Safe journey, Steve.
Archive for memory
Steve Jobs 1955-2011
Category: memory |
Tags: steve jobs
All is Quiet, Except…
To end the physical suffering of a four-legged companion is such a commonplace desire. And yet, the final decision to medically terminate the suffering is complicated by a narcissistic drive. This drive supersedes any and all logic–it is selfish and ugly. It will allow you to watch a cancerous growth overtake the mouth of a beloved feline companion. Hector’s, once, assertive call to attention became a meek utterance. Yesterday’s voracious appetite became my daily performance of persuasion and appeals, “please, eat.” I was a witness to his pain-to the deterioration of a respectable quality of life. This was an indisputable argument with sound evidence. However, as I rubbed Hector’s silky coat and watched his breath fade away, guilt and self-doubt swelled in my stomach and throat. This tumultuous feeling, I’ve been assured, is normal. However, I was unprepared for the actuality of it all. Unprepared for the awakening of the narcissistic drive that puts me before him. This realization is what wounds most. Had our relationship always been so one-sided? Had I always put my pleasure or pain before his?
Hector found me. Fifteen years ago, I walked into a room with a parade of 100 tiny kittens. “Choose any of them,” the caregiver said to me. Suddenly, a small saber-toothed Tabby climbed up my pant leg and introduced himself. He looked me straight in the eyes and with a toothy kitten screech demanded that I take him. I could do nothing but comply.
Hector had a unique personality. Unlike most cats, Hector was not indifferent to affection so typical of felines. In fact, his affection could be overwhelming at times. I cannot count the amount of times over the years I pushed him off of me. “Get down,” or “Not now. I’m busy,” I would say. Instead of running away, Hector would wait patiently for a returned gaze. Often this would turn into a contest of will. Who would give in first? It was always me. How can one deny such purposeful intention? He was playful and kitten-like until the end.
The lively atmosphere of my household was due to his presence. So much of my daily life was filled by his silly antics and his on cue responses. The house is quiet now. I no longer hear the pitter patter of his sprint to greet me at the door. I no longer hear his midnight toy mouse serenade. All is quiet, except for the emotions that consume me. (Again, the narcissistic drive). He is no longer in pain, I tell myself. He is no longer suffering. Nevertheless, he is no longer… He is a memory. A memory that I’m not ready to accept as such. A memory that I never want to let go.
Category: memory |
Tags: narcissistic drive
Memory Work
In Annette Kuhn’s, Family Secrets, “Secrets haunt our memory-stories, giving them pattern and shape” (Kuhn 2). For me, the secrets that haunt my memory-stories can be viewed explicitly in the photograph above. This family photo depicts my mother, father, and brother. It was displayed prominently on my dresser when I was a little girl. I remember standing before the mirror watching my long hair get violently (and painfully) brushed and braided by my mother. I would fidget from discomfort, only to be hit on the head with the backside of a wooden brush. “Ouch!” I would scream. “Stand still,” she would yell back in broken English. “But, mom…,” I would reply in a whining tone, until she would tug my hair harder. This was our daily ritual. I would whine, she would yell obscenities at me, and then it would be over. Every now and then I would glance at this photograph from my peripheral vision that was swaying back and forth from the violent tugging and pulling of my hair. This family photograph, the one that bears no trace of my existence made me internally brew with anger without knowing quite why. One day (I cannot now recall why) but my adolescent anger manifested itself outwardly and I broke the frame and glass partition of the photograph. I devilishly took a pair of scissors from my dresser drawer and excavated with great care, an outline of a mustache on my mother’s face. With each dig into the paper I derived pleasure. It wasn’t my finest artistic moment, I admit, but as a child it was the only artistic form of expression I could achieve. After mutilating the image of my mother, I saw to it that the entire photograph was crumbled in the palm of my small seven year old hands. I had ruined it! I was pleased with myself. That is of course, until I got the beating of my life. I haven’t been particularly fond of belts ever since. For some reason though, I have a memory of drawing horns on my brother’s head. As I look at the image now, there is no trace of it. It must be memory’s trickery, because I could have sworn I had done it. Perhaps it was another photograph, because I distinctively remember drawing horns. Kuhn explains that memory work “[...] is potentially interminable: at every turn, as further questions are raised, there is always something else to look into” (Kuhn 6). Of course it is easier to piece together a narrative of my past as I stand distanced from the 7 year old girl I once was, but it is interesting to see how others responded to the blight on my childhood record. My brother is a master at Photoshop and photo restoration, in fact, when
you look at the image in its restored state, it is better than real life! It seems as though my brother produced an image of the past that was a fulfillment of a wish. When you look at both of our parents (now deceased) you do not see the mustache or the crumpled edges. Instead, here we have a past that is a reflection of luminous perfection. This, however, is not my remembrance of the past, mine is one that is torn and mutilated with no signs of my existence.
My Father
Lingis explains that “The face of the other is a surface upon which the axes and directions of his posture and the intentions of his movements are exposed to me” (Lingis 131). He explains that written upon the face of the other is their mortality. It is “[...]the place where the elemental addresses, appeals and requires, the involution in enjoyment which makes one’s own eyes luminous, one’s hands warm, one’s posture supportive, one’s voice voluble and spiritual, and one’s face ardent” (Lingis 132). When I reflect upon Lingis’ encounter with the last days of a loved one’s life, I think about my father.
I had been living in California for nearly ten years, having only returned home to visit once in that time span, and I’m sad to say, it was as a favor to a dear friend. I lived selfishly in California; it was, will forever be, home to me. Suddenly one evening, I received a phone call from my sister; my father was extremely ill and the doctors needed to amputate his right leg. How did I not know that he was ill? Over the phone, I ashamedly asked my father, “How are you doing?” Was that all I could come up with? I wanted to take it back as soon as it was uttered. He sensed my discomfort and replied with as much humor as he could muster, “Well, I guess I won’t need the shoes I came in with [silence]…” We drifted awkwardly in the silence, neither of us knowing how to remedy the situation. I realize now how extremely brave my father was then. He didn’t want to talk about his life, his health, his impending situation. We didn’t need to speak about those things in order to know (to feel) what was left unsaid. He wanted to know about me, who I was, who I would become.
A few days after the phone call my father had the operation. It didn’t go so well. My father was herded, like cattle, into a convalescence home after the surgery, and it was there that an infection spread throughout his body, compromising the other limb. It too, would have to be amputated. We were devastated. His good humor, and mine, could only carry him so far, so I quit my life and moved back to Florida to be with him.
When I arrived, he was in the intensive care unit. He looked liked like an inanimate marionette, with tubes outstretched from a limp body. The strings were slack. As I watched his gray body lay there I recalled the words of Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” The unconscious gray body that lay before me was not my father, he was only a shadow, a memory. “Though wise men at their end know dark is right,/ Because their words had forked no lightning they / Do not go gentle into that good night.” I sat next to his frail body, articulating emotions through hot tears. The attending nurse knew that words were insufficient, offering me sympathetic eyes and a warm comforting hand upon the shoulder.
I spent a month in the hospital waiting bedside. As my father’s life strings finally became more taut, I feared the reaction he would have to losing both limbs. The limbs that had throughout his life carried him across the world, connected him to the earth. How could I manipulate language to pacify his pain, to make him better accept his circumstance? Words seemed inadequate, inappropriate, so I was silent as he peered under the white linen to confront his personal nightmare. He looked away, tears welled in his eyes, in mine, and I saw, without utterance, his disappointment for the first time. I saw the vulnerability written on the surface. I saw his strength leave his body. He didn’t want to live. “Good men, the last way by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” He slipped out of consciousness once again.
The room was filled with the undulating sounds of a respirator. There were no suitable words, no vocabulary to draw from to make things better. “Wild men, who caught and sang the sun in flight, / And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way. / Do not go gentle into that good night.” I did the only thing I could do, I sat beside him and held his hand, as if the contact could somehow act as a conduit to carry the message of love and support. “Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight / Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Somehow he found within himself the strength to pull through and we left the hospital. We spent a year and a half together facing the world. An ugly world for those who are handicapped. He was not only physically dismembered, but also dismembered from society. It was not easy for him, the stares, the pity, the silences made things worse. He began to deteriorate before my eyes, weakened emotionally and physically. He did not want to continue to live so dependent, so vulnerable. “And you, my father, there on the sad height, / Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. / Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” He was no longer within my reach. He slipped further and further away from me with eyes glazed, terrified. On a Friday evening October 7, 2005, my father bravely closed his eyes, took a deep breath, exhaled and embraced the dying of the light.
I would like to think that I was there for my father in his last days of life, comforting and accompanying him as he faced mortality. But this accompaniment was, perhaps selfishly, more for me than him. I think back upon sitting bedside, holding his cold gray hand, and I realize, now, that it wasn’t so much me providing support as it was the other way around.
