Memories...

The man who was my lover at the end of my addiction - the man who first stuck a needle in my arm, and then suggested a few years later that going to treatment was a good idea - died when I was 2 years sober.  He had a complicated relationship with his then teenage daughter, in the way that relationships with practicing addicts tend to be complicated. I didn't know her well. We had limited contact when he was living with me, and then after he overdosed she thanked me for a letter I'd sent describing what I knew of the man she had only a limited relationship with.

With the magic of social media, I reached out to her last week, some 28 years since our last conversation. Today I received a very nice reply, talking about the work she's done around reconciling the amazing man that was her father and his destructive choices.She apologized for not remembering me, or as she put it "I remember your name but have no other context for who you are."

And so, I am struck with the mercurial nature of memory. My context in relation to this girl's father is that meeting him changed the course of my life, yet she doesn't remember who I am.  Memory is almost exclusively about context, is it not? For a time,  I kept a cache of photographs locked away, afraid to look at the Pandora's Box of the final years of my addiction. When I did  finally break the seal and showed the pictures to a friend, he said, "What's the big deal?" He saw a girl wrapping Christmas presents. I saw pain, depression, and the fear of what was to come next.

A great deal of my recovery work has been about reconciling the past, those "causes and conditions" that contributed to my alcoholism and acting out.  That has meant countless inventories on what I remember about my childhood and my drinking history. And those memories have changed, have softened, over the years.  One of my Alanon daily readers says that we eventually get to a point where "we can look at the past without staring." That has taken time. A long time. I don't think that we survive this dis-ease without some trauma, even if it is the trauma of what didn't happen (dreams lost, potential set aside, relationships destroyed).

With long term sobriety, my relationship to my past has changed. My story doesn't grab me by the ankles like it once did, reminding me daily of how close I'd been to death.  I sometimes have a hard time remembering how lost I was, how driven I was to alter my consciousness, how confused I was about my place in the world.  I sometimes have a hard time remembering, and that's OK...