I’ve been mining the box of loose photos that my husband Arthur
and I accumulated over the course of our relationship. I found one from thirty
years ago that was taken in Arthur’s grandmother’s house. In this photo Arthur
is showing his cousin the book a friend of his wrote called White Trash Cooking. Arthur is dead, his
grandmother is dead, the cookbook’s author is dead, that house doesn’t exist
anymore…Looking at that photo made me think how as you age you start living
with ghosts—not in the literal sense, but in the sense that people and places
no longer exist on the physical plane but only in your mind.
Maybe this is one of the reasons older people start losing
their grip on reality, it suddenly occurred to me. Most of the things and
people that matter to them now exist only in their memories, and they prefer the
reality of their memories to ‘actual’ reality in which they are alone.
This brought up for me another difficult aspect of grief,
which is that you become the keeper-of-the-memories. Our point-of-view, our
subjective reality, is shaped by our memories, and as long as we have at least
one other person who was there when a particular memory was formed we can
confirm that we are anchored to reality. We can confirm that memory is ‘real.’ But
losing our partner-in-memory unmoors us. Was it real or did I just imagine it…who
knows?
