Never Goes Away

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.  Proust

In my early days of grief, as I searched through books looking for answers into what had torn my life apart, I noticed that Rainer Maria Rilke and Washington Irving had different opinions.

Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, writes that we carry sadness around for too long instead of letting it pass. He says that sadness brings something new into our lives so we should let go of the sadness and pay attention to what is in the shadows waiting to be explored: “A stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.”

Proust and Grief's Memory

               Memory is a process, not a repository. Marcel Proust

The strength of memories is that they remind us who we were and how we made it to this point. As we work through our memories, we notice patterns of behavior. We also understand the murkiness of our past more clearly.

It’s helpful to sit with friends and retell the adventures of our lives, otherwise we forget the details, who else was there, and all the side stories. I also suspect that, over time, we tend to remember past events the way we want them to exist and not the way they were. People who were there can correct us. Idealized memories do not help us figure out the way ahead. Only the truth can do that.