Music and Cats

I’ve been trying for several months to write about my experience of Paul’s first battle with cancer: how it felt to be twenty-one and madly in love with a man who appeared to be dying; how my family history and psychological makeup affected my reaction to his illness; how I failed to find the psychological help that I needed, and was failed by those whose help I sought; how my pain and fear eventually led me to run, both emotionally and physically, from the one person in the world to whom I felt the closest.

I begin by writing about memories that are clear - people, places, events and sensations that I’ve revisited many times. As I venture past the boundaries of these well-worn memories, I run into huge, dark voids where nothing is clear. There is nothing, save for the awareness that horrible things happened. I resort to questioning Paul, attempting to mine his memories of those times as a path to my own. His memories are as fragmented as mine, have just as many dead ends.

Driving down the east side of the hill where I live, I am stopped by the flagman at a construction site. I sit impatiently for a moment, tapping my fingertips against the steering wheel, then turn to watch the earthwork. Yellow John Deere excavators crawl across the broken ground, scooping up massive shovels full of damp black soil, which they empty into waiting dump trucks. As the dirt tumbles into the truck, I catch glimpses of stone. Some are smooth, as if polished over years by a river; other are ragged chunks, shorn perhaps from a faraway mountain by the terrible weight and movement of a glacier. When the flagman waves me on, I drive slowly past the dump truck, watching for the next shovel of dirt to tip, waiting to see more exposed stones.

I arrive at my therapist’s office on the edge of the Mercer Slough, a wetland tributary to Lake Washington. The lake level has been high, so parts of the parking lot are flooded. I find a dry parking space, and run up the steps into the building.

I’ve been seeing Dr. F for several months. He has helped me climb out of the well of depression into which I tumbled following Paul’s recent cancer surgery. I look forward to the hours that I spend with this slight, silver-haired man in his quiet corner office. Settling into the soft brown leather chair by the windows, I tell him about the difficulties that I’m having with my writing, particularly with my memory.

“When you try to write, you’re coming up against your repression,” he says. He knows that I have a degree in psychology, and am no stranger to this concept. “Your mind is protecting you from memories of an extremely painful time in your life, when you thought Paul was dying.”

“I know I’m repressing,” I sigh. “I just don’t know how to get past it.”

“It’s normal for the mind to repress painful memories.” He sips his tea and continues. “When a memory is repressed only in the conscious mind, the subconscious memory can wreak havoc in your life. However, when a memory is completely repressed, it doesn’t tend to cause problems.”

“I want to write about that time. I want to understand what happened.” The frustration I’ve been feeling comes tumbling out. “If I can’t remember, how can I understand? How can I write? I want to know what’s different now - how I’m different, how my relationship with Paul is different.”

“If you really want access to those memories, we can work on them,” he says carefully. “But, if your mind lets you become conscious of the memories that you now recognize only as voids, you’ll have to deal with all the feelings that those memories evoke. You have to be prepared for how painful that process may be.”

This stops me short. I pause for a moment, thinking about the past year. “Are you suggesting that I not go looking for more pain right now? That I’m dealing with enough already? That ‘because I want to write about it’ isn’t a good enough reason - at least for now?”

He smiles slightly. “Did I say that?”

I smile back at him. The here-and-now of my life holds sufficient challenges. The past will wait, will still be there when and if I’m ready to go digging.

At the end of our hour, I walk out into a beautiful afternoon. Water stands, still and dark, over half of the parking lot. A female Mallard paddles slowly in the middle of the ersatz pond, quacking softly. Eight fuzzy gold and brown ducklings form a shifting pattern around her, their shrill voices responding to her call.

I stand for a minute, watching the duck family. Turning toward my car, I notice a long, narrow crack in the asphalt paving, running twenty feet along the edge of the water, only inches from my feet. The crack had not been here the previous week. As I watch, bubbles form along the crack and burst. The pavement has been damaged by the weight of the water. I imagine that, when the water recedes, workers will dig up this area of paving, repair the subsurface damage, and roll on fresh asphalt. If they are skilled, there will be no trace of the repair.

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