A Different Type of Memory

I have always had a strange obsession with dates—with the passage of time. When I was young, I would document the dates and times of every significant event of my personal life: the arrival of my college acceptance letter, or the last day of school. It was part of an obsessive compulsive desire to remember things in the future, a naïve hope that I could someday look back and revel in the fact that at 5:37 p.m. on a May 16, I took my last high school exam.

College changed this. There is no telling why, or when exactly, but I no longer care to remember exact times or dates. Perhaps the time elapsed since these days, these seconds, has become more important than the events themselves. Perhaps I’ve realized that there is little I can procure from knowing exactly when things transpired. More importantly though, I’ve realized that those exact dates, as opposed to the time passed since them, illicit vastly different emotions.

For a while though, there was one date that was most important to me. It was Saturday, September 23, 2000. It was the date my mother was hit while driving by a drunk driver. She died 14 days later. I was 12.

Dates change every year; there will never be another Saturday, September 23, or at least not for several years. When the anniversary of my mother’s accident comes each year, it is hard for me to remember things. For me, it was most importantly a day, not a date. Remembering days and dates are very different.

When I remember the day, I remember concrete things. I remember how I last heard the door slam when my mother left, or the smell of the hair gel that I wore that day. Remembering days makes me conscious of the nature of loss, of the cruel synaesthesia of memory. It is a memory of my mother becoming a memory, of how 12 years of my life became the only years with my mother.

College has taught me a different sort of recollection. I am dependent on quite a different type of memory, a detached one. September 23, not a Friday, perhaps a Wednesday this year, is a date. It tells me eight years have passed since I lost my mother. On September 23, there may be flowers on my family’s dining room table. My father may tell me one of his patients remembered my mother, or that they sent along a card. It is a memory not of the emotions that surround death but of the time that has passed since.

At college I am at the mercy of this sort of memory. The loss of my mother confined her to my mind, to memory, though it was always one revived through her things, through smelling her cashmere sweaters or by smelling Chanel No. 5. Detached from this, I can live this memory only through instants. My memory must be trained to be catalyzed by different things, through someone else’s laugh, through a test I’ve saved from third grade with her signature, or through a scene different than my home. I can run my fingers over it, it is like the dates I used to write down and document, but my reliving is cruelly limited. I am at the mercy of these limitations, of this surreal reality of recollection.

The memory of my mother that lives with me is a life of mere instants. There is no attachment of recollection to bits of her reality, to things I’ve held on to. College is often a movement towards independence, towards self-sufficiency, but I find myself dependent on new associations I must form, on fickle and unknown emotions in unknown places.

Several weeks ago, I had lunch with a blockmate. Leaning in across the table, sheltering his words from those around us, he told me, “If I had to pick my favorite activity of the semester, it would be staring at walls.”

There is an odd comfort to this feeling. It is a way of a new recollection, one in which I am ever more conscious of the passing of time, of the reliving of a different memory away from concrete things and attached to unfamiliar things. The most valuable lesson college has taught me thus far has been the adaptability of memory, the transference of recollection to a new set of catalysts. The brilliance of memory is that it is undying, but the emotion of recollection is one that must be constantly learned, channeled, and relived.