The Fear of False and Fading Memories

Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes

Some of the story I am about to tell you is made up.  

A lot of the things about my dad have to be made up.  If his life were a coloring book, there would be a lot of tones outside the lines because I’m the one who’s been drawing the picture for the past nine years, since his death.  As your narrator, I am like a drunk arrow, flying crooked towards a target I cannot see.

The things I have are not enough.  

I have his nose, for one, and his chin.  I have the pictures he took of the snow our first winter in New Jersey, the year the heavy whiteness piled on and on to sagging boughs.  The year everything was so cold, so wet, so near.  I have the wonder at this American newness flashing in his Brazilian eyes as zipped up his jacket and held the digital camera between gloved fingers.  

Or am I making that up? 

Confabulated memories––that is, fabricated remembrances without the intention of deceit are not uncommon––render it entirely possible that the lightning I picture in the memory of his eyes derives only from my imagination, or, in other words, nowhere real.  While the reality where the deceased are still alive is entirely idealistic, when all I have left of him are memories, the significance of their correlating with reality, with what actually happened, burdens me.  I feel it is my duty to remember things ‘right;’ every time I conjure a memory, a worry that I might be making it up, that I am besmirching its truth-value, floats into my mind alongside it.  To narrate stories without certainty is to ontologically uphold the dark facelessness of truth that we all encounter when giving meaning to the past.  

I have his laugh seared into my memories, still smoking.  That, I certainly have.  And I have his files saved on my computer. 

My father was a writer.  Although one of the things I find the hardest to conjure is his voice, when it comes in writing, it as if he were there saying them to me.  

On countless occasions when I sought an image of him not claustrophobically decomposing in a sealed grave, I weaved my way through these countless documents.  Among them are letters, poems, an unfinished autofictive novel––where I am a character with the name he would have given me if ‘Gabriela’ had not seemed just right as he sang to me in the maternity ward––and single-lined aphorisms.  

Some pieces are finished.  Some are not.  A meditation on taking off in a plane (on one of the trips I imagine him taking to see me when we lived apart), ends mid-sentence.  

Some things are translated.  Most are not.  The same poem holds two titles: “Só tinha que ser você,” transliterates to “It Could Only Have Been you,” but was translated by him to “The Heart of the Road.”

Some things have dates of origin and even revision.  One poem titled “Passaros em revoada,” or “Birds Reentering Flight,” the speaker says that he hopes “Quando partir, / Que eu tenha conhecido melhor o autor do poema.” He hopes that when he departs (I presume he means existentially), he will have gotten to know the poem’s author better. My father on the quest of self-knowledge, as we all are, in the face of an unknown, oncoming death in three years when he first wrote it in 2012 and less than two when he revised it in 2013. Others bear no timestamp, no chance to imaginatively historicize the moment in which he wrote and rewrote. 

I confess I have not been through them all: considering that the flashdrive I was given by my grandmother contained all the files from his computer, there is an enormous amount.  And, in that same consideration, there are some too intimate to read comfortably, and others too nebulous to hold significance.  

One day, I came across one holding a single sentence. At the top of an otherwise blank word document, my father wrote, “Passei a maior parte da minha vida me preocupando com o que nunca aconteceu…” “I spent the majority of my life worrying about that which never happened…” 

This one bears no date.

Given that my father probably had many things actually happening to him––like an inoperable tumor in his head and a divorce and a daughter living on a different continent––that would worry him, I wondered about this one. But then, I caught myself, again and again, doing the same thing. Among other things of his I have, it seems I have also inherited his worry. Because I worry about a lot, definitely too much for it to be healthy.  

Often I find myself clobbered by a feeling of deep dread, like a well opened in the space between my ribs and I find that I am deep in its mossy waters; white brightness and shouts from the well’s rim show me there’s an outside and I am not there.  I am in here.  I am totally, utterly entrenched in the dread that in the future, something horrible will happen.  Not a lethal car wreck, or a fatal aneurysm, or some tragic accident in which I am killed or die soon after.  I am not afraid to die. 

I am afraid that I will find that lump in my breast while showering that will turn out to be malignant.  I am afraid that I will become paralyzed.  I am afraid that any elevator I step into will crash.  I am afraid I will get Alzheimer's and fail to remember what I’ve casually vowed to never forget.  I am afraid that the dizzy blackness that overcasts my eyes when I stand up too quickly won’t dissipate as it does now.  I am afraid that the ringing in my ears will grow in volume until I can’t hear anything but that.  I am afraid that my partner will die before I do, leaving me alone in the world, again. 

Often, when I am tired I think—and, to my partner’s dismay, say aloud—that nonexistence would be easier than existence in that moment.  Factually, I think that’s true.  

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion says she was born fearful.  Unlike her, my fear did not accompany me as a child, but sprouted at some point in adolescence and parasitically flourished as I’ve gotten older.  It doesn’t seem like the momentum is letting up.  I think about these things.  I fear these things. Am I passing the majority of my life worrying about something that won’t happen? 

On the same day I found that rather haunting document, I found this picture:

My dad does not look so worried in this picture with his red shorts and beer bottle.  Even his hair swoops carefree.  I suspect that in the warm sunshine of a memory, there isn’t much to worry about anyway.  

But I worry about this picture.  I worry because I know that the story ends with yellow forehead and polka-dotted hospital gown and stale gauze air.  I know it ends too quickly.  And I know that it’s up to me to make the rest up.