251. Remembering

Sometimes the things we remember about our dead loved ones are the smallest, silliest details of their life. 

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If you’ve lost someone you love, maybe you know this fear:

That you are forgetting them. Not them in the big picture sense, but them: the parts you forgot to memorize, the things nobody would think are worth remembering, that maybe they wouldn’t even mind you forgetting.

But it’s so horrible, to reach back into your mind for a piece of them and find it missing: why didn’t we write it all down, record it, stick a USB drive into their brain and download every bit of them. Science, I’m sure, is close, but a fat lot of good that does for the people we’ve already lost.

A lot of people are afraid to talk about the dead: it might make someone sad. They might not want to remember. But we are already sad, and most of us, I think, do want to remember. We want to know it is not just us missing, remembering, grasping for pieces of the person we lost.

My son has no real memories of his father, so I give him mine. I tell him about his favorite foods, the funny turns of phrase he used. I share what I have left, even though I know it will never be enough.

And sometimes, someone gives me a memory: a high school classmate or a colleague will send me a photo of the version of Aaron that I never met but would have had a crush on for sure.

The other day, my sister in law texted and asked if Aaron had an anklet tattoo. She vaguely remembered him having one that was funny and maybe it was a barrel of monkeys? 

This is not something that I had forgotten about Aaron but it’s something that I hadn’t remembered in a long time, and yeah, she was right. He had a barrel of monkeys ANKLET tattoo. And not only that, but the tattoo “artist”didn’t fill the monkeys in AND didn’t do any visual depth to them, the arms just OVERLAPPED??? Criss-crossed? Hard to explain but trust me, it was funny and dumb and I remember the first time I saw it thinking, this guy is such an idiot, I love him.