Memories

Certain moments in one's life are seared into memory so deeply that they just won't allow time to change them. Most of our memories change over the years so that they become elastic and they allow intervening years to shape the way they are experienced.

My own memories of living through Hurricane Celia are like that. My family's house was wrecked by the storm. We were inside the house as pieces of it blew away around us. I responded with panic and fear during the height of the storm. My parents responded with parental calm, even at the worst of it. It was a very tough time, but it doesn't seem so awful now. The experiences that people in New Orleans went through during and after Katrina put the Celia experience into perspective for me. Time and experience have interceded, changing my memories of Celia, and they have made the memories more tolerable. My parents had a much harder time with Hurricane Celia than I did, as a high school student, I'm sure, but the experience of losing our home back then has been filtered and made less intense to me by time.

Some memories, though, won't allow time to mold and shape them. They are what they are and time can't change the experience. Time can't make those memories more tolerable. They are seared into the brain with a red-hot branding iron. They are always vivid and fresh. Those memories are like powerful jolts of electricity. They are perpetually painful and stunningly current. When those memories surface, they bring back emotional experiences that make the heart race, the skin crawl, and the tears flow.

My memories of the day my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer are among those few memories that are seared into my brain so that time cannot change them. The doctors had done a biopsy of a lump in my wife's right breast a few days earlier. She had an appointment with another doctor who was to review the results of the biopsy. For some reason, I asked if she wanted me to go with her. I had never asked before if she wanted me to go along to a doctor's appointment, but I sensed that she might want me to go. She did.

We were ushered into the examining room together and the doctor arrived shortly thereafter, with his assistant or his nurse, I'm not sure which. Immediately he began talking about how this was a terrible thing that she was experiencing, as if she knew something about the results of the biopsy that she did not know. Both my wife and I were stunned at what the doctor was saying, but I think both of us were hoping that his words would eventually lead to him telling us that it always looks bad but reality intervenes and fixes it. But he didn't. He ultimately made it clear that the biopsy revealed breast cancer and it was too large for a lumpectomy and its location was such that the only option was a mastectomy.

Much of the rest of that day is a blur, but that experience of being told my wife had breast cancer is seared into my brain. Similarly seared into my brain is the experience of hearing the surgeon, a few weeks later, come out of the operating room to tell me that he had hoped the cancer had not spread to the lymph nodes but that, unfortunately, the tests revealed it had. I remember him telling me she had a hard road ahead. I was able to hold it together for only a few moments. My wife's sister was there with me and she led me outside to the parking garage, where I completely lost my composure. I called my sister to tell her the news and I was barely able to talk to her.

It has turned out well. My wife is doing fine now and the cancer is gone. She has the lasting scars of a missing breast and her hair never came back after the chemotherapy, but she is with me and that is all that really matters to me. Memories of all of the horrors of her chemotherapy and the agony she went through during that time have softened for me with time, but the memories of those few awful moments will never change.

When those memories surface, they put my attitudes about politics and culture and humanity into perspective. Suddently, when confronted with those memories, nothing else seems awfully important.