Toward the end of The Chronology of Water, Lidia describes memory – how her memory is poor. “When I look back, things are underwater, and when I pick them out and bring them to the surface they float around my idiotic attempts to drag them to land. I wonder what memory is, anyway. What writers are doing when they scratch at it.” Memory, being human and flawed and fickle. She continues:
According to recent neuroscience studies, the act of remembering triggers nearly the same activities in the brain and its circuitry as the actual experience. … However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It’s what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience.
The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can’t remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever.
If you’re writing in the moment – transcribing the memory as you’re in it – is the moment still preserved? Does it still change, because of the language? Does it change only slightly? I’m afraid to revisit the writings I recorded during my mother’s death because of this. By going back – by editing – am I changing the memory? By editing, does the memory become less true? By editing, what am I losing? How do you best honor the memory? The sanctity of the moment? The truth? The untouched memories are the most safe, forever preserved. So do I lock those words away? Forever?
The truth – “what is ‘true’ in non-fiction writing is also always ‘crafted’ – given shape and composition and emotional intensity – through our narrative choices as writers.” Which is more important – being a holder of the memory-relic, or a teller of the memory-story? Is a memory even a memory if it isn’t remembered? What makes us human are the inconsistences logged, the exaggerations over time, the loose ends suddenly found and tied. Would I rather my memories be safe replicas, or alive? “Given the choice between grief and nothing, I choose grief” – from Faulkner and from Lidia. Given the choice between locking the memories away – pure and true – or sharing them, even at the cost of augmenting them, sharing them. Even with the fear of bastardizing them, sharing them. “I want you to hear how it feels to be me inside a sentence. Even if some of the sentences seem to lose their meaning. I want the rhythm, the image, the cry to remain with your body.” Between logical and emotional meaning, I choose emotion. I choose grief. I choose love. I choose to share.
Sharing, life-writing, has such grand stakes, Lidia writing between and from life and death:
I can say it in a sentence now: my mother did not protect me. As a girl, I died.
So when my child died in the womb of me, it was as if I’d done the same thing. I’d killed a girl I meant to love.
It’s a big deal to make a sentence.
The line between life and death.
It took me 10 years to emerge from the grief of a dead daughter.
Motherless child. Sometimes I’m still a daughter, sometimes a dead daughter. I was never the daughter my mother wanted, and could never be. But my not-daughter soul still feels the same daughter grief, a particular ache shared by so many. Daughter grief living side-by-side with daughter pain. Pain inflicted from mothers to daughters and not-daughters and born again-daughters. Pain inflicted by mothers who did not protect their daughters. Mothers who killed the daughters inside.
From my memories / my mother is dying; my mother is dead :
june. 237.
we were the same. my god we were the same. we were the same and you still treated me like she treated you.
how could you? how could you not see? how could you not hear the echoes in the cries of little girls who deserved better? who felt and were so unloved by their mothers? who were willing to just stand aside and let them die? how could you not see?
why did you become the thing you so hated? when did you become just like her? did you know? do you know now?
Lidia and me and so many little girls. I wish I could have saved them – “anything to keep the girl I was and the girl I had – tiny daughter dolls – safe from this world.”
And yet, there’s still love. Despite everything, she’s still my mother. From Lidia: “You probably want to know what I said to this woman. She was not a good mother. She did not save us from my father, and she taught us things that we have spent our entire lives trying to unlearn. … I said thank you mamma. I love you.” The luxury of human memory is that same ability to move away from the truth. Picking and choosing what to remember and tell, picking and choosing which memories to hold on to, and letting the others go. Lidia’s mother passed after saying I love you. My mother passed after I told her to let go and left the hospital room.
october. 163.
of course she was abusive. of course she was horrible to me. these are things that have been deeply ingrained into me and will never go away no matter how much time passes. but looking over all the images with me and her in them, from childhood and from the recent past, i see how much she loved me. she did love me. was it a perfect unconditional love? no. but there was love.
this is a woman who was abused and did her best. unfortunately her best was not good enough. unfortunately she did not seek help before she had me. unfortunately she did not seek help as she raised me. unfortunately she took out her pain on me. unfortunately it made our relationship very difficult. unfortunately she did much damage to me.
april. 220.
i remember the blankets she made me and the songs she sang me right before bed the most.
she did love me. she did.
“I left words out. On purpose. But I know why I was hiding words from you,” Lidia says. But there’s the words we sit with instead – the words Lidia does tell us. “I think of all the mornings she drove me to swim practice at 5:00 a.m. Or the sound of her voice singing I see the moon. Or the day she brought the shoe box out and showed me the story she’d written, and the redbird drawing my father had done – the lives they could have lived. Or her face when she told my father she’d signed the scholarship letter, and that I was going to college, that I was leaving.” The luxury of human memory: making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, and creates a fiction you can live with. Lidia’s advice: “Make up stories until you can find one you can live with. Make up stories as if life depended on it.” Make and choose a story so you can keep on living. The story-memories I choose: my mother sewing blankets for me. I think of all the nights she read to me and sang me to sleep. Or how she painted my room by hand with rollers and sponges and pink paint. My mother baking bread and putting butter on Malt-o-Meal and oatmeal in happy faces for me. I think of all the times we had tea parties in the backyard, all the drives we took to nowhere in particular. I think-remember us showering together, climbing into bed, dancing to her favorite albums. Those moments. Holy memory-moments.
Lidia writing a dissertation on Kathy Acker, and me writing an annotation on Lidia’s memoir: “When I went to write words on top of hers, kind of I felt like I might throw up.” I typed out the standard two passages I’d analyze – in hopes of pointing out examples in her text, point out examples in mine, infer how these could help me moving forward in the program, but it didn’t feel right. Like I might throw up; “trying to write critically, academically, hurt.” While it didn’t seem entirely “like a violence” or “murderous even,” it did feel “false.” What transpired between us doesn’t “fit” an annotation. The intimacies shared goes much deeper than that. Meeting grief to grief, eye to eye, daughter to daughter. “Instead of the dissertation chapter, I began to write a story.” Instead of an annotation, I wrote a conservation with Lidia – in two parts. A conversation, with her mother and my mother. Her little girl and mine. Her dead girl and my dead girl gender. My life and her life. My memories and hers.