May
2015.
Remembering by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.
Couns., PhD
By the time you read this I would have returned from a short
holiday in Perth, catching up with friends and snorkelling off Rottnest Island,
and generally having a relaxing time. When I began planning this holiday it
didn’t really occur to me that the lives of some of my friends are in the
process of being turned upside down due to serious illness, surgery, professorial sabbatical, home
renovations, and the problems of looking after elderly parents who sometimes don’t
even recognize them. My focus had been on the promise of fun. I forgot that we are all are getting older,
moving into more mature years and leaving behind the mindstuff of youth. And so, I got to mulling, once again,
about life and decay of memory. The death thing, well that’s something else.
It so happens that two of my favourite authors are becoming
very reflective in a similar way, not that I am at all in their situation. The neurologist, Oliver Sacks now faces
death from a terminal cancer of the liver. The psychiatrist, Irvin Yalom is just plain old. Both,
though, have recently published what are probably their last books. Yalom is a
wonderful existential therapist who has written novels and books on his case
studies, as well as teaching tomes, one of which was a text book we used when I
was at university. Sacks has entertained and instructed us through his work
using neurological case studies,
opening the doors to self reflexive writings about what being human is like at
a whole range of levels, from disability to enhanced perceptual experiences
using music and medications.
How these two authors are writing these days shows two deep
thinkers dropping down to a heart-felt place of reflection. There is a tangible
difference in their writings from earlier times. At times in the past, they
were a bit didactic and sometimes somewhat full of themselves, but now they are
assuredly authoritative and humble, transparently so. I like this, even though
it is disarming.
I’ve been noticing the passage of time quite a bit recently
in those around me. The comfort of knowing a person and them knowing me with
equal facility, has been shaken somewhat.
One person I spoke with recently had forgotten who I am, even though I’d
been in communication with him over a period of months. It’s a bit like picking
up an object you thought was going to be heavy, but suddenly you find it
surprisingly light and your expectations about it are totally mismatched so that
you practically drop it. Or, another analogy: it’s like returning home but no-one
remembers who you are anymore.
It’s the stuff of nightmares.
In this spirit of discomfort, I began reading Yalom’s latest (last?) book, Creatures of a Day and other tales of
psychotherapy, having a sense
that I would, and would not, fully understand what he meant by the title, and
so it happened this way.
Yalom quotes Marcus Aurelius’ (120-180 AD) The
Meditations, with the words,
“All of us are creatures of a day: the rememberer and the remembered
alike. All is ephemeral – both memory and the object of memory. The time is at
hand when you will have forgotten everything, and the time is at hand when all
have forgotten you.” Unfortunately,
disquieting and haunting though these words are, the slippage of cognitive
decline is gradual. There are small forgettings, small deficits, small, but
increasing decays, so that though it looks like nothing is happening/ has
happened, things are happening, and wishing it weren’t so, doesn’t change that.
There is a wrench from the familiar to the unknown, and this is what I’m
finding now among the friends of my generation.
I find this slippage of the memory capabilities of others uncomfortable and
out of kilter with my own experience because my own memory is very good, and
actually getting better, the more I practice remembering my clients’ histories.
It is like seeing deer standing on a slippery embankment: slipping, inexorably
into cognitive oblivion, while feeling alert in myself, present and younger
than my actual years.
Seize the day, o creature, I want to say. Drink deeply of
it, dive into it, celebrate it, re-member it, and quiver at the momentous unknowness
of being for who knows what is next. Who knows who will forget.
