Memories can trip us

Facebook “Memories” pop up every day, of course, and most I ignore. But this week has been filled with “Memories” about the trip Nigel and I took to Australia for his sister’s surprise birthday party. This particular series has aspects I didn’t mention at the time, and lessons I couldn’t comprehend back then.

The “Memory” at left mentions that norovirus “hitched a ride”. While Nigel and some other family members got quite sick, neither I nor Nigel’s mum were sick at all. That’s probably because we’d both had norovirus in December 2015 (caught at a different family gathering…), and that ordinarily gives one at least some immunity to the same strain for 6-18 months (or even for several years). However, Nigel didn’t get sick earlier, or maybe just mildly, but in Australia he was utterly miserable for the first 24 hours.

We couldn’t fly for 48 hours, but, fortunately, we had travel insurance, However, Nigel had to get a medical certificate in order to file the claim, and he managed all of that in the second 24 hours. The arranged details were arranged, the replacement flight booked, and and we flew home two days later, arriving in the evening.

Sunny and Jake (Leo wasn’t part of the family yet) were being looked after by Nigel’s cousin in Hamilton, and we could have driven down to pick them up the next day, but Nigel loved our babies, so we drove down immediately after we arrived. Nigel perked up noticeably when we did that, but we got back to our house in south Auckland pretty late that night.

That as the last big trip Nigel and I ever had together, though we did go to more family gatherings here in New Zealand. Fortunately, norovirus was not invited to any of them.

Three years later, in 2020, I went to Queenstown with some of the family, and much as I enjoyed the trip, it was challenging for me, to say the least, because it was the first time I’d travelled anywhere since Nigel died, roughly 14 months earlier, and it was also around three years after we all went to Australia. All of that was on my mind at the time.

In January 2024, a bit more than four years after the Queenstown trip, and just over six years after the Australia trip, I went with even more family on a trip to Fiji. That trip had challenging moments for me, because Nigel wasn’t there, and it was my 65th birthday. Even so, by then the bigger challenge came from discovering that, in fact, there IS such a thing as weather that’s “too hot” (and humid) for me. Nigel’s sister Carolyn was on the trip, and we lost her a bit more than a year later.

My last post in Australia in 2017.

The moral of this travelogue through space and time is really this: Everything we do, everywhere we go, we bring memories with us. Good or bad, they always come along. In 2020, as a still-new widower, I had every reason to not go on the trip to Queenstown, but I went anyway, felt what I needed to feel, and enjoyed what I wanted to enjoy. The Fiji trip was similar, though for me the challenge on that one really was more about the tropical heat—but memories of that the trip now carry some pathos of their own because of losing Carolyn a bot more than a year later.

The trick, I think, is to accept that sometimes painful memories will come forward no matter what we do, and even in the midst of good times. Because of that, I think it’s important that, if we’re able, we need to push through the pain, and not let it hold us back—and I know all too well how damn hard that can be! I also know firsthand that emotional pain can keep us from fully experiencing good times—but not necessarily keep them away entirely, maybe just dull them a little.

All of that has been on my mind this week as I saw one Facebook “Memory” after another about that trip and the trip to Queenstown, which was around the same time of year. It’ll happen again next year, but I don’t mind at all. I’d rather feel pain because I loved, than to feel nothing at all. Honestly, that’s a huge gift.