Forgotten Memories

I love others stories.  Biographies and autobiographies are a favorite genre of my reading.  I also enjoy fiction and feel the authors are often writing of hidden memories, dreams, and desires as these fictional stories unfold.

For over forty years I spent my work days listening to others stories, their memories and recollections of life.  There was pain and trauma in these stories but there was also hidden trickles of happiness that if uncovered and collected became little pools of joy.  Realizing and uncovering these little pools leads to freedom from fear.

Throughout my life I have found memories that I avoid often contain drops of happiness that in my fear of remembering I have neglected to collect them into my conscious self.  I often avoid these memories by distracting myself, pushing them away, or actively saying I don't remember, and often I don't.  

My father almost died when I was nine.  He and my mother traveled halfway across the country to consult with a specialist on his medical problem.  I was left with my grandmothers and a great aunt.  This was during the mid 1950's.  I am not sure his medical problem would have killed him but in my thinking his prescribed treatment and resulting surgery almost did.  It took me years to address, recall, and process this memory.  When I did I realized a weight had been lifted that I had not known was there as I had carried it since my childhood.  It opened me to a freedom within myself.

The journey to forgotten memories can reveal treasures along the road.  Over the next hill or around a bend something of yourself may be found.  An important and lost part of self is recovered and integrated into your being.  You experience a completion of something you did not know you were missing.  There is an expansiveness where before this view was not visible and you had no awareness that it could exist.

The fear of realizing a forgotten memory is real and a part of the psyche that we try to repress, to not remember.  I always remembered the summer of 1956 when my father almost died.  I recalled living with my grandmother, talking with my parents on the telephone, and returning to my home to start the new school year.  I remember going to a near-by town to meet my parents' train when they returned home.

What was not a part of my memory was how I felt.  I felt alone and abandoned but if I remembered that deep unconscious memory a voice whispered that I would be angry with my father, the man who nearly lost his life.  So I kept the memory at bay, but the unconscious anger still plagued me.  As I approached adolescence this buried anger surfaced and bubbled over into my life and my relationship with my dad.

People around my family could not understand this anger.  My parents did not put it together with my fear of my father dying and my feeling that his sojourn into the world of medicine was wasted effort, time, and money, while I was left out of the decision making process. Even writing this today I feel the prickles of this anger nipping at my heels, but having remembered I work with this and in doing so I integrate it into a remembered part of me.  The recalling and integration of this time in my life resolved the anger that grew from a memory that I tried not to remember.  This remembering took away the weight of my loss and in doing so I was set free.

Learning that the memory of what I felt (abandonment, loss, and anger that hid my fears), I found that in my remembering that frightening time in my life (complete with how I felt), relieved me of an unnecessary burden that I was carrying. A ghost of my past was put to rest and my fear and anger were resolved.

Beneath this unremembered memory with its unresolved feelings was a deep spring of joy.  Recalling, remembering, and understanding this as a part of me leaves me to completely surrender into the happiness of now without the fear of being the ungrateful daughter who abandoned her father.  I only abandoned myself when I could/would not remember.  The memory allows me to rewrite this experience in life; not change it but to rewrite it with love and understanding for all involved.