Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

Left alone in time, memories harden into summaries. The originals become almost irretrievable.

One day the baby gently sat his little blue dog in his booster seat and offered it a piece of pancake. The memory should already be fading, but when I bring it up I almost choke on it — an incapacitating sweetness.

The memory throbs. Left alone in time, it is growing stronger.

The baby had never seen anyone feed a toy a pancake. He invented it. Think of the love necessary to invent that. In a handful of years he’ll never do it again. An unbearable sweetness.

The feeling strengthens the more I remember it. It isn’t wearing smooth. It’s getting bigger, an outgrowth of new love. ♦

~ ~ ~

Since the baby was born I still occasionally wonder whether I should have a baby, whether I should get married, whether I should move to this or that city I’ve already moved to, already left. All the large questions still float about me, and in its sleep-deprived dampened awareness of the present moment, my memory treats these past moments as if they’re all still happening.

I’ve never understood so clearly that linear time is a summary of actual time, of All Time, of the forever that has always been happening. ♦

~ ~ ~

A year postpartum, my memory was still afflicted. I enjoyed writing because within days, I forgot what I’d written, and rereading it was like reading a letter from someone else.

In class my students repeated what they claimed I’d said during the previous class, and, not remembering the words as my own, I found myself approving of them vaguely. ♦

~ ~ ~

My life felt full before I became a mother, but I’ve found that trying to say that I prefer having the baby to not having him sounds aggressive. In fact I’d felt affronted, before I was a parent, when parents told me, even in the gentlest terms, that they preferred having their children to not having them.

Maybe the trouble is that the shape of life is elastic, that it can feel and be full at variable levels of fullness. Or maybe we’re poor judges of our own lives’ fullness. Or maybe the concepts of emptiness and fullness are poor metaphors for happiness, if in fact happiness is what we’re talking about. ♦

~ ~ ~

Let me put it another way: when I am with my son I feel the bracing speed of the one-way journey that guides human experience. ♦

~ ~ ~

The trouble was that I failed to record so much, I wrote, but how could I have believed that if I tried hard enough, I could remember everything? ♦

~ ~ ~

I wrote about an illness once I was seven years into a remission that lasted four more.

I didn’t know it yet, but the illness, which still isn’t over, wasn’t the real problem. Thinking about it was the problem, and I don’t think about it anymore. Not in the obsessive, all-consuming way I used to.

I used to harbor a continuous worry that I’d forget what had happened, that I’d fail to notice what was happening. I worried that something terrible would happen because I’d forgotten what had already happened.

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments — an inability to accept life as ongoing. ♦

~ ~ ~

Once I’d spent two years hobbled by an impaired memory, I worried less about everything I was forgetting.

I forgot to buy milk this week. I forgot to file taxes last year. And on I go. ♦

~ ~ ~

The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know. No more time, no more potential. The privilege of ruling things out. Finishing. Knowing I’m finished. And knowing time will go on without me.

Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity. ♦

~ ~ ~

Why, then, should I continue writing the diary?

In it I digest the time that passes, file it away so I no longer need to think about it, and if I spent all my time thinking about the past I’d stop moving into the future, I begin to write, but no — I’d keep moving. How ridiculous to believe myself powerful enough to stop time just by thinking.

There’s no reason to continue writing other than that I started writing at some point — and that, at some other point, I’ll stop. ♦

~ ~ ~

Often I believe I’m working toward a result, but always, once I reach the result, I realize all the pleasure was in planning and executing the path to that result.

It comforts me that endings are thus formally unappealing to me — that more than beginning or ending, I enjoy continuing. ♦

~ ~ ~

Before the baby was born, the diary allowed me to continue existing. It literally constituted me. If I didn’t write it, I wasn’t anything, but then the baby became a little boy who needed me more than I needed to write the diary. He needed me more than I needed to write about him.

The time I spent sitting and nursing and holding the baby and cleaning up his messes could have borne the worry from me as completely as I bore the baby, which in my experience marked a change of mind that by now seems permanent. ♦

~ ~ ~

Before I was a mother, I thought I was asking, How, then, can I survive forgetting so much?

Then I came to understand that the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life, a force indifferent to time. ♦

~ ~ ~

Now I consider the diary a compilation of moments I’ll forget, their record finished in language as well as I could finish it — which is to say imperfectly.

Someday I might read about some of the moments I’ve forgotten, moments I’ve allowed myself to forget, that my brain was designed to forget, that I’ll be glad to have forgotten and be glad to rediscover as writing. The experience is no longer experience. It is writing. I am still writing.

And I’m forgetting everything. My goal now is to forget it all so that I’m clean for death. Just the vaguest memory of love, of participation in the great unity. ♦

~ ~ ~

When I remember how this document began, I remember it as something I used to worry about. ♦

~ ~ ~

My son goes happily on.

One of his first words was bamboo. Everywhere we went, he called out to the bamboo that was or wasn’t there. Bamboo! He called his bear Bamboo and fell asleep whispering its name.

Time passed. He grew accustomed to the world. He learned more words.

His bright hair grew long.

Everything is new. His first lizard. His first funeral. Now we measure his age in years.

The future happens. It keeps happening.

The man is still alive, but the boy is gone. The light is out.