Digging Up Buried Memories

The Introduction to the Most Unforgettable Stories

I hate moving.

It’s not the loading and unloading of boxes that bothers me anymore. We started paying movers to do that 3 moves ago. Our friends had gotten too old and started making too much money to accept Papa John’s as compensation for the mileage we were about to put on their bad backs. So we started paying movers, and the moves themselves have been more expensive but less demanding. The loading and unloading from one address to the next is the easy part. The packing is the tough part because of two reasons that come to mind:

• I’m more of a hoarder than I care to admit.

• I’m more sentimental that I’d ever thought I’d be.

Packing takes me forever because I don’t pack. I go on archaeological digs. I excavate things from the back of bookshelves, find things in the bottom of drawers, read things at the end of journals, and start to trip over my memories. I stumble upon memories so painful that I remember why I buried them in the back of bookshelves, the bottom of drawers, and in the final pages of journals. I didn’t want them as memories. I wanted to give them respectable funerals and move on. But when I end up finding them, something strange happens.

I don’t cry.

I’m not sad.

I find myself smiling, and laughing, and looking around these empty rooms hoping someone walks in and asks me to explain my smiles and laughter.

Life has filled out. The events I wanted to bury weren’t complete stories. They were prequels. Settings. The intro scenes of your favorite movie or TV show designed to let you know that something different was on the horizon.

After I read Kiese Laymon’s book Heavy at the top of the year, I could finally put words to the one takeaway that forever changed my life as a human and a storyteller.

Here it is:

The Things in Life You Work so Hard to Forget
Are the Things that Make your story Unforgettable

In other words, life events I thought were TRASH, were actually the beginnings of a compost pile that would facilitate growth unimaginable. It just hadn’t happened yet. I had all the ingredients I needed, the only thing I was missing was patience. All of a sudden, quotes I’d heard about hope started to sink in.

Especially this one.

Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have right now isn’t permanent.

-Jean Kerr

Impatience is the reason why we don’t put together such unforgettable stories. We’re too quick to put periods at the end of life events instead of just letting a comma hang off the last page of the last sentence of our present journals.

The feeling we have right now isn't permanent. Here’s the difference Two Years can make.

A Tale of Two Years

April 14th, 2015 - The day my brother took his final breath. I was convinced that this was going to be a blackout date in my calendar for the rest of life. If April 14th was a restaurant, then Grief had a standing reservation and Joy would never be able to get a seat. Period.

But….2 years later, something happened.

April 14, 2017 changed all of that. My daughter was born premature a little over a week prior. In addition having tubes through her nose and mouth while spending 22 hours a day behind a plexiglass incubator, she couldn’t breathe on her own. But, on April 14, 2017 while crying tears of sorrow as I reflected not only on the loss of my brother, but the fact that he’d never get to meet Ava, the doctor snatches her out of my hands. Before I have a chance to object, he places her back in my hands and she’s lighter. All I heard were the words,

Today’s the day she breathes on her own. Congratulations.

April 14th was a day I wish I could bury in the back of a bookshelf, in the bottom of a drawer, or at the end of a journal. It was a part of my story I wish I could forget….until, the word but ended the conversation and it changed the genre of the story I was living from a tragedy to something much different.

Once again, I was reminded:

The Things in Life You Work Hard to Forget
Are the Things that Make your story Unforgettable

What memories have you been determined to forget that could actually be the intro to a story that is unforgettable?

What memories have you so buried away that you’ve failed to realize that they’ve already turned into the compost needed to give life to something you’re currently experiencing?

Maybe, the only thing we need to change today is our willingness to remember and connect the dots.

Again, I’m writing everyday about this stuff because I’m convinced I’m not the only one.

Have y’all had similar experiences?

Let me know in the comments.

Peace

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For more on Grief, Hope and Storytelling that bridges the gap between the two, you might enjoy my latest book We Go On: Finding Purpose in All of Life’s Sorrows and Joys.

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Day 10 of 30 Days of Hope