One of my favorite retirement bloggers posted an article warning about living for yesterday, finding everything about our current lives falls short of the idealized events of years before. I agree that there is a danger in living too much in our own pasts, in failing to recognize the joys and the opportunities that present themselves to us now. But I also believe there is some value in claiming our personal histories. These are the events, after all, that have shaped us into the persons we are.
There is some risk in revisiting these memories, however, for they are filled with people, places, and events that have vanished from my life. Thinking about them threatens to embroil me in the poignancy of loss. The memories seem particularly heavy when I am in Denver, Colorado, the site of my family’s birth. I drive by the high school where my grandmother and my mother graduated, and I try to catch a glimpse of their ghosts, to imagine them both walking across the lawn, books in hand, chatting with friends about the new guy in class or the upcoming dance. I see their images and I miss them, the women they grew up to be, the women who nurtured me and who set an example for me. I walk through the park where I know my father played as a child and I look in the faces of the children who are there today, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. I drive through the historic neighborhoods, seeking the homes that my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles lived in. I am disturbed by the rush of emotion I feel during these searches – for strangers live in those homes now, if the houses themselves still stand.
The house where my mother lived with my grandparents during World War II has been converted into an apartment, with crooked mailboxes lining the front porch. This is the house where I was brought as an infant, while my mother waited for my father to return from Germany. The knowledge that we lived there, that I lived there, puts a weight that I can feel in my chest.
Another house beckons to me, a home built in the 1970’s, rather than the 1920’s. This is the house where my parents lived after their retirement, the home where they lived until their deaths. When I drive slowly down the street, I remember all the times I drove there and turned into their driveway. But today, I simply cruise by, taking in the changes the new owners have made, and remembering the interior of the house, the way it was all the times that I visited there. I miss going there, miss the presence of my parents, miss feeling that I had a home there.
No, I do not want to forget those memories, even the ones that today cause me some grief.
Denver has a wonderful museum, the Museum of Natural History, which affords me a metaphor for the way to incorporate those memories into my current life. It is a museum that was always on our list to visit in our annual vacation trips to Colorado. The most impressive part of the museum to me, as a child, even more impressive than the bones of dinosaurs that take up the main hall, were the displays of a wide variety of animals, frozen by a taxidermist into natural positions and set among realistic habitats behind glass. I loved the animals, especially the gigantic walrus and the polar bears. They looked to be so alive, so real, that I trembled a bit when I approached them.
Denver has a wonderful museum, the Museum of Natural History, which affords me a metaphor for the way to incorporate those memoires into my present life. It is a museum that always on our list to visit on our annual vacation trips to Colorado.
The most impressive part of the museum to me, as a child, even more impressive than the bones of dinosaurs that take up the main hall, were the displays of a wide variety of animals, frozen by a taxidermist into natural positions and set among realistic habitats behind glass. I loved the animals, especially the gigantic walrus and the polar bears. They looked to be so alive, so real, that I trembled a bit when I approached them.
They are still there, still a perfect monument to my own childhood. But the museum, of course, has undergone some changes, with new displays and new construction. I remember my excitement as a child when I approached the massive brick façade of the great building, anxious to get inside and begin my roaming through the displays. Today, if you drive up to the front of the museum, you will see it has changed. It is contemporary, with polished glass and chrome, and it looks so different from the way I remember it. But, a step inside reveals the original entrance, the one from my childhood – the new entrance has been added on, but the old one still exists.
That is the way my memories are for me. I have layered new experiences outside of the old ones, but the old ones are still there, still very much a part of who I have become. Walking back through those memories, now stuffed and preserved like the animals in the museum, brings both joy and sadness. Most important, these memories help me to clarify my core beliefs, and they hold lessons that guide me in decisions I make today.
From the viewpoint of retirement, I can look back over the panoply of experiences, some joyful and exhilarating, some painful and even crippling. Regardless of the emotions that they bring out in me now, I know they have something in common: the decisions I made when I was going through the experiences, the reactions I had to them, are still within me. They are me.
4/20/15