My friend Raymond McHenry tells of Paul McCartney’s inspiration for his latest album, “Memory Almost Full.” The former Beatle said he saw that phrase on his cell phone and found it a metaphor for our lives today. He said, “I think we all need to delete stuff every so often.”
In the last few years of my father’s life, his mind began to turn on him and become his enemy. Old hurts and slights which he had either dealt with or had buried decades earlier began to reappear and reassert themselves into his consciousness. On several occasions as we sat and chatted, he brought up the time when he was 18 years old, the eldest of what would become 12 children, and his mother ordered him out of the house. He and the brother just younger than him, Marion, whom everyone called ‘Gip,’ were constantly fighting and Grandma told Carl to get his things and get out.
“That wasn’t right,” he would say. “I was doing right, and all Gip wanted to do was have fun and get out of work any way he could, and yet she threw me out of the house.”
Not being there, all I knew of that incident was what he related, and I had no inclination to find out any more of the situation. Both Dad and Gip were now elderly, and Gip was a fine loving Christian man living in the mountains of Virginia, and we naturally felt that whatever conflicts they had known in their youth should be left there. On a logical level, Dad knew it too. But there was nothing logical about this bad memory that hounded him and robbed him of his peace.
I tried the logical approach. I pointed out that by age 18 he had been earning his keep for nearly 6 years, and that Grandma knew he could take care of himself. I reminded him that with a houseful of children, she must have been stressed out, and with her two oldest sons fighting, she just wanted some peace and took the quickest route to get it. “If anything,” I said, “she was showing her trust in you, that you were responsible enough to leave home and take care of yourself.”
Nothing worked.
I made a mental note to keep in mind as I move into the older years that the brain can pull this kind of cruel stunt and unearth old slights long buried and presumably forgotten, and to be on the lookout.
Eventually, as Dad’s condition deteriorated in the year before his death, the memory of that old hurt faded and he did not mention it again.
One technique I tried in order to gain some peace for him is worth remarking on here.