Autopsy of Memory

Ode to the wrinkle forming just slightly left of the center between my eyebrows. I’ve turned 28 and my skin has started to shrink, to pull, and my expressions now stay half a second longer, locked in time. Sometimes I try to pull the line out with a gua sha, tugging it smooth like pulling the blankets over my side of the bed each morning. My side. The other stays empty, a space for leftover pillows. This does not make me sad.

It occurs to me that this has happened before, for many lifetimes, women contemplating absence—perhaps as they age, inching their bodies toward the middle of the bed, or maybe choosing a figure to fill that space. Still, unsuccessfully filling the absence. The partner remains a stranger or turns into one as the years pass. Around the body—or around the nothing—other objects trickle in, like sediment in the corners of a house. Busying around dishes or rifling for the last pill.

Tracing the newly formed lines with my finger, crevices to fill, my thoughts come to my grandmother. Hot air between hands. Her body collecting stories, her own unique objects, like the rings of a tree. Some almost imperceptible, and others deepened through heat.

Hot air between hands. Her body collecting stories like the rings of a tree. Some almost imperceptible, and others deepened through heat.

In the mirror, my vision morphs, threatening the solidity of my limbs. She appears, as if through a portal. I am in the skilled nursing facility. She peers into her own eyes, trying to remember who she is looking at. A nurse readies her toothbrush, sliding toothpaste across the bristles. Her expression stalls, as if we make contact, confusion rippling across the wave of her brows.

I want to reach out, but I am trapped within its four edges dangling like a photograph. Behind her, the room opens. It’s divided by a dull yellow curtain and shared with a woman whose name she can’t remember. The River Lethe pulls at the sticky soles of her socks; an underworld smell coats the molecules of the room. It flows in anticipation of the grand and final separation: one of her feet in the water and the other on the vinyl flooring.

In the wind of the fan whirring, the lonely howl of lost memory reaches me. She is both here and there, pacing the dimensions like hallways of fun house mirrors—in one moment, I am her mother, a stranger, a nurse. She is both at a hotel and waiting for the train. At once too young and too old to function—like loneliness, she exists in the polarities: here and there, young and old, terrified and ambivalent. My grandmother and no one, her own body both a home and a stranger. She would hate this place, its lack of beauty, if she had the energy or remembered how to be herself, tidying loose ends. For now, she is empty stretches of time, waiting, her foot sinking deeper in the tide.

The air of absence pushes into me and I fall from my body. Into her vision. Eyes tracing the crack along the wall at the height of her bed.

But it is all imagination—my eyes are closed, she is sleeping.

It flows in anticipation of the grand and final separation: one of her feet in the water and the other on the vinyl flooring.

 

I did not know my grandmother well. I do not visit her in the SNF. Maybe I avoid her, or I just don’t make the time, choosing fleeting lovers or vanishing into parties of forgotten nights instead. But I think of her. I think of how they say you exist as an egg within the womb of your maternal grandmother. How this is alarmingly close, inside of a woman I do not know. The matrix of my body imprinted on by a woman who never thought she was enough. Who couldn’t crawl from the well of self and grab for the arms of her children. Who during the day sat with legs crossed, and who yelled at the face of night for freedom. I see it here in my own reflection, in my lack of dancing.

An unknowable figure, an archetypal head with legs crossed and lips pursed—I remember accidentally burping next to her and going white. She didn’t recoil but I recoiled at the thought of her recoiling, as if she loomed above. I can’t tell if she was judgmental or my mother’s shallow breathing just traced her as such, like ever-present watchful eyes within a framed portrait. But she never tucked my hair behind my ears, and I stood up straighter reflexively in her presence.

Eyes shut, through the portal of biological proximity, a memory comes to me of urging her to play the grand piano in the hall of the assisted living unit, her timid reluctance at doing so, and the Clair de lune ringing out in fullness despite her reticence. Even now, I feel the fear radiating from her body across distance and time. A palpable sensation emanates from the recollection of holding her arm to support her walking, like I could catch the contagion of a constant shiver.

With few details, I write the scroll myself, imagining the piano as her savior—a limb she could attach to finally make something worthwhile, be something worthwhile, worth loving. Or a sound she could speak, violent gushing water threatening dam walls and keys whistling from small punctures.

I want to grab her by the shoulders and scream: “We are here, we love you, we want you. We think you are perfect.”

But, with a shudder, I know these words wouldn’t reach me either.

Now, her pursed lips soften. She smells the people shitting the bed—hears sedated bodies grumbling, the constant noise of news, and the sounds of those trying to remember their own names in circles through the night. “I am Martha. I am a very beautiful woman. Martha, yes. A very beautiful woman, yes.” Feeling the fabric of reality teeter in the buzz of fluorescent light, everyone is already dead, and the nurses’ faces resemble plastic dolls with permanent smiles. I imagine my grandmother tossing her feeble body in the beige sheets, awake in the middle of the moon.

I know someday I will probably regret all of this.

Fearing a mirror, I sit and long for her psychic architecture, as clearly as I can remember her long lace curtains catching breeze from the window, or days spent gathering pine cones in the redwoods of the Sierras. As if her catalog could reveal answers to questions so far back I can’t find the words to ask, charting terrains of unmapped longing. I want to freeze and preserve her moments of memory—what it felt like to wake up and see the blue sky through the window, what she thought of driving to work, or looking at her own face in the mirror. I don’t know if she ever allowed herself to be more than a secret, but so much of my memory of her is that of a statue that smelled of roses.

In her bedhead, I am allowed entry. Slipping in through a crack in the back door.

My mother told me stories about my grandmother from when she was young—comforting her during the night as she cried out for someone to love her. The wails contained historic shards attempting to find exit—a young woman discovering that her mother had killed herself without a note; a brother imprisoned after going into the woods wielding guns in a paranoid schizo state, while she was stuck watching as he clawed the curtains of reality.

Sometimes the truth is like a sneeze—compulsive, involuntary, searching for an exit. Nestled in a booth at a diner, she confessed to me once over coffee—the most vulnerable I’d ever seen her. Running along the fragment of story, twists and turns I didn’t recognize. “It was all my fault.” I could sense that she meant so much more than her brother, like she was revealing an endless mountain of guilt. Trenches of regret and the dirt falling in on itself. Grabbing her frail hands along the linoleum, I whispered loudly, “No, Grandma, no. None of it was.”

I have a vague memory of a vague memory that her piano sank in the bay of Port-au-Prince. Maybe here she lost her anchor. I’m not sure what we do with these stories—how we reckon with the biggest moments of our lives lying wasted on the seafloor, or what becomes of sunken family legacies. What becomes of lost memories.

Memory is the great big river, withstanding amid it all. We find ourselves swimming in its deepest throes, vaguely aware that we’re caught in the swirl. Even in tide pools, our minds require driftwood, anchors. But my grandmother’s skin is papery, translucent. I can almost see the swirl of memories threatening to tear through as the rind dries out, to break free and slip into the current.

Though memory is just that—faulty, unreliable. Perhaps, then, even the hoarding of memory is some misplaced priority. To seize memory loosens its grip. It’s water, wriggling in movement even within one’s clasp, a fish pulled from the sea. What if it could freeze? We could sever it from time, turning over its placid body under fluorescent light. Though it would grow cold, distant, disembodied. To hold too tightly is to strangle it, as a cadaver grows colder by the moment. An oversanctification produces a loss of holiness—it can no longer truly touch you.

There is no need to give memory an autopsy, no use in collecting ash. Someday, often too soon, each of our rivers crosses paths with that of the Lethe. We pour ourselves out, adding to an ancient story—we forget.

And there is something to that which grants me a long sigh of relief. I don’t have to stay up until dawn keeping watch. There could be a gift to the levity of memory, a gift to being forgotten. We grant memory its weight according to our own touch. Does it sit on our open palm under a gaze of admiration? Or do we twist, contort, stretch, bend, seek any opening to squeeze our spirit in? Maybe the ancestral pull could fall dead in its tracks. Maybe it could find itself swimming in the slippery flow.

We pour ourselves out, adding to an ancient story—we forget.

Today, I trace the mirror’s edge and expect to feel her rigidity, but she has softened now in her bedhead. The River Lethe pulls at the manicured veneer. Her muscles tense in memory of withholding, of fighting, and I imagine her as the Nine of Wands at the gate of completion. One head battered and bruised, holding on to the last wand to keep steady. Guarding over the gate of self, holding on desperately to memory—the weary victory of protection.

The truth is, I look at her as if in a dream, feeling a familiar void. An emptiness wells in me, a giant wave that never reaches its apex—like I can only breathe cold water.

I know her guilt. I feel it each time I say no to visiting, each time I reject the moment while knowing so deeply it ends. Avoiding the fragrance of death. I feel sad for the relationship we never had, for the sticky density of being around her. For the answers it could, perhaps, still bring. But I’m tired of answers—they’re hot to the touch. Tired of absent affirmation. To know is an end, and I want to sing.

The subtle sound of a piano drifts in through the window, across distance, almost imperceptible. I imagine the outline of her, ageless, as a vague form behind me, hands placed gently on my shoulders. The faint smell of a hospital hallway, old skin and rose perfume. An endless corridor, the wide, expectant throat of time aiding gravity. Tugging my skin to pull me in.

Staring too long, I conjure her, my grandmother—our lifetime circles in, and I watch the deep crevices form. I imagine her wiped clean by the tender touch of millions of angels purring. My heart stretches open, like trenches waiting for her memories to pool in, open-palmed and inviting.