remembering

Mrs. Casey, do you love Christmas? Well you know, she answered reflectively, Christmas can be a sad time for people too. It's a remembering time for us older ones. We remember the people who are gone.Oh, I never thought of that, I told her in surprise.Well that's youth for you, she said; you don't start to look back over your shoulder until there is something to look back at, and around Christmas I tend to think of the Christmases past and the people gone with them.

Wherever you visit, let the place you visit remembers you well!

The people we love get under our skin and crawl through our veins and fine their way into our heart. They choke up our blood flow and mess up our breathing and tangle themselves through our bodies like wire. Like razors, like fire.We remember them even when we don't remember them.We try and forget, but it's pointless.Even amnesia. Even comas and brain damage and traumatic shock.Whatever makes us not remember, we still remember.Our minds flounder like fish but our bodies...Our bodies remember.

That was what murder was-as easy as that!But afterwards you went on remembering...

. . .the sorrows of the heart yearn to be erased, for one final atonementfinite and forgetting and whole__ut time in its preservingwill not permit forgetting; destroyingonly when we can no longer begor argue with time to preserve the brief benisonsa few moments longer than our sins

Then one morning she__ begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn__ remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she__ realized again what she__ learned at five when her mother left _ that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting the small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she__ worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother__ voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree__ heartwood. (51)

I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.

Because If you ever think of me in the future I want you to remember me smiling

The irony of lifeIs our greatest fear is to forget,Yet it's the only certain fateThat anything has ever met.We know one day our earthWill find itself victim to time,That nothing will be leftTo tell of your story or mine,And still through life we rushScrambling for something to remember,Perish the thought that ash be ashAnd not the memory of an ember.

How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy?

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.

No one is ever really lost as long as their story still exists.

Remember how we forgot?Once upon a time, we were youngOur dreams hung like applesWaiting to be picked and peeledAnd hope was something needing to be reeled-inSo we can fill the always empty big fish bin with the one that got awayAnd proudly say that "this time, impossible is not an option"Because success is so akin to effort and opportunity they could be relatedSo we took chancesWe figure skated on thin iceBelieved that each slice of life was served with something sweet on the sideAnd failure was never nearly as important as the fact that we triedThat in the war against frailty and limitationWe supplied the determination it takes to make ideas and goals the parents of PossibilityAnd we believe ourselves to be members of this familyNot just one branch on one treeBut a forest whose roots make up a dynasty

I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.

what is not true does not exist in this moment.

I remembered standing in the middle of the street in front of The Crooked Bookshelf, filled with the certainty of a future. I had heard the wolves howling behind the house and remembered how glad I had been to be human.

It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.

Remembering tires a person out. this is something they don't teach us. Exercising one's memory is an exhausting activity. It draws our energy and wears down our muscles.