My grandmother is slowly beginning to lose her memory. No, she hasn’t been diagnosed with anything because she refuses to see a doctor, but every now and then she will ask me the same questions over and over again. Like, “hows grad school?” and I’ll tell her I graduated over a year ago and she’ll congratulate me for the 5th time and I’ll just nod my head and say thank you. The bright side is she’ll offer me 4 or 5 slices of pie and serve each one to me like its the first as long as I sit through the same story that she’ll tell to me 3 or 4 times. I try to act just as surprised as the first time I heard them.
Eventually she starts to do things like leave the oven on, and forget who she’s talking to on the phone, and what day it is, and what she had for dinner last night, and how to get home when she goes somewhere she hasn’t been in a while, and everybody else thinks this is a reason for concern. Except me. Because I see the beauty in slowly losing your memory as you get older.
There is a certain magic in forgetfulness that God rewards us with if we are fortunate enough to make it into old age. Because after a few years of the mundane every day is something new. An opportunity to experience old things for the first time as those bad memories fade away. In her mind, there is eternal sunshine and that's all any of us really want anyway. The look of surprise on her face every time I tell her I already got my degree means, to her, every other Sunday is graduation.
Every visitor is in town for a holiday. Every birthday is a surprise when you wake up and don’t know why everyone you know is calling you to tell you they love you and every package you ordered is like a present to yourself. You no longer recognize people in old photographs. There is no more living in the past. No regretting old mistakes or wishing you had second chances because as far as you know, you’re still on plan A and everything worked out exactly the way it was supposed to be. Beautifully.
Until that day we wake up on a beach in Montauk and feel everything fading from our memory we will drag our regrets to the shore and relive our mistakes over and over until we bury them in the sand and treat every morning as an opportunity to start over.
Just don't forget who I am.