffering and even bring regret with them. For those suffering loss during the pandemic, this conundrum has been even more excruciating.
At the end of 2020, I spent some transformative days with a friend moving through his long-standing grief with him. We were finally able to come together in the same physical space to mourn the death of his wife (and my lifelong friend) nine months after she died. I quickly came to feel how overwhelmingly stagnant his grief was. It hung on him like a wet wool sweater, claustrophobic and stifling. It was as if his heart was bound in chains, and he was slowly suffocating. Due to COVID, no one had ever held him since she died, nor did he get to participate in any shared common rituals of grieving. As the months passed, he was emotionally and psychologically coming apart at the seams, but there were no easy remedies to assimilate and transform the grief. He was still living within the same home they shared for years with nothing but memories surrounding him. There was no reprieve for him from the sadness.
We spent our days together moving through the grief in stages. It felt like we were slowly working our way through a long dark tunnel and little by little the light ahead of us became brighter.
Then came a brilliant moment of deep transformation.
My friend cried with joy as he felt as if his chest literally cracked open, and he was able to be in touch with his heart again. He could begin to feel love flow back into his body.
Grief, like love, lives in the body and has a physical manifestation. We may not see it clearly, but we most definitely feel it. It is a mostly an unknown process how we move through these experiences of the heart, like we do with the head. Our bodies know things that our minds have forgotten.
We had created a sense of ritual by holding space together. Humans, and other species need this; to bear witness to one another in grief. It came naturally because we both desperately needed it to. It started by simply being together, by holding one another, by crying together and eventually by sharing moments we had all lived together, as the grief started to let go of him a bit.
Soon I was able to open the doors to his wife’s studio, which had been closed off for months, like he was. You could feel the uplifting force of light now moving unencumbered through the house. It was the perfect metaphor for what had happened for him.
Remembering, or residing together with shared memories, can be a source of great comfort in transforming grief, but it can only come to be that for us after we have been able to process the loss initially.
One of the tougher issues we have to approach during the pandemic is our inability to actually be together. We are all suffering loss from being held away from this most basic of human comforts - to be touched by someone who cares about us. Our shared traditional rituals (that may not necessarily speak to us personally) exist for good reason. Whether we are even aware of it, they help to lay out a road map for the heart to find it’s way back to embracing love.
Love and grief are like a kudzu vine, inextricably entwined; one cannot exist without the other. This is one of the deepest ironies of mortal life. I also believe it grounds our humanity firmly within our physical bodies. If we can understand this intellectually, we can attend to it, in new and creative ways because we know we must.
Creating personal rituals or practices during grieving (helpful even for the suffering we endure just from the solitude of quarantine) can bring healing; unchaining our hearts and allowing them to bask in the glow of love, which is truly the only antidote to the darkness of grief that can immobilize us.
Sensory memories, also called implicit memories can hold a key to this healing process. They allow us to retain the impression, the actual sensations of the original memory, even after that moment has passed. It stands to reason that through these type of memories, we are able to hold onto a knowingness of an experience within our senses, and that when that particular memory is restored within us, we can actually return to that time and place. That means we no longer have to feel only the loss. An integration process begins to occur.
Photographs, “snapshots” of our life, can inspire sensory memories. Square and rectangular boxes of brilliant color or stark black and white, some with dates and curled edges, some fading away, some just pixels in a digital file on a screen; yet through the sense of sight we can unlock the rest of the senses, and a synergy may occur - we can see, hear, feel, smell, or taste something that allows us to be in the past and the present simultaneously. The connective tissue becomes the love we feel from this synergy. To remember in this deep way is a journey our neural pathways engage in to piece together the actual experience of the past, in the same way a photograph can inspire us to return to a past moment we have lived.
This can be the beginning of creating an ‘act of remembrance’ . We can work on healing our feelings of loss by mining our sensory memories as seeds to grow acts of remembrance. In doing so we gain exponentially. Remembrance honors the memory of our connection to love, as well as building meaning and legacy for anyone or anything that has touched us authentically in our lives.
I have an exercise I like to do with people to begin opening up the process of working with sensory memory in this way. I ask them to find a photograph from their past - a person or place that makes them feel truly safe. After studying the details of the photo, I ask them to close their eyes and allow the other senses to fill the picture up in their imagination. Try it. Spend the time with your eyes closed to answer what else do you see, hear, feel, taste. Consider it a meditation or mindfulness exercise, or just plain fun. Take notes afterward. The results may amaze you. They may also lead you to create a beautiful act of remembrance, with the power to bring about positive and transformational change.
Creating meaning from tragedy is a uniquely human form of spiritual alchemy* and it is a crucial time for us to know more about this universal human experience, so we can continue to make it through these still hardest of days.
The mind must be trained, rather than the memory ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
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“The Flickering Film of Memory” ~ a quote from Patti Smith’s Instagram feed
* From “How Can We Bear This Much Loss ”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/opinion/grief-covid-book-of-job.html
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/introduction-to-memory/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/07/inside-bernadette-mayers-time-capsule
The Lure of Other People’s Photos
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/the-strange-lure-of-other-peoples-photos.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cu
