Memories we could not bear to lose - HITRECORD

Memories we could not bear to lose

May 26, 2024

"What's one memory you would be desperately upset to lose?"

This thought-provoking question kicked off Maggie Stiefavater's "Fearless Storytelling" project, prompting writers in the community to dig deep into their pasts to share specific experiences (both big and small) that they wish will always stay with them.

Give these stand-out contributions a read, and then write your own HERE.

Leaving for prison

NAdwyer
Jun 13, 2019

When my son was only 3 years old and I was 23, I got into some trouble. Well ok, I had been getting into trouble since I turned 14. This time it was bad though. I had been sentenced to 18 months in Federal Prison. Because I was not considered a flight risk (although believe me I thought about running more than once!) I was allowed to 'get my affairs in order' before turning myself in. When the day came, I woke up at 5am and got ready for the two hour drive.

Here is the actual memory:

I walk into the living room, my son is curled up on the couch with a blanket. Either me or my stepmom woke him up and set him there, I can't remember. I go to him with tears in my eyes and hug him for what I know will be the last time in a long time. As I let go he says to me, "it's ok mommy, you can go to jail now."

I never want to forget that my actions caused those words to come out of my beautiful little 3 year olds mouth.

That was seven years ago as of yesterday and I have not been back to prison or jail since. I've cleaned up my life and things are so completely different than they were before. God willing I will never have to hear something like that from my son ever again.

Visiting Grandpa

create_self
Jun 17, 2019

By the time I was born, my grandpa had survived 2 strokes and was in his early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The entire right side of his body was paralyzed. He lived with us for 6 months out of the year, and I grew up sharing meals and listening to his stories. I understood the odd mix of languages he used, a bit of Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka, and Japanese, since his mind didn't really differentiate between the languages anymore.

I remember seeing all these photos of Grandpa before the strokes. He was strong and tall. He was the known athlete in our family. But I never knew that side of him.

By the time I was in high school, my grandpa's condition deteriorated severely and my parents made the decision to put him in a nursing home. I know my dad will never forgive himself for making this decision, because in Taiwanese culture, we take care of our elders and provide for them when they can't do so anymore. But Grandpa needed 24/7 care, so dad flew back to Taiwan and checked him into a nursing home.

Over the next few months, we received updates from my uncle. Grandpa doesn't recognize him when they visit. Grandpa has angry episodes. You should visit soon.

I visited Grandpa with my mom and sister during winter break. Walking into his room, I found the fluorescent lights intrusive. The nurse yelled into his ear, "Your family is here to visit!" My mom started talking to him and told him who we were. I stood at the edge of the bed, not really knowing what to do. And then I felt someone hold my hand and stroke my arm. I looked down, and it was Grandpa. He didn't say a word, but tears kept streaming down his face. And in that moment I knew he remembered us, and he remembered everything.

Hyperemesis and the Peanut Butter Cheese Toast of Death

runrunrun
Jun 13, 2019

Two months in, my wife had lost forty pounds and I was haunted by visions of what life would be like without her, if the rest of her vanished, too. I tried to imagine how to explain to my daughter what her mom was like after she was gone, after she didn't remember her anymore except in Facebook videos and all those pictures that proved they'd looked exactly alike. I imagined daycare that I couldn't afford, and working long hours as a single dad that my daughter would never understand, and my daughter growing mean and broken, starved of her mother's light. I imagined dating again. I imagined working the widower angle, of awkward nights with strangers ending in sex or disaster, and feeling disgusted with myself whichever way the fantasy went. I was thirty five and my wife was very pregnant and very sick.

It's like morning sickness on steroids.

That's what the doctors tell you. They don't tell you about the PICC line running up towards her heart that will kill her if it gets infected. They don't tell you you'll be the one changing the IV bags full of saline and so if she gets a deadly infection, it's probably your fault. They don't tell you that the hand washing and the alcohol wipes and the bottles of medicine in the fridge and the hypodermic needles will become a ritual, a daily mass conducted by a priest who has no idea if the words that fall from his lips do anything but evaporate into the light of a fluttering fluorescent bulb that's needed changing for a months, which will go on fluttering right on past the point where those same doctors start talking about TPN, about sending nutrients directly into her veins because it's been a month since she's had anything to eat but a few bites of toast that filled her with agony.

I'd been campaigning for TPN for a few weeks: my wife was starving, so what was the hold up? But there was something in the doctor's eyes every time I mentioned it, something that woke me up one night where in the blue light of my computer screen I read a bunch of scary articles about the infection rates of TPN catheters, and the mortality rates of the infected.

I've since learned that my midnight Googling steered me into some outdated research that's been hanging on since the 80s, but I didn't know that then. Back then, in the blue light of my computer, I think I went a little crazy.

And so we started to fight. Arguments over Gatorade. Over saltine crackers. If she'd just try a bite. A nibble. Something.

You don't understand, she said. When I eat something, it feels like I'm gonna die.

If you don't eat something, I'd think, you are going to die.

Every once in a while, there' be a good day. One week, she ate a piece of toast. Inexplicably, about 45 days into the famine, she got a craving for Chick-Fil-A and I literally shook with happiness, taking solace in the fact that even after she'd thrown it up ninety minutes later, she had to have absorbed some calories. But more often than not, the answer was toast. Bags of saline infused with prenatal vitamins that dripped like water clocks through the night and toast. Cheese toast, if we were feeling bold. A slice or two, every three or four days.

About the time I researched TPN mortality rates and dipped into full-on panic mode, I got the idea that the next time she was feeling well enough to try to eat, I was going to Trojan Horse some protein into her by sprinkling some dehydrated peanut butter powder under a huge, melty slice of orange cheddar. Surely she wouldn't be able to taste that? A smattering. A teaspoon feathered across the surface of the toast like a fine dusting of snow you know is not going to stick.  And so, like one of those harlots that slides out of bed with James Bond and slinks over to the mini bar only to open her ring to dump the white knock-out powder into his shaken-not-stirred martini, I deftly proteined my wife's cheese toast with peanut butter powder.

I'd forgotten, in my desperation, that my wife's taste buds are nothing short of super human. She can't feel a pea under a stack of mattresses, but she can always detect a single mote of basil in her spaghetti sauce. And so it took exactly one bite before she retched and lost the cheese toast and about two hours worth of saline fluid into the little trashcan she kept next to the bed. The windows where she wasn't nauseous, the hours when she could eat and hold it down--those only came every few days.

And I'd just blown this one to smithereens.

I begged her to try another bite. Forget the peanut butter powder: I'd make her a new piece. Just please, eat something. But she couldn't do it. And I couldn't do it. I stumbled out of the bedroom and collapsed on the kitchen floor and wept. My two-year-old daughter toddled up to me curiously and then away again, climbing up into bed with mom while I wept. I'd gambled and I'd lost. She was going to starve and it was going to be my fault.

Five months later, my wife gave birth to a beautiful boy. And having subsisted on a constant drip of prenatal vitamins for six months of his germination, he was freaking huge, and continues to be off the charts for length and head size to this day, even though his dad's only 5'6". He's extremely sweet and cuddly, and the person he likes to cuddle with the most is his mom. I don't think he'll ever really understand what she went through to get him here, but he definitely loves the shit out of her.

There's a lot about our bout with Hyperemesis Gravidarum that I've blocked out, that I don't want to remember. I'm still side-blinded when my wife reminds me of things I've shoved into some dusty corner of my mind's attic: remember when you had to stick me with those needles for the Zofran pump? and suddenly I'm in a flashback of raising my fist with a needle in it like John Travolta about to plunge the adrenaline into Uma Thurman's chest in Pulp Fiction, and I'm amazed that this has slipped my mind.

But I don't ever want to forget crying on the kitchen floor. Whenever we're fighting or I'm feeling ungrateful despite the myriad blessings in my life, I think about the kitchen floor and the peanut butter cheese toast of death, and shudder.

my little things

saintmaker
Jul 01, 2015

My oldest daughter came to visit me for Father's Day last weekend.

She asked me this question: "What are your favorite memories of your 3 daughters?"

I thought about it for a bit and replied: "Well, I think you'll be surprised."

"Try me," she laughed.

"It's not the big things. Your Mom covered all those wonderfully. The birthdays, every Christmas, Halloween, graduations. For me it was always the little things."

"Such as?" she asked.

"I remember coming home from work back when I was in the oil and gas business. I pulled up in our drive way and saw your 2 sisters playing in the sand box...which had magically became the mud box...just add water, right?

They didn't see me at first. Both still in their diapers. They seemed so serious. How could 2 toddlers playing in a mud box be? And more importantly, why? I don't know the answer...but I know at that little moment in time, I could see them as babies, as young girls, as young women, as middle-aged women, as old women.

What I saw was all the big things contained in a tiny bubble of time. It was as exhilarating...it was poignant...it was mesmerizing. That brief second created an equilibrium in the Universe."

"What about me? What's your favorite memory of me and you?" she asked.

I replied: "You were 3 years old. We were at the hospital in Laredo. You were having tubes placed in your ears. The nurse was trying to draw blood from your tiny veinless arms. She stuck you 4 or 5 times...and then your Mother said, 'I want another nurse in here...now!' It was too much for her. I told her to wait in the other room and I will stay with you.

Another nurse came in and began to try to find a vein. This nurse stuck you 3 or 4 more times until I saw the first tear run down your cheek. You never complained. You...you were the toughest little 3 year old girl in the whole wide world. Again, I watched your life unfold in a matter of seconds. I watched you evolve...to become the strong, resilient, wonderful daughter...and Mom you are now. I thought to myself, 'I truly am the luckiest Dad in the world.'

Y'all were my little things who became my big things.