The memories trap

The thing about the memories we have about the events in our lives is that they don’t all give us warm feelings. In fact, memories can tigger all sorts of positive and negative emotions, depending on the circumstances. For someone dealing with deep grief, memories can be especially fraught.

I’ve shared a lot of posts about memories, especially Facebook “Memories”, and I talk about what, if anything, has changed since the events in the memory, possibly including the way I feel about the memory/events themselves. Contrary to expectations or whatever, they’re not all about “bad” stuff.

A couple days ago, I published “The day a big change arrived”, a post about when I my new Mac Mini arrived—definitely a positive thing. This past weekend, though, I published a reflective/contemplative post about my recent trip to the rental house in Auckland, and that wasn’t about a memory that was served up to me (like by Facebook, for example), but, instead, about memories that were triggered within me when I went to a place that was significant in my life.

There’s a third kind of memory, one that I can talk about in any number of ways, like a happy post that reminds me of sad things, or vice versa. Today, Facebook served up a “Memory” that I shared on Facebook and chose not to talk about further. It turns out I never talked about it directly on this blog, so I’ll start by sharing the lighthearted tone I took when sharing the “Memory” on my personal Facebook today, then I’ll talk about what was going on that I didn’t talk about at the time.

On February 22, 2021, my cousin-in-law and I took our dogs to be groomed, and since the groomer was quite a long drive from Hamilton, we decided to make a day of it. We ended up in Morrinsville, a town in the Waikato that Nigel and/or I went to from time to time. I took some photos, and in the first one (at the bottom of this post), I said:

Took the dogs for a trim today, so popped round to nearby Morrinsville. Haven’t spent time here in maybe ~15 years; it’s changed a bit, but the big decorated cows are still all over (I like this one because New Zealand is on the map, which is often not the case overseas).

It was a mainly lighthearted caption, as was the caption to the photo at the top of this post. I said in that caption:

Still in Morrinsville. Photo is of some stupid cow. Also, one of Morrinsville’s more unusual cow statues (apparently made from scrap metal). I think she’s giving side eye because I didn’t ask for permission to take a photo with her. Bloody tourists. Also, it’s HOT today!

When I shared the photo up top on my Facebook, I said: “I was clearly in a very serious mood that day…”. The fact is, I wanted to leave it at that and not talk about the rest, everything else that was going on behind the scenes, and unspoken by me.

That day in Morrinsville was about three weeks after Sunny died, and the dogs that were being sheared were just Jake and Leo. Jake died about seven months later.

All of that was immediately in my mind when I saw today’s FB “Memory”, yet I said nothing about it. The thing about memories isn’t just the many ways they can affect us, they can also affect how others view us: Do we focus “too much” on that particular memory? “Should” we have “moved on” from whatever the trauma was? What other judgements might people make if we share memories that are important to use, but that, perhaps, other people think shouldn’t be?

This is the dilemma that will hit any grieving person eventually, and sometimes it’s a constant war between what we want to say—or need to say—and what we think is socially acceptable. Navigating the stormy seas between those two things is sometimes more challenging than dealing with the grief itself. That’s something I learned quite early on.

Obviously, I no longer care what anyone else thinks: I’ll speak my truth, and if someone else can’t understand it, or decides to judge me harshly because I do, that’s absolutely not my problem. After all, everything I’ve put online so far has been absolutely free: Absolutely no one is compelled by the force of law or commerce to pay any attention to what I post, if they don't like what I post, that's all about them, not me.

Nevertheless, it seems that every grieving person—absolutely including me—reaches a point at which we think we should say nothing at all. I’m lucky in that I came to my senses pretty early on. While it may be a bit too harsh to say that my attitude became “fuck that shit”—well, no, it’s not too harsh, because that’s exactly where I ended up. But, then, maybe I’m just lucky? I have little to lose if people reject me for my openness; others aren’t even nearly as lucky.

Every time I encounter a memory, whether on social media, or even just what the photos widget on my iPad serves up to me every day, it gives me two choices. First, do I share it all? And, if I do, do I speak my truth or spin it? I don’t think most non-grieving people face such choices most of the time.

Today I chose the easiest path with the FB “Memory” I shared, and other times I don’t. What’s the deciding factor, what makes me choose one over the other? I don’t know. Mood? How I was feeling in that moment? Something else? Does it even matter?

The negotiations that I hold with myself every single day are echoed by lots of other people dealing with the loss of their person. For us, memories can be especially fraught.