Three months. I find myself taking thoughtless longer strides. Exciting, but risky. Will the centre hold?
The list of small gains grows. I’m standing more, independently, for longer. I’m more stable in crucial movements…
Our cat died last week. After twenty two and a half years, there are flashes and lost forms everywhere. The house is not the same. And now that the last steps of extreme old age have been taken, there are also memories. Waves and waves of them.
Which has felt fitting (and intense), because I was already wrestling with William Faulkner’s take on how weird and slippery memory can be. ‘'The past is never dead,’ he once wrote. ‘It's not even past.’
As my back straightened over the last month, I found myself gripped by a very specific image. Me, sitting out back in my usual spot, trying again and again to keep my spine straight, and eventually failing, conceding, and slumping. In the context of my changing body, that memory of a younger, struggling self has been overwhelmingly emotional. For at least a week I swallowed back tears when it popped up – which it often did.
But the longer this went on, the more I questioned the image, which felt subtly off.
I started to wonder how much the heightened emotional tenor of the current moment – of receiving treatment, and starting to experience tangible physical changes – was influencing the force and texture of my memory.
The wider history of that bench out back is that I have spent many hours having drinks and conversations with friends and family in that exact place. Some of those conversations and relationships will stay with me forever. Many have significantly influenced my life trajectory. That bench is the spot where I dreamed up my novel, which won me an award, and was a meaningful personal experience. The bench is also one of the places where I communed a lot with Dorfmeister, our cat, one of my favourite of all mammals I have encountered, and certainly the one (excluding Robyn, of course) I have spent the most conversational hours with over the last two decades.
When I recall this broad history out back, I don’t actually remember much sadness at not being able to sit straight. I remember many attempts to hold a better posture, but I have made those attempts all my life, in every possible situation. Pushing against the squeeze is something I do, generally with fairly low levels of emotional investment, given the paucity of rewards on offer.
So, how ‘true’ is the memory that has been washing over and through me these last weeks?
Cognitive scientists and the like tell us our memories are not facts from the past stored in a filing cabinet in accessible order. Rather, they are a dense net of stories, with the events we tell ourselves about again and again and again becoming our narrative foundation stones.
When we pull up a memory we are effectively activating a contextual story path. One story leads to another and another and another, and eventually to the historical target. Which means the state you are in (emotional, intellectual, spiritual) when you recall the past has a huge amount to do with what kind of past you recall.
I think this is what I have been experiencing – a relatively fresh memory, profoundly weighted by the now.
After five years of chasing treatment and three months of being on it, I am fascinated by the interplay between body and mind the process has involved. And by the fact that now, in the thick of it, feeling my body change at the genetic level seems to constitute, a lot of the time, a powerful ramping up of the feedback loop between my internal narrative self and my fleshy vessel – the body carrying all these stories and feelings and flickering emotions around.
I am equally interested by how often this feedback loop involves memory. Stories of who I was turn out to be unavoidable corollaries of dreams of who I could become. In the theoretical abstract this makes perfect sense. But as a lived reality it’s a strangely new experience - and one which requires a good deal of daily management.
I was unprepared for this aspect of the journey, but it is slowly starting to feel more familiar - much like the incremental physical changes. I think I am learning to let the story river flow, and to treat the process with equal degrees of interest, engagement, and caution.
I wish I could say the same about getting used to life without that cat.