Remember to Remember

Dear Grandson,

My last in person memory of you is you sitting in your car seat, double strapped, clutching your newly gifted blue, Thomas the Train engine.  You wouldn’t let it go, even as someone was dissuading you from taking it home, a foreshadowing of everything that was to come, the theft of your memory soon to be wiped out along with the absence of your Christmas gift.  Yet, you hung on to the train and continued to fiddle and play with it in your car seat, smiling sweetly.

You knew.  

You knew, not three years old, yet you knew, maybe not on a conscious level but certainly an unconscious level what was to come and what was important to hold on to, not just a train, but a memory of who and what that train was to symbolized, a foreshadowing of what was about to be ripped away; your memories, your history and heritage, and with ruthless determination, control of your present and future.

The Chinese government knows this as well as they attempted the same thing with the protesters of Tiananmen Square.  Memory was the enemy and that it wasn’t enough “that the protesters be killed, they had to be falsely remembered as deviants and rogues, not as brave students who gave their lives for freedom.  The defeat of memory by lies was added to the protester’s useless deaths.”

And it was a death that was handed to us that January day as you were driven down our street, not a physical death, as a biological matter, never again taking a breath or having the ability to reanimate mortal flesh, but a death nonetheless.  The pain was the same, the savage thrusting of a pitchfork through your stomach kind of pain.  A pain where one wished for death so the pain would cease.

But here we are, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us, time cannot go backwards, a re-concentrating of molecules, once mixed, can never go back to their original form.  So to wish that things could go back to the way they were is literally and metaphysically impossible.  Thus the importance of knowing what you are about to say or do, its impact on the future and your careful consideration on whether that will fulfill your desired creation of healthy and whole relationships will be your ever challenging task.

Life is but a teeter-totter, balancing imprecisely, delicately on a fulcrum of history, DNA and a million other random probabilities all in motion and acting as influence to where you tilt on any given day; toward life or death.  There are no other results.  This is the “wave function”, the mathematical description of existence and nonexistence.  And this will be the observable and incontrovertible evidence of which way your balance is tilting, toward a future of life or demise.  

Are you reducing, retracting, isolating, diminishing, and eliminating anything and anyone that disrupts a psychological need for control, creating a false version of self-worth?  Or are you expanding, creating, illuminating, and welcoming the world with all its characters in all their diversity, complexity, and enriching beauty?

As best described by Morgan Freeman (Red) in his advice to fellow prison mate Tim Robbins (Andy Dufresne) in the popular movie Shawshank Redemption;

“I guess it comes down to a simple choice really.  Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

I will proudly wear the badge of “Grandpa”, not for vanity’s sake, but because you are my grandson.  We DO have a relationship, cut short for now, yet certain of a future to include the reweaving of our torn threads.  Not to retrace an illusionary trail in nostalgia, but to create something new and fresh and strong.

 And while some individuals believe they have succeeded, because they have temporary control over those who are dependent on them for physical and emotional sustenance, children and adults who have not yet attained the skills or maturity for self-sustainment, self-identity, and self-fulfillment, there will come a time when these skills and experiences will be attained and contrary to a neurotic and unsustainable demand for control . . . and a reckoning will occur.  

And memories will again be remembered.  

Love will again be the master of our futures.

Until then, I will remember for the two of us.  I will preserve these memories in words and songs and videos and pictures and stories.  They are your memories as equally as mine.  And they will not be killed off or falsified by outside forces.  

They have already established their eternal place in the universe.

Together, we will remember to remember, forever.