Should I Remember Everything?
thoughts on loss, memory, and what remains
There are times when I sit down to write, and I know the work is going to be hard. There is something deep within the earth of my heart that has to be dug up, and the excavation is long, slow, and painful. I don’t know what I am going to find until the ground is broken up, the heart is laid open, and the words are cut out of the bedrock.
This is how I feel at the start of this letter.
Last week, my brothers and sisters met at our childhood home and in two days time, cleared it of every trace of our lives there. My parents are gone. This final act makes their deaths feel so real.
I keep thinking of how an entire life of storing and saving and building and making a home ends in a few cardboard boxes of photographs and home movies, a stack or two of handwritten letters, and a couple of large Tupperwares of books and papers that are too special to pass on or throw away. The bins are labeled “Mama” or “Daddy” or “Grandma” or “Grandad.” They go to someone’s house, high up in a closet, where they hold their secret histories until there is another move, another death, another landmark celebration, until the family gathers in grief and love and remembrance.
There are filing cabinets of things that didn’t make it into those boxes. Records, paperwork, whole lifetimes of accomplishments and hard labor, documented. Things that will not be remembered.
There is so much grief in that little phrase. It makes my heart ache.
I feel like I should remember everything. That I should hold onto every scrap of evidence that my parents lived, that I was a girl in this house.
Should I remember everything?
My life flashes before my eyes: a girl in the garden, a yard full of snow, sitting on my daddy’s lap in his study. Rolling out Christmas cookies with Mama, shaking red sugar on the golden tops. The piano, playing in the background of lively conversations and board games. My father whistling as he walks through the house with a vase of freshly cut flowers, my mother with a basket of laundry, a lazy ponytail in her hair. Phones ringing. Dishes clinking. Sitting in the lap of the ancient mulberry tree. Reading all summer long. The best hiding places—behind the towering azaleas, on the top shelf of my bedroom closet where the ceiling is higher that you would expect, in the far recesses under the basement stairs where no one would dream a girl could fit. Daddy in his cowboy boots. Mama blotting her lipstick on junk mail. Walks through the garden, naming the flowers. Peanut butter and jelly picnics in the backyard. Everyone coming home for Christmas.
Six hours have passed since I started this letter. Writing these memories out makes me sob. The tears work on the soil of my heart. They loosen it. I see two sentences just below the broken earth. I move the dirt with my fingers and gently brush them off so I can read:
It is good to remember.
It is okay to forget.
I guess that is why I am writing this letter: to reassure myself that I do remember and to tell myself it is okay to let some things go. Surely, we are not meant to remember everything. Our minds and hearts could not hold it all. And the pain of losing the ones we love would be unbearable if we remembered every single detail. Memory is merciful. God has graciously built within it a softness, a gentleness. It grants us permission to hold onto the glow of love and to gradually let go of the thoughts and images that haunt us.
It is good to remember. But we can cling so tightly to memories that we forget to live our present lives. We can spend our days scrolling back through images and videos and forget the living faces that are upturned before us, longing for our attention. We can spend our lives so intent on documenting our existence in order to be remembered that we forget to really live. We can dwell on the trash heaped up at the dump, not remembering exactly what we put there, or we can fix our eyes on the beautiful life before us. It is okay to forget. It is okay to forget. It is okay.
In the end, love is all that remains. It cannot be truly lost. Love can not die, it can not decompose in the landfill. It cannot be misplaced or dropped off at the Goodwill. It can not be boxed up in an attic somewhere. It cannot be forgotten. In time, all else will fade from memory. But love, planted like a seed, continues to grow and bear fruit. The love of my parents is in my very DNA. I have carried it into every room, every situation, every relationship of my life. I hear it in the voices of my brothers and sisters. I see it in the eyes of my beautiful children. Love is the treasure that I carry from this empty house. When I search, I find it safely hidden, buried deep within my heart.
“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away… For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” (I Corinthians 13: 8, 12-13, NIV)
Friends,
Thank you for being here. My mind has been reeling with so many thoughts after going through a lifetime of treasures with my family. I have more to say. I’m sure it will come in pieces over the next few weeks.
For today, I want to leave you with this video of my daughter, Rosie, singing one of her original songs. It is called Just Let Me Cry, and it feels really connected to my post. (One final breath, one beat, one chord/ I don’t want to feel this way anymore/ Life has to change, it has before/ I’ll take one last look, and then close the door) I think you will love it.
Today we got back the first mixes of her 5-song EP, and it sounds amazing. Stay posted for details! Can’t wait to share. Local friends, remember her first show is August 9 at Fender’s Alley in Cornelia, Ga at 6:00. We would love to see you there! If you want to follow Rosie on substack, you can find her page at
.Sending hope for the glow of love in all your memories today.
Love,
Mackenzie
