Memories are Funny Things

They remembered that God was their rock, that God Most High was their redeemer. Psalm 78:35

The following paragraphs have been sitting on my computer in draft form since I started blogging in January. They were cut from an early post about why I decided to start writing. I always planned to turn them into their own post, but never did. I think I left them alone because my memories of Oliver are precious to me, which makes it challenging to admit that my memories of Oliver are also fleeting, affected by time, and controlled not by me but rather by what was going on in my emotions and irrational brain at the time of his death. Precious but imperfect. Comforting but painful. Memories are funny things.

Some of my memories from Oliver’s death and the days surrounding it are seared in my brain: rubbing his back two nights before he died when he was having a hard time falling asleep, seeing the nurses kneel on the ER bed to perform CPR, walking around with a fist over my chest for a month because it felt like my heart was going to burst out of my body and drain all of the lifeblood out of me, entering the grocery store without him for the first time after bringing him with me almost everywhere for 10 years and 8 ½ months.

Some of my memories still knock me off my feet at unexpected times and bring me right back to those first moments of pain and loss: driving past the hospital where he died, seeing a child whose mannerisms or looks remind me of him in some way, opening facebook to find a picture of him after losing his first tooth.

Some of my memories are missing, always lost to the fog I walked in those first months.

Some of my memories are slowly being lost to time. As his death moves further into the past I find I can't always remember if something happened before or after Oliver died. Did he read "The Penderwicks" with us? I think so. How about "The Vanderbeekers"? I don't know.

Some of my memories changed as his death gave me a different perspective to everything that happened before. Suddenly it was a privilege to wash sheets every morning, to teach him not to burp at the dinner table, to leap 100 feet in the air because he jumped out when I was coming around the corner. In my memories he is a lot more perfect than he really was. I know this and try to acknowledge it especially when I remember him with my daughter, not wanting her to feel less than, but she remembers him this way too.

Memories are funny things. In the Bible we see both the call to remember and the call to press onward:

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. Isaiah 43:18-19

Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I [Paul] press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. Philipians 3:13b-14

Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the thing your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them. Deuteronomy 4:9

I can see how finding the right balance between memorializing and pressing onward is important. By doing both we honor God and the person we are missing, bring to mind God's faithfulness, and accept the invitation to work today as we long for heaven. 

Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. Lamentations 3:21-23

We had a couple of warm days here after a few frosts.
Our flowers are striving again!