on the gift of persistent memories

This week I offer a personal reflection for Memorial Day. To hear Brandi read this week’s essay, click here: https://youtu.be/bt6G01qFYBo

Memories can be brutal and beautiful, bringing waves of grief or gratitude. Those waves often exhaust us, but at times they also sustain us, in miraculous ways. As Marvel’s Vision reminds us, grief is love persevering. Remembering is eternity breaking through our mortality.

As Memorial Day approaches, as graduations come and families gather, take time to remember together. Indulge your memories. Tell the stories. Catch a glimpse of eternity.

This week begins our third year without Judah Finn Thacker. His dying leaves a crater in our past—in our selves—that time doesn’t seem to fill. Many of us don’t know how to live without him because we don’t want to live with his loss. His death cracked all the foundations I depend on: That God is good. That kids grow up. That parents can protect. That sibling love will continue into adulthood. That everything works out. That childhood is magical. That hope is always present.

My personal pain has diffused a bit, and there are plenty of moments of massive joy. Some things don’t get better. The intensity of grief still takes my breath away, buckling my knees at times. I find one of my kids devastated on the ground every now and then. I see the way my kids don’t trust the universe anymore. I don’t know how to claim the promises of God a lot of days. My tears nearly always loom. It is too much to bear.

 And yet. Here we are, 730 days later. We are still making dinner and playing sports and swimming and laughing. We are still having birthdays and growing up and older. Today, as I think about Judah and choke back such brutal sadness, I want to elevate a fraction of the way that he still lives in me.  I share these memories in hopes that they remind you of the many, many ways the one you miss is still all around you.

He is gone. And he is not. And that is lovely and real. And I am thankful.

I think of Judah when I walk through my house, because he had favorite spots that are still his here.

I think of Judah when a person surprises me with random deep knowledge that intrigues and delights.

I think of Judah when I see his brother sitting, legs folded like a stack of books, lost in his imagination (or ipad J). 

I think of Judah when I hear a bey blade rip, Star Wars or anything in the Mario world. 

I think of Judah when I see my beautiful 12 year old son.

I think of Judah when I glimpse a dinosaur, a pokemon or a light saber.

I think of Judah when I see a dog doting on her owner, always wanting to sit nearby.

I think of Judah when I hear his sister humming to herself, utterly satisfied with her own thoughts.

I think of Judah when I see a Happy Meal, or Chick-fil-A.

I think of Judah when I notice a person consider someone else before they name their own needs.

I think of Judah when I see the kindness and empathy buried deep in my 15 year old son.

I think of Judah when I see a person cheer another person on, sharing in the excitement of the game even in watching.

I think of Judah when I notice my 17 year old scanning the room, taking the emotional temperature before he decides who to be in that moment.

I think of Judah when I see a little kid have a very grown up reaction to another kid.

I think of Judah when I notice someone really thinking before they answer a question.

I think of Judah when I hear my daughter say a new word I didn’t think she could understand or pronounce.

I think of Judah when I share an inside joke, connecting me to a memory with a person I love.

I think of Judah when I hear a cackling, bubbling laugh.

I think of Judah when I watch someone do something very brave.

He is gone. And he is not. And that is lovely and real. And I am thankful.

May your Memorial Day be full of pauses, of memories, of eternal moments. Speak them aloud. Share them with others. Expand your community across time and space, and welcome the brutal, beautiful memories that continue to shape you. Happy Memorial Day.

on remembering, for Memorial Day

As we approach Memorial Day, we do well to remember that memory is not just a comforting nostalgia, but a way of knowing who we are, of connecting with God and others. Many of us, immersed in counseling lingo, know the dangers of forgetting. We know by now that we cannot know who we are without knowing from where we’ve come. We know that trauma will never heal as long as it is locked deep within us. We know that we cannot progress or grow as long as we refuse to take inventory of our mistakes and poor past habits. We know we cannot begin to imagine steps of reconciliation as long as we ignore or deny the wrongs in our past. Memory is a teacher, a revealer, a guide for every day that follows.

Memory certainly can be constructive and healing, but the work of today is not to tell us to take our medicine, nor to remember in order to stay out of trouble. Instead, this Memorial Day I hope to ring the bell of memory again for beauty, as an act of worship, and maybe of resistance. I am arguing we should not face memories because they otherwise haunt us, but because in our memories we find our very selves; in remembering, we tap into the eternal hint God placed within us at our forming. Remembering resists mortality and reverses erasure.

Walter Benjamin was a Jewish German philosopher and thinker about culture and literature who fled Hitler’s growing Nazi hatred in the 30s. He died along the way when he thought his escape had been blocked, committing suicide. Thankfully, among other ideas he left us the legacy of the notion of Messianic time. For Benjamin, a powerful connection—one that overcomes the limits of mortal humanity—occurs when a community beholds a piece of art or beauty together. Making a memory collaboratively with others somehow crosses the boundaries of space and time that isolate us. Messianic time is felt and tapped into when a collective experience is shared. When a moment is held among people together, it is so powerful that an atemporal connecting occurs across time; for Benjamin, past, present and future merge into the shared moment.

The bonds of mortality, of our own sad stuckness in temporality, are tight indeed. How can we practice remembering in a way that catches a glimpse of Messianic time? Frederick Buechner, a writer and priest, is helpful here as he reminds us that first our memories must be spoken. In speaking of a hard and never talked about past memory of loss, he found hope in words, asserting, “Words are so much a part of what we keep the past alive by, if only words to ourselves.” We must learn to face our memories and also learn to speak them. Tell yourself the story of you. The stories that shape and impact and make you. Remember them to yourself, with images, yes, but also with words. When we speak such words, we offer ourselves the chance to re-remember the ideas that helped shape us, putting ourselves together again.

Buechner argued that speaking memories into the present keeps those we have lost alive, but I think it helps us stay alive too. As a follower of Christ I believe I was made with God’s imprint. The God in me elevates and expands my most painful limits, giving me tastes of the eternal in precious, restorative glimpses. I have to struggle and grieve and fight against my own imprisonment in linear time. I am neither eternal nor God, and am thus limited to live one day at a time, leaving the past, and memories of those I knew in the past, behind.

This is mostly true, but I think memory is a beautiful, outrageous, God-sized loop hole in my prison of time. One of the pathways to Messianic time, to God’s eternally connected temporality, is memory. Buechner puts it this way: “Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.”  What if remembering the past lifts us out of linear time and instead gives us a taste of the eternal, where all time is simultaneous?

This Memorial Day, indulge in remembering. Take some time to re-member yourself—to put yourself back together—by telling the stories of the people and encounters that continue to shape you. Take a morning to marvel at how close you can be to those you have lost when you remember them. Give your private memories words, and tell stories about the people you have loved and love still. Keep them alive with your laughter, and revel in the Messianic time that allows you to walk with them, to hear their voices, and to sense the embrace of God, again.