The truth about remembering

Forgetting, the ultimate betrayal.

[Photo: Ed Robertson on Unsplash]

Memories are very much our own, unreliable yet uncontested so long as they remain deep within whatever grey, gloopy bit of our brain they reside. We treasure them, we’re traumatised, we mourn their loss and scorn those who toss theirs away. Cenotaphs tower into the sky as testament to our commitment to remembering, but memorials are also an acknowledgment that one day we might forget. It is not enough to remember, we must show it to the world. Widows are castigated for cracking a smile within an unsuitable timeframe, teenagers are expected to revise to swell the memories of future them, force feeding French vocab and equations in the hope of an academic foie gras.

This week, we reach seven years without Nichola, my dearest friend, and inside I have the same debate with myself over the tiny tokens I use to show that I have not forgotten her – as if there were any remote chance of that. The change of the photo on Facebook; the flowers for her grave in Derry; the messages to her parents, husband and children; the wistful lunch with Emma*; even writing about it here, as I have done almost every year since my world gained a new shadow. Does doing these things help me? Do they show anything other than I can remember what the date is? Does it make her death more tragic, or less true? Should your last day on Earth even be marked at all, momentous as it is for the survivors, when to you it means nothing at all?

The photos and the messages do not tell the story. They are surface level traces of grief. I read somewhere that when a memory occurs, your brain isn’t remembering the actual event, but the last time you remembered it. Every recollection a faded photocopy of the one before. Maybe I should try to remember her less often, and preserve the purity of my memories, before they become grainy and featureless.

Emma came over for lunch a couple of weeks ago, to meet the dog for the first time. We still can’t quite get through a meal or drinks without mentioning Nichola at all, and I doubt we ever will – why would we want to? But it was a couple of hours before the noise became too loud and we had to break. Seven years. We shook our heads. Sighed. Blinked away the weight of it all and ignored the shivers down our spines. We understand our grief now, its unpredictable nature settling into a pattern of sorts. We know the warning signs when it’s about to surge.

We both said exactly the same thing, that now the initial terror of it all had largely faded, we were left, quite simply, pissed off. It’s annoying she isn’t here. Not only because she is missing her sons growing up to be fine young men, and every special occasion comes with its own scar, but because we’ll never know what she would’ve thought of the world as it is now. And us, as we are now. What might we have done differently, had she never left? Some questions are not meant to be answered, but it doesn’t make the asking of them any less compelling.

We’ll order the flowers, change the photos, send the messages, but this year I won’t be in London for the anniversary, and nor will Emma. Will being somewhere else help the huge space in our lives feel smaller, or will it scald us like a betrayal? It is sobering to think that I will wrestle some form of this dilemma, every single year, for the rest of my life. A cage without bars. And that’s why we perform the visual tributes, for the other survivors. A flare lighting up the dark to remind each other we needed no reminding, that we remain comrades in grief.

No matter where I am, when the flare burns out and the tributes are packed away again, it’s the same old sky above me. And she is still gone.

* not her real name

I wrote about my friend in the Guardian last year. READ NOW

I reviewed this week’s Guardian Blind Date. It went really well; they’re lovely. READ NOW