"These Things I Remembered"

 I'll never forget the day my wife called me when she was going into labor for the first time. I was at a recruiting event in Annapolis when she called my cell and asked if I could come home. I packed up my table and told the people next to me, "Gotta go...we're having a baby."

She wasn't going into labor right away, so I wasn't rushing and still had a good four hour drive. It was late October, and there was a fog over the cornfields of southern Delaware as I made my way over the expansive Chesapeake Bay bridge and up route 13 through the Eastern Shore. I turned on the radio and Adele's "Someone Like You" was playing; to this day I can't hear it without thinking of that drive home before our lives became something else entirely, and only for the better, an audible mile marker in my memory.

I still have to ask my wife (as I did tonight as were lying in bed) what time our kids were born. The fact of the matter is, I'm not good with details; I remember the forests, the macro snapshots--like my drive home over the Chesapeake--not the trees. One of my favorite bands in high school was Hüsker Dü, which means "do you remember" in Danish. Maybe it is the years of being on psychotropic medication, but I can be like Guy Pierce in Memento at times--not quite short term memory loss or early onset dementia in any way, but a somewhat concerning inability to remember things. 

So, it's important for me to remember. I have to write things down. If I was ever deposed, it would be a nightmare, because I can't even remember what I did the day before sometimes, and would be an unreliable witness unable to remember dates and times. I rely on my wife for those things.

As we were talking this evening about our (well, my) recent plans to delete my one and only social media account--Facebook--in the next month, I went back and forth as to whether to download my ten years worth of posts, pictures, and conversations from the site to a hard drive, or whether to just take the nuclear option and leave like a ghost without a trace.

The fact of the matter is, I write to remember. I've spent half my life doing just that--in notebooks, letters, word docs, and, yes, blogs. My wife asked if I would print out my former blog to preserve it for our family as a kind of legacy, for our kids as well as her. It is, after all, an important part of what brought us together, when she read it before we met for the first time and felt like she was doing something she shouldn't. When I exported it to pdf, it was 900 pages long. For her, the physical copies are important. In a digital age, she likes leather photo albums. She saves Christmas and birthday cards. And so she wants the paper version of something she may never read again, but at least she has in physical form. 

When it comes to Facebook, though, I'm not sure a decades worth of posts and interactions is worth preserving--at least not in the same way that the memories and mementos I truly do cherish should be preserved. Social media by its very nature is fleeting--read one moment, perhaps generating a flurry of likes or explosion of comments, but quickly forgotten in the ether a week later. Many of the interactions are with perfect strangers. And underlying it is the unnerving nature of social media in general at fomenting division and tribalism, not to mention our own personal form of cancel culture. 

For a good while now, I have wanted to leave, and never had a good enough reason. With the alarming rise of digital censorship, the foreign influence of the CCP, and the fact that maybe, just maybe, this 'social experiment' is not in fact a good thing for us as a society--well, it took a while, but I think I have given what I asked for in prayer: an out. I've made some great connections (many of which I've developed in real life as well as a result of the site) and there will be a big part of me that misses it, but not enough to outweigh the robbery of my time and energy and the feeling of being, well, used by forces I would rather have nothing to do with. And so, I think I will be taking the ghost option of letting it lie as a chapter from the past, not one to be preserved, but like a house fire you were 5 minutes too late too.

I am beginning to read the Lamentations of Jeremiah. It is both a funeral dirge to the dead and a poetic lament to the destruction of Jerusalem and the desertion of God from the city on account of their national sins. Apt, wouldn't you say? So much of the Jewish experience lies in remembering--the Passover, the Exodus, the time before the Exile. You don't remember what you had until you lose it. 

We may find ourselves in the days to come echoing the Psalmist: "These things I remembered, and poured out my soul in me : for I shall go over into the place of the wonderful tabernacle, even to the house of God : With the voice of joy and praise; the noise of one feasting." (Ps 42:4). Will we look back and say, "Remember when we could go to Mass? Receive the Eucharist? See our brothers and sisters in the Lord--in the flesh?"? Will these be our Lamentations--that when the Lord was known, at our fingertips, we did not remember Him until it was too late? "Seek ye the Lord while He may be found" (Is 55:6). 

It occurred to me that though this has been a queer year to say the least, there have been some upsides--working from home has allowed me more time with my kids; my wife and I still managed to have some memorable date nights; we've all gone on hikes and played in the snow. And I've caught myself thinking at times that these will become the memories in the possibly very dark days ahead that I will want to preserve, that I shouldn't take for granted, because faith and family are the only things that really matter in the end. We will look back and say, "remember when we used to laugh in the kitchen? Remember when we would lie on the couch together and read? Remember when we would eat dinner together?" And it will seem like an age ago, like a mirage in a desert given what we are up against as Christian believers. 

We simply don't know what's in store for the future--but we can know our past, and preserve those memorial mental snapshots of life for the times when we need to remember. And to do that, we need to be attentive to the present, which is where there gestation of memory takes place, not distracting ourselves with fear of the future or gorging on news feeds or constant posting about this or that aspect of the political realm. We need to make space in our minds to preserve what is important, and not be afraid to do a data dump of the non-essential, as the apostles were told by our Lord, "Take nothing for your journey; neither staff, nor scrip, nor bread, nor money; neither have two coats." (Lk 9:3). 

There is a great (unscripted) part in the movie Good Will Hunting when Robin Williams is talking with the young Matt Damon about his late wife who died of cancer:

"My wife used to fart when she was nervous. She had all sorts of wonderful little idiosyncrasies. She used to fart in her sleep. One night it was so loud it woke the dog up. She woke up and went, “ah was that you?” And I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

But Will, she's been dead for 2 years, and that’s the stuff I remember: wonderful stuff you know? Little things like that. Those are the things I miss the most. The little idiosyncrasies that only I know about: that’s what made her my wife. Oh she had the goods on me too, she knew all my little peccadilloes. People call these things imperfections, but they're not. Ah, that’s the good stuff."

He's right. That is the good stuff; the stuff otherwise that goes unnoticed. But it' also the most worthy of memory, because it's 'offline' so to speak. The moments that take place in the intimacy of a bedroom, or a car ride, or an impromptu dance party with your kids in the kitchen. We don't set out to make moments like that--like life, the best parts just happen. Just be sure to pay enough attention when they do. So you can remember.