Grief in the Days of Time Machines
We were taught to put our foot to the wood to test for heat. If the door should prove hot, sheet-tying was the next step. And, ultimately, escape through the window and over the fence into the neighbor’s yard.
Eventually, my father purchased a folding ladder that could be secured with strong metal hooks over a window ledge, and this was stowed underneath my bed. But until that day I was drilled periodically in the art of knot-making and knew that, as the eldest child, it would be my responsibility to make sure that my sister survived, that she did not perish in the fire that might one day consume our home. I was taught specific strategies, but what I learned was something very different: My world could burn. My world was something from which I might need to flee.
Claustrophobia. Calamity. Fire. The Apollo tragedy contained all three. I listened to that broadcast long past my bedtime, into the early-morning hours when exhaustion finally won out over dread. Meanwhile, my sister slept through all of it. My sister, whom I would not be able to save.
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How do I know what I know? How do you? Why does the brain retain certain memories, certain scenes, over others that are lost or forgotten? Why, in recent weeks, have I been haunted by the memory of that transistor radio and the night I listened helplessly to the tragic fate of the Apollo astronauts? Why do I so vividly see my old bedroom, lit by a nightlight, the orange tail of the goldfish flicking in the small bowl, my sister sleeping in her bed, almost close enough to touch?
I have thought that the memory stuck with me because of the music, the hit parade of 1967 that played through my head, and which was so important to me in those days.
I couldn’t remember the date of that tragedy. A quick Google search restored it to me, and another resurrected the songs that were at the top of that week’s Top 40. Half of them I already owned in my iTunes Library, but the others I quickly added, and from all of them I made a playlist to listen to alone, in my car, as I shuttled back and forth to school, to the grocery store, on various errands. Lyrics I had not listened to in decades came back readily to my tongue. I was ten again, hearing songs even the oldies stations neglect: “Snoopy vs. The Red Baron,” “98.6,” and “Georgy Girl.”
When I sat down to write this, I thought the music would pop to the surface, a buoyancy to cling to as I tried to return to the past. But it was not the music that made that one night stick in my mind. It was the disaster. It wasn’t my own disaster. It didn’t belong to me. And yet somehow it did.
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Facebook has a new feature called “On This Day.” In case you have forgotten some event or milestone or beau of years past, Mark Zuckerberg and his team would like to remind you. Repeatedly. It is a concept predicated upon the misbegotten notion that all of our memories are happy ones. Each day, I watch while friends repost photos of their five-year-olds at four, at three, in diapers; of brides and grooms toasting to a new life; of vacations in the Caribbean; of games won and marathons run. And each day I note Facebook’s suggestions to me of my own memories, stored in its archive. From just one year ago, I have been offered many choices: My sister’s cancer returns. My sister spends Christmas in the hospital. My sister dies. Directions to her memorial service. Her marker in the cemetery.