The Pain and the Joy of Remembrance

THE PARADOX OF MEMORY

Lately,   just  when I am trying to get to sleep, I am flooded with vivid memories of people  from my past. My mother is with me, my Aunts Anna and Grace and my father who left us, Norman, and of course, my two sisters Janie and Sheila.

MY latest dream-memory was of my younger sister Sheila.  She loved the canary that  I talked my mother into letting me buy from Woolworth's in downtown Pawtucket.

She loved SKIPPER  so much that she would sit in a rocking chair near his cage--she named him SKIPPER.  That  led to her insisting on sitting with the cage on her lap and then  rocking together. She sang and he  sang.

 I don't have that many positive memories of Sheila. 

She died of leukemia when she was only 16  and although she had Down Syndrome, she did not share  our older sister Janie's happy Down Syndrome  personality. Sheila was unhappy and jealous--especially when she noticed  that she was not having the same adventures and experiences as I was enjoying.

She wanted a boyfriend, she wanted to go to dances, and when I brought  my new baby only a month old to her hospital bed, she told my mother after I left, "I want a baby just like Norma."

Such an admixture of happiness and sadness in such memories of the Dead. Things that I have not thought of  for years. and now their immediacy and power take me by surprise.

This poem by Christina Rossetti  was a favorite of mine  when my mother and I  took turns reading poems to each other on the Saturday nights when Anna was out dancing.

She captures the mixedness of memories .

 Remember 

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

—CHRISTINA ROSSETTI