Beloved son,
I have been wondering recently what your first memory will be.
It took me a while before I had mine. I was born in Lafayette, Indiana and lived there for over four years before we moved to Colorado. The only solid memories I have from that time – in no certain order in my mind – were getting my head stuck in a hollow toy penguin, getting my head stuck in the neighbor’s fence (yes, these were my rebellious head-sticking years), and prodding at our cat Calico until she hissed at me. And that’s about it. Four years in a place, and I can only recall three semi-traumatic events. It’s not a great ratio of experience to memory.
In your first 13 months of life, I can’t even count how many amazing, hilarious, and heart-warming memories I’ve made with you. Mom and I have taken literally thousands of photos in that time. We’ve recorded dozens of videos, filled a calendar and the better part of a journal, written you notes and created albums, and not a single one of the moments we’ve documented will exist independently in your memory. That’s wild. How fascinating is it that we humans are not designed to remember things until later in life, after we have experienced and learned so, so much.
What spooks me even more is thinking that your very first memory may likely be a traumatic one, like getting your head stuck in a fence. (I’ll do my best to steer you clear of that; I know firsthand what warning signs to watch for.) Mixed in with all the cuddles and belly laughs from your first year are a good many sad and scary moments, too. Which one might lodge in your brain? Will it be the first time I trimmed your nails and cut your tiny finger? Will it be Grandpa’s booming voice that used to send you into tears? Or how about that sinister towering machine that wanders around the living room and sucks up everything in its path? Your first molar coming through that kept you up at night? That visit to the lake when you slipped off the floatie and went underwater for a frightful second?*
Chances are, you won’t remember any of these blips at all. In fact, it’s likely that nothing that happens in the next two years will live on in your own memory, and even for years after that your recollection of your own life will probably remain a hazy patchwork of moods, visual impressions, and stories that we tell you later in life. For as rich a time as this is for me and Mom, it is literally forgettable for you.
There were times early on in your life, particularly those late nights when I was cradling you and trying fruitlessly to sing you to sleep, when I would ponder the strangeness of a memory-less life, and the whole situation would feel kind of like a raw deal. My mind would occasionally wander to this place: “I put in all this effort, I lose sleep and take off work and sacrifice my time and my hobbies, I cater to this helpless boy’s every single need and show him what it means to love, and he won’t even remember a second of it? What is the point of that?”
Those selfish thoughts were fleeting and infrequent, but they cropped up nonetheless. Even when I haven’t been feeling entitled, I have often marveled at the odd asymmetry between us. Looking at it from a different angle, I might say that it is you who are getting the raw deal: Mom and I have all these amazing experiences with you, and you don’t even get to relive them in your memory.
But then, memory isn’t everything, is it? Or rather, there are different kinds of memory, each playing its part in who we are. When you are five years old, you will still remember how to walk, even if you cannot recall your first steps. And even though your 30-year-old self won’t remember using the shower curtain last night to play peek-a-boo with me and Mom, your 30-year-old self will certainly remember me and Mom, and you will certainly still remember that we’re loads of fun. (You better, anyway!) The things you are learning, the relationships you are forming, they bond to your sticky, sticky brain, even if the individual moments pass by like grains through a sieve.
Of course, even for grown-ups like me and Mom, grains through a sieve is all that any of us have, anyway. Even when we can “capture” moments in our memory, we have not caged the actual thing, just a video of it. That is the nature of being bound by time and mortality (and a big part of the reason that Mom and I have taken such a ridiculous number of pictures these past 13 months). Yet somehow, even as moments slip by relentlessly, there is a continuity in our souls and in our relationships that endures through time.
When I think about your memory in that light, what I see is an eternal perspective. Even more than exploring and acquiring and developing into a fully functioning human, what matters most to you is relationship. How could I think you have no memory when I come home from work and you greet me with a beaming smile, toddling over to say hi? You see me and you know me. That sticks, and it will stay stuck for a long, long time.
When our earthly days are up and we enter heaven, I am not sure that we will be able to recall every moment of our lives, and if we can, I doubt that we will have the same kind of attachment to those moments as we do now. I have no doubt, however, that even though we will have been given new bodies, we will recognize one another. What connects us then will not really be memory so much as knowledge of who the other is. We will enter the kingdom and, instinctively, greet each other with a beaming smile.
*The one memory that I definitely don’t want to stick in your head, by the way, is the moments where you had a cold and couldn’t unplug your own nostril. They say they designed the Nose Frieda for the health and safety of babies, but I am pretty sure it is actually just a test of how unconditional parents’ love really is. I’d rather us both forget about those days – they really sucked.
And yes, I just dropped one heck of a cheesy pun. But really, shoving one end of a tube up your nose and putting the other end in my mouth and sucking vigorously is not my most cherished moment with you. I passed the test, though, and yes, I absolutely love you that much and more.