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August 6, 2006
Protect your memories
The other day I was surfing around on google looking for a newspaper article that had mentioned some statistic I wanted to use in an NIH grant application that I am writing. As I scanned the results, reading the small sample of text google always places below the link, a little light clicked on in my brain.
About an hour later, in the midst of something completely unrelated, it occurred to me that a name I had seen in one of the google blurbs matched that of a girl I knew growing up. Curious (the name isn't exactly Jane Smith, but neither is it inconceivable that someone else had the same one), I searched through my history, and found the link.
It was to a newspaper article about a recognition dinner for a drug and alchohol re-habilitation center in an upstate NY city at which this person spoke. She is a newly recovered addict. The age seemed dead-on.
The city, and girl, shall go un-named: despite the fact that this girl's name is in the article, and hence her particulars are in the public record, I would prefer not to use her full name, for a variety of reasons. If you are reading this and knew the two of us once upon a time, please do not leave her full name in comments. But for those of you from the old days who do visit my site from time to time, I am writing of Amy I. (or Aimi, Aimee, as I learned it was spelled in old yearbooks later that afternoon). (Check the yearbooks and it should be clear who I am talking about. She was a year younger than me and would have been in the class of 1991.)
Later that night, I asked my brother Tim (who stayed in the general area (though next week he will be joining me in Dixie) and hence is a little better connected to people from the daze) if he had heard anything about her. He had, though it had been at least a decade since he had heard any more of her. What he had heard corraborated key details in the article, making it almost certain that this was the same person I knew long ago.
What I learned from my brother and this article really bothered me. She became a heroin addict by the time she was around 21 (I was 22 at that point, and obviously locked into an entirely different story). She spent 11 years addicted to heroin. While she has, or had as of September, 2005, kicked the habit, I could not help but to feel a tremendous sense of loss.
And I can't really explain why. I certainly knew her, probably hung around with her once or twice, and would consider myself to have parted with her on good terms. But no more than that.
Maybe its because the person I remember was such a pretty and smart girl. Maybe its because thinking about what happened to her is like a violation, however peripheral, of my memories of a time in my life that I have probably embellished to some degree or another, perhaps because it is a safe place to return to now and again as an adult.
How did this person, who I remember as so smart, and full of promise, live this life?
I know that all of us have a tendency, it's a natural defense mechanism I suppose, to lock people into roles, identities, images, etc., with which we are comfortable and familiar.
That's a big part of the tragedy when a child dies. All things must die. But when a child dies their identity, the person they would have become, is annihilated, not only physically but also in the eyes of those who loved them and would have watched them grow.
They will never be able to express themselves beyond the parameters of a child, to become a fully articulated person. And those who survive them are not instinctively driven to try by dint of the imagination to flesh that person in. Our conception of them is more or less locked forever in time and place as we knew them then: a small child.
Thinking about Amy also led me to remember a little girl named Briana, the daughter of friends of my parents, who died of a brain tumor when I was a young teenager. It occurred to me that she would be in her mid to late Twenties today, had she lived. But she is trapped in my mind as a little girl whose dying desire was for a Cabbage Patch kid.
The opposite is going on with Amy, I think: confronted with the adult, I am trying to lock out the person she became and reinforce my memory of the comparatively pristine girl.
Which is not to judge: I didn't know Amy that well and don't really know what led her down the path she followed. And it goes without saying that I've made a lot mistakes myself. Certainly since the time when I did know her I have learned that, if you are not careful, it is so easy to slip out of this life. If I saw Amy again, maybe I'd tell her about one of the other important things I've learned since then: that beyond a certain point, regret is a useless emotion.
I guess if there is any moral to this story, it is to protect your memories.
Thomas Wolfe was probably right.
Posted by dag at August 6, 2006 4:46 PM
Comments
*Pristine*?
You know, you are a real asshole. You should try recovering, before you judge.
Posted by: Ouija at August 6, 2006 7:56 PM
Really, what you said has me so fucking pissed.
You know what? There are some people with bigger problems than where the nexct great bottle of wine comes from or where you can get some dumb assed mask turned into some grossly expensive piece of art for you to show ofdf to your assholde friends.,
How dare you judeg her.
Posted by: Ouija at August 6, 2006 8:05 PM
Ouija,
Presented with your comments, my first instinct was to turn and deliver a full frontal counter-attack.
But my second instinct was that this really is not an issue that inspires me to fight.
Your level of anger suggests to me that some of the issues on which I touch in turn touch close to home for you.
However, a careful reading of my post reveals, I think, that in fact I am not judging her: I don't know why her life took the course it did. Perhaps, I admit, that time of life was less halcyon for her than for me. Perhaps the seeds of her later addiction to heroin were already well sown by events that had in some fashion or another rendered her vulnerable. Maybe things went terribly wrong after I last saw her.
What I meant by "pristine" was "untouched by heroin". And that is fair: at that time she was untouched by heroin. I fully admit that she may have already borne deep scars by that point. (Who knows? Some author, perhaps it was Marguerite Duras in The Lover, seemed to feel that we will never fully escape from or resolve in our adult minds what happened to us when we were, say, thirteen.
My subject was more about my memories of her or at least the emotional core of memories that had faded through the years (though, on looking at my old yearbook, it was clear that she had, in fact, been a strikingly beautiful girl, certainly more so than had ever occurred to me at the time-but then again my taste in wine has also vastly improved since then), rather than any sort of really nuanced assessment of the person she was or is. And that's all I can ever really talk about with authority: I did not really know her well enough to understand, and hence say, more about her. Moreover, at that age I think I lacked the sophistication (and perhaps still do) to really offer much in the way of a sophisticated assesment, even if I had know her much better.
And yet I cannot overcome that abiding memory of someone I had, probably until just the other day, not thought of for at least 16 or 17 years: she was pretty, and smart, and seemed as bright and hopeful as moonlight in a martini.
And maybe that light never really fully went out. Maybe that part of my memories, whatever the embellishment, was and continues to be, however tenuously, true. In the article, she said that she believes "I can be whatever I want to be. I deserve to be whatever I want to be." I certainly do hope that that comes to pass.
OK?
Posted by: dag at August 6, 2006 9:30 PM