Timeless or culture bound: The Memory Keeper?

I'm at the beach reading a novel called "The Memory Keeper's Daughter" by Kim Edwards. I found it on the bookshelf in our rental house.

It's a beautifully, lyrically written book that reminds me of Virginia Woolf, but I am bothered by the way it imposes a "post 1980" sensibility on the years 1964 and 1965. (The book is divided into sections that represent different years: 1964, 1965, 1970, ending in 1989. I am just finishing the section "1965." The book was apparently published in 2005.)

Here is the plot in brief: The beautiful young wife of a doctor goes into labor on a snowy evening with their first baby. Because a heavy snowstorm is so unusual in Lexington, Kentucky, where they live, the medical clinic is deserted when they get there. The doctor calls his nurse, a 30 yesr-old "spinster" who is in love with him. She comes and helps deliver the baby. The wife is "gassed" at crucial moments, so goes in and out of consciousness.

The couple has twins rather than a single child. The first child to come out, their son, is perfectly typical, but the second, surprise child, a daughter, obviously has Down Syndrome. The doctor is horrified. His wife is unconscious. The doctor, wanting to spare his wife grief, quickly hands the baby girl over to his nurse with an address for a home for the "feebleminded" and tells her to drop the baby there. He then tells his wife, who is aware of having pushed out a second infant, that the baby girl died.

So far so good. The details are believable and vivid (though I imagine in 1964 the doctor and nurse would have seen nothing wrong in calling the baby a "mongoloid"). But here is where things begin to go awry. The young wife, starting in the clinic, wants to have had the chance to hold the "dead" baby. The author, thank the heavens, doesn't use the word "closure," but you know that's what the wife wants: closure. She feels cheated and upset that she didn't get to hold the baby and that there's no acknowledgement of the baby's death. She even goes as far, at the urging of her hippie sister, Bree, to put a notice in the paper advertising a memorial service for the dead baby. The existence of the "dead" baby also puts a rift in her relationship with her husband.

Ok. The wife is having a perfectly normal post-1980 response to a death. But I grew up in the 1960s, and this kind of response bears no relationship to anything I remember from that very different culture.

I remember two death incidences from my elementary school years. In the first, when I was in the fourth grade, my third grade friend Eileen--my other friend Aimee and I would walk home from school with her-- developed leukemia. We didn't know that leukemia was 100 percent fatal at that time and parents didn't tell us. We did know that Eileen was sick, because she had radiation treatments and her hair fell out. She would wear a light blue silk scarf, ala Jackie Kennedy, tied under her chin. She was a very sweet, cheerful girl.

Not long after the radiation ended, she died. We were a bit shocked. I heard from Aimee, whose family was close with Eileen's, that under advice from their doctor, the family was getting rid of any reminder of Eileen. They had another daughter and they were going to seal up the hole around Eileen by pretending she had never existed. This way they would not grieve. It seemed a bit sad to me that they would erase Eileen, but it made a certain amount of sense: Eileen couldn't come back and why should the family suffer?

The second instance was my classmate Richard's dog. His very cute Yorkshire terrier was a kind of class mascot, who'd been with us through fourth, fifth and finally sixth grade at our new school. He was so adorable that sometimes when he followed Richard to school, the teacher would let him run around the classroom for a few minutes before shooing him out.

In the sixth grade, the dog got run over by a car and killed. Our teacher informed us of this, along with the information that Richard, who was out of school for the day, was going with his parents immediately to get a replacement Yorkshire terrier who'd be "just like" the former dog. By having no gap between dogs, he wouldn't grieve. We were admonished to treat the new dog as if it were the old dog to "help" Richard. This was 1970. To my 11 year old mind, you couldn't just replace a dog, and other kids must have raised that question, because our teacher insisted all the more vehemently that dogs were indeed interchangeable. After a day, Richard wouldn't know the difference.

A larger cultural representation of this attitude was expressed in an original Star Trek episode. Captain Kirk is so stricken with grief over the death of a young woman that Spock offers him the ultimate 1960s mercy: a Vulcan mind meld that erases the memory. There's no sense at all that Kirk's grieving is healthy or necessary.

Of course, to our 21st-century sensibilities, these responses to death are shocking. At the time, they were presented as very modern, clinical, cutting edge, clean, rational and enlightened, a way to avoid wallowing in the morbid preoccupations of the death that characterized the past. Mourning was uncomfortable. It could be dispensed with by using logic and forethought.

We know now that you can't simply will grief out of your life. We can't just forget. Mourning, holding a dead baby, memorial services for dead babies and miscarried infants, public and family remembances of the departed, are cherished cultural ideals.

But in 1964? No. People soldiered on. Although this thing called the "1960s" was happening, especially from 1967 on, and women were wearing miniskirts and college students were protesting the war, none of this was more than superficial to the culture of the Baltimore suburb where I lived. We went on as we always had. Family secrets stayed in the closet. Avoiding shame was more important than finding closure. The 1960s women I knew would not have advertised the death of an infant because gossip and blame or pity would have been more likely than encouragement and support or empathy. (Remember "Diary of a Mad Housewife?" In this early 70s movie, the woman, after outlining her utterly barren and horrendous life, is excoriated by her "support group" for not being happy with a well-to-do husband, a Park Avenue apartment and two children.)

I wonder why imposing contemporary cultural norms on the past bothers me so much? I suppose on one level it's simply the falseness, the "that's not the way it happened" feeling. But I also think that by exploring how people used to respond, by going deeper than getting the superficial facts of car makes and clothing styles down, we learn more about ourselves. We learn that our attitudes and our responses are not necessarily universal or given. We understand that at different times and in different cultures, cultural norms we take for granted might not have been accepted or allowed. In a spiritual sense, we can learn gratitude for what we have that other's didn't, such as the ability to mourn openly, and can better evaluate what may seem eternal in our culture as perhaps very transitory.

What do you think?

web addicts

Hi everyone.

I picked up the passage below from Peggy, and it speaks my mind. I think most of us struggle with the balance between the Internet and the rest of life, which is why I'm (almost) glad when I sometimes go "dark." On the other hand, as Peggy says, the Web is a source of support and friendship. Here's Peggy:

Like Jamie (and so many others), there is a virtual community that lifts and supports me that stands in the gap of what does not exist in my face-to-face reality. I have learned that I need to be more restrained.

But I find that I am able to be more restrained as the sense of “starvation” abates … for I have been many years in a very desert kind of place, a dry land where there is little to refresh and nourish. For me, to have turned away from the oasis that the Holy Spirit has provided in my virtual community would only have hurt me more — like the traumatized one in shock who pushes away the hands of those come to help and heal.

These hands have lifted me up and brushed the sand from my face. I admit, in those early days, I was a bit like those who gulp the water in such a way as to splash more than is swallowed … and the starving who forget to take small bites and chew thoroughly.

But I’m recovering from that and the strength is seeping back into my weak limbs … and I can now do things in the physical realm because of the strength received from the virtual.

I too have had that sense of being spiritually starved and then nourished, through the grace of God, on the Web, and I felt moved by Peggy's words on that topic and her honesty. I think sometimes we can be open with others on the Web in a way we can't face to face, and that we can find spiritual friendships that are a blessing with people we otherwise would never have a chance to meet. I wonder if the best of the Web is a taste of what heaven will be like. But I do understand all too well how the computer can also pull us from real life. What do you think? I think we all struggle with the tension of the web versus "real life," but how do you handle it?

Wall-e

We saw the movie Wall-e. It's about a robot named Wall-e who's left behind on a trashed earth to clean things up. He falls in love with a robot probe who has come to see if there are any signs of life on earth so that humans who've gone on perpetual space holiday while the planet is cleaned can come home.

I will review the movie (probably) on "Roger and Diane on the movies," but in the meantime, I have to say the trash-piled earth depicted in the film made me cringe as we sort through our house before we move.

We had two metal file cabinets in good condition that we a. could not sell at our yard sale, b. could not get the Salvation Army to accept as a donation (they don't take office furnishings, they told me) and c. could not get the dump to accept for their free pick-up spot. The dump told Roger the file cabinets were not worth trying to give away. So we trashed them. And I think of the great piles of garbage in Wall-e ...

Somehow, this trashing seemed wrong to me. Did we not try hard enough to find a home for two perfectly good file cabinets? Should we have asked around more? How much time can one spend trying to find a place for every object one can't use? Did we really have to fill a landfill with perfectly good things? It bugs me that somewhere out there we could have met a need with those file cabinets. Aren't we meant to be good stewards of the planet's resources?

But we have so much stuff. We simply don't have time to try to place every piece in the right hands. I'm having a new gratitude for Goodwill and other charities that will actually accept many of our goods and try to get them to people who can use them.

And I still have trouble letting go of things, like my children's toys and books, because they are connected with memories. So I am struggling with attachment. I am afraid if I give up the things that trigger the memories, I will lose the memories too. This is not an idle fancy, as sorting through things has brought back all sorts of forgotten episodes.

Haste is again the culprit in all of this. We buy too much because we don't take the time to buy only what we need and we let it accumulate because we don't take the time to give it away.

I hope we don't end up in a Wall-e world that is totally obliterated by great mounds of trash, though I fear we're headed in that direction. Roger told me today that scientists have determined that the alkaline soil on Mars would be good for growing asparagus. I hope we don't see Mars, now that we've found it has water and arable soil, as a new place to despoil.

Is this a spiritual issue? I don't think clutter (within limits) is necessarily a sign of malaise or that a spotless home is a sign of spiritual health, but I believe the unease about so many goods going to waste points to a spiritual problem in our culture