Losing the past

At diagnosis, it was the future that dropped away first - no more retirement together, no prospect of more time when the kids were older. On that first day, I had about fifteen minutes between the first phone call from Jen saying there was bad news, and her arriving to tell me the details. In that time I googled breast cancer survival rates, and hoped that it might be an early stage cancer - we could still have many years. Then the first heavy blow -- stage 3, locally advanced, 70% survival at five years. Three weeks later the second blow, when they found the liver metastases -- stage 4, five year survival less than 10 %. Jen's sister asked about stage 5 -- Jen's response was that stage 5 is being dead, which briefly became a item of black humour in our household.

Now the future is over for us, save for our ultimate hope in Christ. It is the past that is now under threat. There was a piece by the American humorist Garrison Keillor in the Melbourne Age's 'Good Weekend' last Saturday, about the death of his brother at age 71. He writes:

When your brother dies, your childhood fades, there being one less person to remember it with, and you are left disinherited, unarmed, semi-literate, an exile. It's like losing your computer and there's no back-up.

In our fifteen years of being married, there's so much that only Jen and I ever knew, and I am the only one who now remembers. Earlier in the year I reread Ted Hughes' intense poems in "Birthday Letters", to and about his first wife, Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963. The poem "Daffodils" begins:

Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you.

I tried to read that to Jen one day on the way to chemotherapy, but couldn't finish. We both feared that unless Jen lived a bit longer, our youngest son might eventually not remember her. Or perhaps more likely, that his memories of her would become less vivid, and he would slowly lose Jen in another way. Of course now we will use the photos, videos and mementos we have of Jen to renew her memory. Yet I too face that fading, that loss of sharpness. Now there is no-one to contradict my version of past events, but equally no-one to fill in the gaps. I have photographs I can't place anymore, and for which I need Jen's help. There is no-one else who has been with our boys almost every single day, and who has loved them as much. Memory too is not static -- it is shaped by use, so that each recalling and retelling of a story confirms its truth, and wears away those inconvenient details that don't fit.

Much is irreplaceable. Yet there is also the overlap of Jen's life with so many other people, and so there is a chance to draw on memories other than mine. I have started asking a few specific people to write down their recollections of Jen, for both myself and the boys, and especially those people who knew Jen before I really knew her. If you, dear reader, knew Jen, then I invite you too to put down on paper some memories of Jen. Specific anecdotes are better than generalities. If you have any photos of Jen, then you could perhaps write something to accompany each photo, or use it as a point of departure. If you could do that in the next two or three months and email me a copy, I'd be very grateful.