“Oh yeah, one of my first memories,” she says at a dinner with her adult children, “Opa was what they called ‘manic depressive’ back then, and a ‘morphinist.’ At that time they sold the morphine in a glass vial and you needed these tiny little saws to open them. As a 4-year-old, I loved playing with those saws.” She can see herself kneeling at the low teak table, asking her father whether she can saw one of those cool little vials for him.

Next day, coffee with her sister-in-law. “People used to say I was so much like my father,” she says. “My father was a painter, and a wise, compassionate man, and his creativity was like,” she searches for a word, “like fireworks.”

In her heart, she knows there’s other ways of telling the story, of remembering. Her memory has many dimensions.

“She” is I, but – let’s not go there. Not yet.

Dimension #1

Six when the first suicide happens – Walter. His death is mixed up with the memory of a kitten his wife brought home when she lived with us. Soft, small, vulnerable, fascinating with its tiny paws and velvet nose. One day it disappears. The memory of knocking on dozens of doors, never finding the little cat, occupies a small town in her mind, Walter's death only a city block. One, two, three, four suicides later – well, some people die of old age, some by suicide. Normal.

Dimension #2

A Christmas memory. ’62. She and her little sister at their aunt's in the Alps, snow sky-high. (She needs a name. How about Maria?) Icicles and a warm fireplace in the house that was a converted 19th-century barn. Waiting for their mother who was going to join them but wanted to spend one more evening with her husband at what they called the ‘nerve clinic.’ When she finally tears herself away, the snow storm has already started. She doesn’t join her two daughters until past midnight.

The story Maria thinks she remembers hearing is that that was when her father stopped the morphine for good. And started drinking like a fish.

Dimension #3

Coming home from school to that huge apartment, unheated in the winter most of the time, with her father in bed, always in bed, is – later she says, “well, sometimes it wasn’t easy.”

His manic depression.

Maria feels lonely in that big, cold, place. She sits in her father’s chair and talks for hours to her best friend on the heavy black rotary phone. Often around four her father comes out of the bedroom, dressed in pyjamas and a bathrobe, and they play a game of cards. He is a funny, wise man. Her mother comes home hours later, makes dinner, heats the place.

They are still heating with coal. It comes from the cellar, four long stories down, often carried by little hands.

Dimension #4

An awkward teenager with big teeth, big ears, and long braids. In a thin fog of dreams about horses. Gnawing anxiety. Maria is not sure whether she made up a story about an attempted suicide or whether it really happened.

No, that’s wrong. Today she is quite sure that she made it up. But it felt so real then … ?

The memories of visiting her father at the hospital are nice. He had barely escaped death from severe liver damage. Too much booze, too much forgetting to let air into the little art chamber full of paint fumes. But what a beautiful summer, so bright and warm, some of it out in the country with the reassuring smell and sound of cows, some of it in the hospital, quiet and bright and healing.

Dimension #5

Some of the teenage awkwardness is coming loose. As it begins to detach, a bike ride into the woods. Sometimes the man (does he need a name?) follows her, sometimes Maria follows him. He is much, much, much, much older than her, at least eight years. Electricity between them as they climb a deer lookout together. Later, by the gravel pit, she sits on a log and he behind her. Her heart pounds as he put his hands between her thighs and fondles the soft flesh of her labia. Confusion thickens. She forgets everything she read in the sex magazine.

Later she learns that those years were called the “sexual revolution.”

Dimension #6

Maria loves her parents. They have a great relationship.

She moves out the first time at seventeen. London. Cold. Unwelcoming. She takes a plane home, her boyfriend greets her, and she gets pregnant that night.

Dimension #7

She moves out for good at eighteen. Her child, the Beautiful Child, a few months old.

That there was this inchoate sense that she doesn’t want to bring up the Beautiful Child in her parents’ place is not a story she tells much. A private memory.

Dimension #8

Maria and the Beautiful Child move continents.

She suffers from migraines, just like her father did. Family lore has it that’s how he got into morphine. She has an almost insurmountable resistance to even a bit of Tylenol.

In her journal, she describes herself as a toad sitting in a deep well. “Sometimes,” she writes, “I manage to come up and sit at the rim.” She doesn’t know whether she remembers at that time the summer of ’75 two years before, marked by barefooted, sunny euphoria.

Her friends smoke a lot of marijuana, grown by the hectares in the lush tropics of Southamericaland. She smokes very little. Something about it … she just doesn’t enjoy it as much as they do.

She likes to eat.

She really likes to eat.

Dimension #9

1982. Maria and the Beautiful Child live on Turtle Island now. She has married Man X. She is pregnant. Her memories? Mostly nostalgia for Southamericaland, and spiky splinters of memories that recall guilt and abandonment. She does not follow the nostalgia. She goes out of her way to avoid the splinters. She forgets to pray.

Dimension #10

Man X produces memories, fast and furious. Some of them she delights in to this day. He builds a huge wooden sculpture on the front lawn in one afternoon.

But many of those memories hurt.

Man X pushes and pulls. He shares with her a memory of when he hurt the Beautiful Child. She cannot hear the memory, only Man X pulling her into his presence with the confession. She is grateful: for that moment, she does not have to remember abandonment. (And what’s there to remember? She wasn’t an orphan or anything like that.) She forgives him, forgetting that it is not for her to forgive.

Dimension #11

For thirty-six hours Maria remember she is her own woman.

Then she remembers a promise: If we have a child together, Man X had bargained, I will keep it. She remembers the agreement, cobbled together by twisted memories. They now have a child together, the Wild Child. She remembers: better not be my own woman.

She eats.

Dimension #12

For nine months out of the seven years they have now been together, Maria and Man X do not fight. She forgets the hurt. She forgets she had forgotten to be her own woman.

Dimension #13

She goes on a journey and dreams. She goes on another journey and dreams more. She remembers one pushing-pulling too many. She remembers Man X’s story of hurting the Beautiful Child. A part of her wakes up and sees what it means. She remembers to ask the Beautiful Child about it. The Beautiful Child pours out one memory after the other. She remembers she should have known. But she had twisted and shoved and draped the memory. Now she remembers. She asks for forgiveness. She remembers not to let Man X back into the house.

Dimension #14

Maria remembers it is her task to protect her children. She has only vague memories of how that is done. She tries. She learns how to make new child protection memories.

Dimension #15

She writes down what she remembers of her relationships with men. She looks at those memories. She connects the memories to the present and to the future.

She eats a lot.

Dimension #16

Maria realizes there is something she needs to remember. Something from when she was a child. Something not good. She does not know what it is but she is learning to trust her dreams and the strange flashes of lightning electrifying her body when she perceives a “perhaps …”

She can’t get herself to say the words “I had a happy childhood.”

Dimension #17

She meets the Good Man. They become parents of the Delicate Child. She remembers her shortcomings as a mother of the Beautiful Child and the Wild Child. She presses on, making new memories, good and bad. The bad ones aren’t as bad as the ones before.

Dimension #18

Maria goes for a walk and feels her muscles, throat, back, legs. She remembers how all her life she has had this need to walk, to let an energy flow through that otherwise gets stuck too easily and makes her brain, soul and body race. The memory that this could have a name is in the future yet. Much later, she will call it “the manic dog.”

Dimension #19

She has a headache. She remembers to take a painkiller. Just a Tylenol.

She looks at the food she eats and remembers her father. She allows a connection. His wine, her potatoes.

One winter, the only thing that gives her joy is shovelling snow. She remembers the manic dog, and her father’s “manic depression.” Her memory makes another connection.

###

I am Maria.

I allow the memory of my father hiding in his bed. I allow the memory of being a toad in a deep well, allow my euphoria and my father’s firework creativity.

I allow all the memories and learn to weave connections between them and the present, allow them to be alive and sprout meaning. I pray again.