What We Don’t Remember

A phone call interrupted the last few pages of Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, The Stroke That Changed My Life.  237, the country code for Cameroon.  I put down the book and answered.  “Madame G?” came a familiar voice, half a world away, sitting beside me on the living room couch in my absurdly hot apartment.   “Madame G,” Mr. Forbeh said, “we are missing you over here.” 

It could be years.  When I look at the calendar, it has been only two weeks since I was there, since I ran the mountains in the mornings, gazing out across sparkling zinc roofs that dot the plain; cooked my meals on a fire between three stones; feasted with my neighbors, bounced their babies, sweated and stagnated and at long last erected a library with mudblocks molded between our hands.  The memories arrive in patchwork, “modules” as Christine Hyung-Oak Lee calls them, “the structure of story” (246).  In the ever-growing fabric between my memories is something gray, shapeless, my new life here which feels at present like a coat ten sizes too big.  

“Time is dependent on memory,” (41) Lee tells us.  Without memory, that is, without short-term memory being converted into long-term memory, there is no sense of chronology, and the structure of her storytelling reflects this.  “The end is the beginning is the middle is the end” (238); Christine (the character) is recovering, she is giving birth, she is getting divorced, she is about to have a stroke.  One of the lines I find most touching in the book is, “My forty-six-year-old friend Justin will have a massive stroke and be taken off life support a week later and then linger as if on a precipice before falling transitioning saying good-bye without words even though he was a poet and words were his life he dies in silence except for the monitors like an exclamation point” (110).  Told after the fact, told in the future tense switching to present.  The juxtaposition of “his life he dies.”  His life, at least the life we see, the description we get, is a single sentence, ending in a figurative exclamation point.  “And what is left of him are memories,” Lee writes.  “And I know that memories fade, memories warp, memories die with you, too” (110-111).  Memory creates linear time, but time rewrites memory and thus rewrites time. 

I sense this too.  As my previous life is reduced to memory and those memories dim in the ambient noise of new demands (reading books, for instance, instead of hours carrying water from the well), time warps.  Mr. Forbeh’s voice spills out of my phone, and suddenly I’m not a student anymore.  I’m not anonymous, walking alone to class, no friends yet, no one calling out to me.  I’m Madame G, secondary school math teacher, who can’t step out her door without the village peeking out windows, without my neighbors shaking my hand and saying good morning because that is more important than what you do, than what you say next, than if you build a library or spend the rest of the day drunk on palm wine in the bar.  The emotional connection through the clasping of hands is more important than anything else.

Christine accesses memories through her body.  “I called this phone number,” she tells her husband, in her attempts to dial 911, “because it was in my fingers” (26).  But sometimes her body fails her.  Walking down the stairs is as habitual as calling a well-used phone number, but she must remind herself which foot to put down, right, left, right, left, to prevent falling.  The difference is that the memory of calling her husband is linked to emotions, which make it a stronger memory, just as when she tells us, “The stories people told me out of love, about love, went into my brain through my heart—another way in which we are able to remember” (213-214).  She finds memories through her gut, through intuition. “I wrote my name, and when I looked at what I had scribbled, it looked correct” (27).  “[S]omewhere in my gut there would come a name that felt completely random yet so persistent that I had to trust it to be true” (49).  The brain, of course, is also important.  Lee describes the neuroscience, and she also uses metaphor, the “invisible boulders in my brain” (121) that must be rolled aside to access certain information. 

The brain, the body, the heart—Christine’s memories inhabit all of these places, but ultimately, memories live in narrative.  Thus the importance of Lee writing this book.  Thus the importance of imagination, of stringing the “modules” together.  In the choppy structure of the book, the jumble of chronology and content, it is the relationship of each module with one another that creates the story and thus validates the memory.  “The goal is to write a story that enters emotional memory,” Lee tells us.  The patches of memories alone do not do this.  Okay, so it was difficult for young Christine to hike.  But it is the hiking struggle as illuminated by the PFO closure, the new ability to breathe deeply and exercise, that leaves an impression on the reader.  Lee shows us that chronology does not really matter—she jumps back and forth between the hiking scene and the surgery.  “His life” beside “he dies” beside the beeping “monitors” beside the “exclamation point.”  This is the role Lee attributes to the mind, to “string memories together into one cohesive narrative” (89).  This is where memories ultimately take on meaning.

“Culture shock is brain shock” (135), Lee writes of her parents’ immigration to the United States.  Looking at the way I am processing memories from my two years in Cameroon, I think I am going through a small form of culture shock.  My mind has cut the narrative back into patches.  I remember at random the dry season dust on my front door, or a student’s smile.  Like Christine after her stroke, I struggle to rewrite the story in my mind, to find cohesion in the narrative.  “Oh,” I’m tempted to say, as Christine says, “Well, that didn’t happen” (130).  I wonder if my mind is protecting me.  Because when I compare those two lives, past and present, I can only be sad.  I can only see the extreme wastefulness of this society, the lack of gratitude of people given a thousand opportunities, the dysfunction of a government that could actually maybe be functional.  I can only feel heartbreak to have left my family, my friends, a meaningful job, a relationship, in a country halfway around the world.  “It was a terrifying experience,” Lee says of her eyelid surgery in which she was anesthetized but awake.  “It did not matter that I did not feel pain.  It mattered that I remembered” (182).  The pain is there, but my mind is helping me out by remembering only in bits and pieces. 

“There are so many ways to say ‘okay,’” Lee writes.  “It means everything is in order, but it is used in so many circumstances where everything is not okay” (141-2).  After her estranged mother-in-law dies, Christine writes and buries a letter that ends up burning in a forest fire.  She dreams that her mother-in-law reads the ashes “in pieces, like a serial novel” (142).  Her dream mind connects the letter with the fire, stitching together a story; the letter, as story itself, is broken back into individual memories.  Our minds, which at times can destroy us, also have a way of making things “okay,” whatever that looks like.

—Gina