Memory undergirds a sense of continuity around who we have been, who we are, and who we will become.

Remembering My Nana & Lala + Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" + Morrison's "Memory, Creation & Writing" + The "Special Light" Of Remembered Things (A Paul Matthews Writing Exercise)

Even now, thoughts of Nana sometimes stab me by surprise: I’ll be considering some urgent matter or even just a trivial detail when I’d hear her cashing in. It’s been thirty years now, but when her loss was fresher, I would sometimes forget she was gone when her sharp laugh and cutting judgments rang. Nana was so unlike her sister, my great aunt Lala. Everything about Lala was pillowy: her hair, her skin, her arms—those soft, soft arms.

When Lala touched you, you knew you were loved. She smelled like coffee and face powder.

“I miss Lala, too,” Lillie moaned one September afternoon when she was three. Her brown eyes contracted with sorrow. We were all piled on Lillie’s bed—her brother and sister had just gotten home from school.

“You can’t miss Lala,” Max said, all-knowing at six. “Mama, Lillie never met Lala, did she? Lala died before Lillie was born, right?’

“She didn’t!” Lillie cried. “Mama, did Lala die before I was born?” Afternoon light brought out the pink in the freshly painted walls and turned the skin of Lillie’s face almost translucent, too beautiful to be real.

I cupped my palm around her cheek, hot with emotion. Lillie was small for her age and a cuddly thing. Her arms, especially, reminded me of Lala—and not just Lala’s arms, but Lala’s being. Lala herself. It was the first thing I said when Lillie was born, as I shook so hard that even the bed lurched, and the nurse had to lean over and hold Lillie against my chest to make sure she wouldn’t slip from my grasp.

There in that embrace inside an embrace, I closed my eyes and squeezed Lillie just below the shoulders. “I know you, little baby,” I said.

Back when they were both still alive in Duluth, Nana and Lala kept each other busy in their long widowhoods. They walked downtown, played bingo, had luncheons with “the old hens” in their senior high-rises. They traveled to Hawaii and Florida and other far-off places. They brought back goodies for me: tiny china cats lying on their backs with legs splayed, tummies turned upward for holding chewed gum; miniature plastic coin purses doubling as key chains and shaped like slippers with Florida inscribed on the sides; plastic alligator heads with jaws that opened and shut with a squeeze thing on the end of a wooden stick.

I kept that gum holder for years, gluing it painstakingly together again after multiple shatterings, until finally it disappeared along with so much else that went missing back then.

“I met Nana, right, Mom?” Sophie asked.

“Lots of times. You used to turn her apartment upside down.”

“Did I?” Max said. But he already knew that he had. He was only asking the question to rile Lillie. All three of them pressed into me, vying for their place in a mysterious history they sensed was important.

“You did,” I answered Max truthfully.

 “And I was there, too, wasn’t I?” Lillie said.

“You … you were there in spirit.” I held Lillie around the waist with one hand and smoothed her fuzzy hair with the other.

“No! Not in spirit!” she cried. “I was there with you. I was. I remember that.”

 “But none of us met Lala, did we?” Max asked.

“She died when I was ten,” I said. “But I wish you could have known her. She would have loved you so much.”

No one told me when Lala got sick. She herself didn’t tell anyone, not even Nana. It was my stepmother who chanced unexpectedly on Lala’s medicine and recognized it as a cancer drug. I saw Lala one last time the summer before she died. She had saved many special treasures for “when I was older,” which she now brought out and arranged on the bed for me to unwrap one by one. China figurines, little necklaces, various souvenirs and trinkets.

That visit was awkward. I thought back then it was because I was too old—I wasn’t as special as I’d been when I was smaller. I was self­-conscious with Nana and Lala that day. I didn’t know how to act. The visit was shorter than those long-ago afternoons spent playing store and dress­-up. No hot fudge, no butterscotch pie. When my father came to pick me up, Nana and Lala each hugged me good­bye and waved until we got so far down Superior Street that I couldn’t see them anymore.

A few months later, when the days had grown short and dark, my father called me in Wyoming—we lived in the gray house then, with the garbage compactor and my failed blue stairs—to say Lala had died. Something behind my clavicle collapsed in a cold, exiting whoosh. Years later, it dawned on me, the thing that was gone: it was the most lovable version of myself.

A few days after Lillie asked about Lala— a Saturday morning when the first clean white snow had covered our backyard—the children and I all traipsed outside together. Lillie wore a long, red corduroy coat with the hood trimmed in fake white fur. Breathtaking against the snow. I hated winter, but the cold air felt good on my face that day. I thought again of Lala, and Nana, too, and the way they had loved me. I pulled the icy air deep into my lungs until I floated a little above the frozen yard.

Later, I lay with Lillie on her bed again, dizzy with thoughts of my own childhood. Out the window, a tangle of oak branches stretched seamlessly up the hill. The fish tank gurgled as Lillie nestled against me, patting my cheek. “Thank you for being born,” I said. I squeezed the familiarity of her sturdy arms.

“I saw you when I was born,” Lillie said, looking up at me, clasping my face in her small hands. “You were there, then, Mama . . . I was there, too. Everyone was. I remember that.”

Ah, memory. A version of the above memory lived in an early draft of my memoir, but did not make the final cut. However, its ghost remained in the pages. And memory remains one of my most powerful portals to the page.

Ultimately, the accumulation of memories from meaningful and emotionally important life experiences give rise to a sense of self, or a feeling that we exist as a distinct and unique person. Memory undergirds a sense of continuity around who we have been, who we are, and who we will become. In other words, our memories help us recognize ourselves as distinct beings with identities that can endure across time despite life’s many vagaries and ever-changing circumstances, enabling reflection upon one’s past, as well as anticipation of the future.

Today’s craft essay for paid members of Writing in the Dark explores memory from several perspectives, from John Locke’s “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” to Toni Morrison’s “Memory, Creation, and Writing” to Paul Matthews’s “special light of memory,” and ends with one of my all-time favorite writing exercises.

This is an exercise I use often in groups, because it yields such consistently magnificent results. I also use it repeatedly myself as a springboard to more complicated material, so, if you’ve been in this community a while, you may have tried this one before. If so, I encourage you to give it another go, but revisit a different time or place, or even an imagined one, to see what comes up.

And if you do try the exercise, you may very well be startled at how lovely, strange, and compelling the results can be. And please share in the comments if you like so we can read and appreciate the special light of remembered things.