Cataloguing the Past

Crucifixion with Mary and St John the Evangelist, Antonio Da Firenze, c 1400.

I have been driven into contemplation of the far past recently. Driving down I-85 South to Atlanta on our way to the PapaJohns.com Bowl, we passed Belmont Abbey College and on through Gastonia and Bessemer City, a trip that always brings me to a melancholy recall of my last days there at the Abbey and the very, very hard time I had during the year 1987. It was the first year when suicidal ideation was my constant companion, and now that I know so much more about myself, I can recognize that as the first year I really was experiencing a major depressive episode, beyond the help of my friends.

My mother refused to help me until she literally had no choice but to take me in or face the fact that her daughter was living on the streets, and so I ended up, at last, going back to Asheville. I straightened things out, at least financially, and I began to slowly feel happier, but I would not say I got out of depression then. I think I became more of a functioning depressive in the ten years that followed, doomed, or at least feeling doomed, to follow a destructive pattern.

My life has changed so much now that those years sometimes seem to belong to another person’s life, but they are mine and I have to own them even though I have rejected them. They are the deep, dark ochres in the tapestry of my life.

Similarly, in recent weeks I have been reunited through the modern-day miracle of Facebook with some very, very old friends from even before that time, and have gotten in touch with my oldest, and very best, friend. Getting back in touch with her has also woken up a lot of memories, not all of them kind of course, but most of them sweet in the bitter way of your adolescence, when there are things you wish you could claim happened to someone else, or that were done by someone else, but nope—you were the dope that did them all.

I have also been speaking about all this past with my shrink, cataloguing my growth history I suppose. That is who I was, I say, and marvel, and weep bitterly, for that is who I am still. It’s all me. What a mess. But when I take stock and assign blame, so much blame, for the misery I caused other people and myself, on myself and on my failure to look for the light, there is still some blame that must be assigned, and I keep coming back to her. To my mother. To the one who will not accept it, will not take it, who has so far refused to bear any responsibility for me that she has severed me from her life rather than bear the shame, the pain, the agony of her own burden.

So I bear mine knowing she will not bear hers. Knowing what belongs to me, I have to admit that some of it belongs to her. It doesn’t matter any more what the truth is. Truth is a construct when it comes to the murky paths of memory. But accounting for it—saying you are sorry for it—is what you owe to the future. I know that I will have no future without owning and embracing my past.

My mother, whose past is littered with the non-actions taken to not-save her own children, rejects the past, over and over. And will never have a future. When I catalog this misery I know I can put it away because I have a different now. My mother’s past is never over, and so her misery never ends. But there is nothing I can do for her now.