Letting go…of trying to remember stuff that is best forgotten

Not to bore you with hospital tales. But I am amazed at how foggy my brain is about the two and a half weeks I spent there. My friend stopped by today and spoke of when she visited me in the hospital. I stared at her muddled and confused. I simply could not remember her visit. She reminded me of what was going on – the tube down my nose, the word game my husband and I were playing, the jokes they cracked (somehow I don’t need a memory to guess who they were making fun of). Some snippets of conversation seem vaguely familiar, but at best fuzzy.

Much about my stay there is blurry and hazy. I watched a movie and no matter how much I try, I cannot remember a thing about it – the actors, the story, the locations. All I can remember is a couple of comments we made.

We’re blaming it on the morphine. But I realized that barring the first couple of days, I had hardly used any. It slows things down and since my body was not restarting, I toughened up and used very little.

Maybe it was the meds or maybe it was the discomfort that made it hard to focus on anything else. Whatever the reason, I’m quite glad to leave it all in oblivion.

I wonder if such memory loss is our body’s survival technique. It’s method of letting go of difficult and painful pieces of our life. I have heard stories of accident victims who can’t remember anything about the accident. So although some painful parts are still vivid, they continue to blur every day. And what a beautiful flaw this memory loss is.

So if my entire being is trying to forget this part of my life, why should I try to resurrect it? Some memories are meant to disintegrate into ashes and blow away into dust. And I simply have to watch them fade into nothingness. Why try and dig them up, relive them and keep them alive?

So with due apologies to friends whose visits I cannot remember, I’m happy that those weeks are getting blurrier by the day. And I’m simply allowing them to...