Forgetting Life but Remembering to Live

Essay. A run-in with an existential fear.

I live in fear of forgetting my life. This fear is both reasonable and irrational. It may well happen, but would happen outside of my contol, and likely outside of my knowledge. It does not wake me at night but besets me with pangs of worry during warm and intimate moments I share with the precious people in my life. What if these moments disappear? I think about it sometimes and, after, latch onto the minutes in the present with frantic possessiveness.

I am thinking about it now. A conversation at a bar prompts my thoughts. The bar is full. It is a rectangular affair that can seat sixty people. It is me and my dog at the edge, by the servers’ station. I come for chicken wings and calamari and to stare at the boats in the marina on the other side of the bar. The dog comes for the petting he garners and nibbles that people sneak him, thinking I can’t see.

Every seat is full for the happy hour. That’s how it works in Key West. The locals swarm for the half-priced drinks and food, and the tourists wander in by luck and grab a seat at the bar or a table in the long wings of the restaurant.

“Do you come here often?” a woman asks and laughs. She is to my right. White hair in a professional bob, a fashionable sweater with sleeves pulled up to her elbows, and jewelry on her wrists and fingers. The fingers are knotted from age. The forearms are thin and covered in sunspots burned-in over decades in the tropics. Her face is thin, the classic lines of a beauty, once and still, but now under a mesh of thin lines.

She is with a companion, who is her daughter. I overheard their chatter. The daughter is in her sixties, but it is a guess, and I could be aiming low. I compute where it may place her mother. She is in her eighties, at least. And, while middle-aged, I have lived only half her life.

The mother is giggling. She raises her glass of white wine. She has seen me before, she says. But that’s not true. It is my dog that people remember. They recognize the distinguished pooch and make an allowance for me. That’s fine. My dog gets me local discounts.

She asks me where I am from. How long am I here. She is excited about sailing. Declares me a local. Our banter is easy. I must lean towards her when she talks. Her voice is soft with the weakness of age. Yet, her speech is eloquent and clear, with the strength of an active intellect.

“How long did you live in Key West?” I ask in a break in her questions.

“At least forty-eight years. I came for the warmth and stayed for the ocean.” She is from Kansas City, where neither the cold nor the culture were a fit.

“What did you do here?”

She is about to speak, then she stops. She lifts her glass, looks at the ceiling, at the hundreds of nautical flags suspended from it, takes a sip of her wine. “It will come to me. I don’t always remember. But it will come to me.”

I am at a loss. I feel a rise of my existential fear, but it is only me. She smiles, drinks her wine, then points to the TV and the football game. “These athletes are amazing. They are so much faster now,” she says.

“You always watched football?”

“With my husband, he was a fan. He liked his team,” she sighs. The sigh is mournful, lonesome. “He liked the team; I liked the players,” she laughs now, then calls out the names of her favorites. They don’t mean anything to me.

“Kansas City Chiefs?” I ask.

“I am not sure…” she says. She stops and thinks, “I think it was a cleaning business. I started a cleaning business…” She flags the bartender, “Abby, two more,” and the glasses are full again, hers and her daughter’s. She sips her wine. “Yes, a cleaning business.” She turns to her daughter, but the daughter is chatting with a neighbor two seats away. The mother calls her name, then again, and asks how long she has had the cleaning business. The daughter half turns, “Two years. Then you…” the daughter’s attention is called away.

“Yes, I had another business… It will come to me.”

“Some people say Key West becomes too small after a while?” I say.

“Any place becomes too small when you stop looking for something new in it. People always have something new to say if you listen. And new places. They open and close. I go with my husband. We see what’s new and go there. Always something to do.”

I notice the mixing of tenses: the talk of the husband in the past, then the talk of him in the present. I discard such incongruities in the course of normal chats. Now, I wonder if the husband’s existence is a mutable fact. Has he passed away, or is he sitting at home watching a game? I want to ask but I don’t.

I fear inflicting a wound, and I frantically look for a question to bring our chat into the present, into what is around us, where there is no risk of a memory gap. I can’t find it, so I sit and I think. What would I want if I were in her seat and she in mine?

I cannot know the answer. I forget my keys. I cannot recall the precise verbs I need for my sentences. It happens more often with each birthday. But I do not yet know how it feels to discover a gap that defined a vital part of my life. Such as a job. But what if a job or a business are only placeholders to get us through the day and onto important things? Of course, we don’t treat them as such. We elevate them, allow them to displace much else. But maybe she knows better and can afford to forget.

If only so. What we remember or forget is likely an accident of physiology, a random decomposition of neural networks. We can’t choose to only forget trivialities or regrets.

“Where are you sailing next?” She asks.

“Guatemala or Panama. It depends on how plans develop over the next three months that we are in Key West.”

“Oh, how fun. I always wanted to go to Latin America. Maybe I have,” she laughs and shrugs her shoulders.

I soon get my check and say my goodbyes. Later, it is hard to fall asleep. I wonder if I have it wrong.

I believed life to be a collection of moments stacked in a sequence. Each moment is stamped into memory by the power of emotions and, less often, by the power of thoughts. And that’s all we have. As age chisels away our acuity, it shreds the core memories, shrinking what was our life. Shrinking who we are. But is it so?

She seems happy. She is talking to strangers. She is finding newness in her days. The vitality of her speech, her observations, her humor speak of a rich life. She remembers the bartender’s names, and they remember hers. Maybe one can forget the past but remember to live in the now. And, maybe, that will be enough?

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