The Wound of Time

Abstract

A few years ago, my stepfather's garage had to be gutted. My mother's third husband, he lived in the same Orange County apartment they had shared before she died of stomach cancer more than a decade earlier. He had kept the apartment like a filthy hoarder shrine to her. What she owned stayed where she left it. A hairbrush with her hair nested loosely on its bristles sat on a glass shelf on their bathroom wall. Pictures of her family, her children, her first husband, still hung on the walls. Her old clothes hung on hangers in the closet. My stepfather kept none of this tidy. Instead, it was like he had tried to hold a moment still in time, and that moment was just slowly decomposing. Dust gathered. Mold grew. He was living in someone else's haunted house, a house full of her memories, and none of them were his own.Into their house she had brought a large collection of greeting cards, school projects, letters, photographs, home movies, and other souvenirs of our family. All of it ended up in their detached garage, stored in cardboard boxes and Tupperware storage bins. During one of the rainy seasons the garage roof developed a slow leak that sealed the garage door shut with swelling. My stepfather ignored it, but the landlord eventually caught on and gave him a week to clear the space for repairs. My brother pried open the door with a crowbar, pulled out whatever was salvageable, and hired a dumpster for the rest. Not knowing what to do with it all, he called me.I was living an hour's drive south in San Diego, but I told him to set everything aside for me. I wasn't eager to revisit my family's memories—the wounds from my mother's death still felt fresh, and I worried these mementos would rip them open again—but I felt that someone had to keep these souvenirs together. If my siblings or I ever forgot how our family had ended up where we did, these would help us tell the story.I made the trip to Orange County and picked up the boxes that had been saved and loaded them all into my car. It was enough to completely fill my sedan with trunk, backseat and passenger seat stacked to the ceiling. The drive home was long, with no view through my rearview mirror.There is a theory of hauntings that I like: The ghost is merely an echo of an instant, a trace of the past reverberating through time. What we feel, through bumpy chilled skin, is the reverberation of a moment energetic enough to warp space-time like gravity. The past rides forward on a dent to replay weakly and endlessly across time like a phantom. I like to believe my strongest emotions have such power. I like to believe they might break loose and even tear the fabric weave of time and stretch across past and future.I've recently been haunted by the past. Not even my past, just the past. The stories I grew up with and the stories I sought out of how my family came up and where they fell. The textures of triumphs and defeats, losses and celebrations, overlapping and looping and repeating, like an out of sync sample that blends into discordant ambient noise. Sometimes, it comes together. Sometimes, it's music.Lately, that echo of the past is loud, but it's just noise. Six months ago, I moved from California, where my first family last lived together, to Minnesota, where I was born. The people I loved and lost—my mother, my father, both of my grandfathers, and most recently, my maternal grandmother—were also born here, or lived here, or worked here, or all three. I don't remember ever living in this place before now. I was born in a hospital in Stillwater, Minnesota, a town of red brick buildings and church steeples along the St. Croix River at the eastern edge of the state. My first home was in the small town of Lake Elmo, not far from Stillwater. But the first home I remember living in was across the river in Wisconsin in the small town of Star Prairie. So even as I make a new life here for my new family—my two young daughters, my husband and I—it feels like I'm just a step away from walking into the past of my ancestors. I imagine that the streets, the parks, the buildings all resonate with their footsteps and with their voices. It's a past that I never actually saw myself, a vision of them I never actually witnessed.I didn't used to think I was this kind of person: Sentimental. Nostalgic. I used to pride myself on leaving what was behind behind. On moving on. I didn't keep mementos. I didn't dwell. It seemed a waste of energy. There is no past to return to, so longing for it goes unfulfilled. What I didn't consider until recently is that letting go isn't always an option. The past asserts itself into the present, and nostalgia consists of more than a mere fondness for memories.Originally, nostalgia meant homesickness, an aching not for the past, but for a place that felt like home. It was considered a life-threatening illness with serious physical manifestations: anxiety, lethargy, heart palpitations, lack of appetite, fever, and eventually, death. Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student at Basel, first coined the term in 1688 to describe a distinct kind of melancholy that afflicted Swiss mercenaries serving abroad. He described the condition as “The sad mood originating from the desire for return to one's native land, a continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibres of the middle brain in which the impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still cling.”The word comes from the Greek nostos for journey home, and algia, for pain. It's a construction similar to other medical terms like cephalgia (headache), myalgia (muscle pain), or neuralgia (nerve pain). These words are maps pointing out the location of the pain: It hurts here, with a big red arrow. Nostalgia, then, hurts in the journey home. We make that journey in our minds, again and again. We rehearse it and dwell in it to the point of ecstasy or insanity.Here are some of the things I found in my mom's old boxes:A cocktail napkin with New Year's resolutions for 1992 written by my mother, father, and aunt. Get famous and make enough money to get my own convertible. Get perfect. Get a chance to sing big time. Get a decent tan this summer. Stay crazy about Ed and life.Unsorted photographs and negatives of all sizes of my mother as a child, her siblings, her parents as children, my brother and sister and I as children, taken by my mother, my father, my grandfather, my great grandparents, and me.A school picture of my grandmother with a bright pink lipstick kiss mark.My father's memorial book, into which is tucked his suicide note, a lock of his hair, his death certificate, cards, letters and notes.Old clippings from my college newspaper journalism days.Dozens of standard audio cassette tapes with recordings of my siblings and me singing Christmas songs, mixtapes and dubbed recordings of music, a spoken letter from my mother to her best friend, radio shows when my mom worked as a DJ at a local station, radio shows when, years later, my mom and grandfather were promoting the book they wrote together.Letters to Santa.Receipts.Invoices for pest control.Letters to and from other family members and friends.VHS home videos made on the camcorder my dad bought for Christmas of 1988, all in rapidly deteriorating condition.The boxes filled what spare space I had in the tiny two-bedroom cottage I rented with my husband, so I immediately set to work organizing and condensing them. I started digging into the piles of paper, throwing out the garbage and sorting what was left. My hands and arms ended up coated in hives from the mold covering everything and the dust I was inhaling triggered my asthma. I managed to sort through everything anyway. Going through these papers, I felt like I was the recipient of an endless letter from the past, voices echoing from amongst all those thin and fading lines of ink, stuck in a conversation that I ultimately had no voice in because it involved a past that had already receded.Mementos from the past can play tricks on your sense of the present. Voices from letters and smiles in photographs come at you with such an immediate sense of the moment they were created they can overwhelm the present time. As I looked into those boxes for the first time, I felt swept away by all of those times and voices as they overlapped with my own. Time felt thick and heavy with too many layers. I spent hours that first time shuffling, pulling out letter after picture after card, and just sitting on my bed surrounded by the mess of all these memories. It felt ecstatic one moment, like being reunited with a person or time lost long ago, but inevitably I'd be pulled back into the present. That pulling back was devastating. At those moments, it was hard to breathe, even hard to move.My mom believed in living in the present and moving on. She believed you could shun negative thinking by force of will, it's just a matter of accepting that what's done is done. My father died when I was 10, my grandfather died when I was 14. I don't remember seeing her cry at either of the funerals, and I tried not to cry, too. I was proud of how quickly I was able to adapt to the fact that these important men in my life were gone for good, relegated to the inaccessible past. I couldn't go looking to them there, so I forced myself not to think about them. I patted myself on the back, thinking I was done with the past and ready for a brighter future.When it became clear that my mom wouldn't recover from the cancer that she had been fighting for two years, I thought it would be the same. My brother and sister, aunt and grandmother all laughed and joked with her in the hospital room while she was still conscious. When she lost consciousness, set adrift on a deep morphine sleep that took her, hopefully, to a painless death, we continued joking and laughing amongst ourselves. I'm not saying it was easy, for any of us, or that we didn't care. It wasn't, and we did. It's just that I thought it was my duty. She told us she wanted us to move on with our lives, so I tried. I thought it was something I was good at.But after all the years of thinking I was above being pulled back into the past, it seemed to come after me. I hadn't escaped grief, I had just put it off. It all came due like an overdue bill. My mother's death reopened all the old wounds, not just memories of her, but also fading memories of my father and my grandfather. I remember visiting my grandmother, my mother's mother, just a year after my mom passed away. She lived in the St. Croix River Valley in Wisconsin, in the house where my mother and her four siblings grew up. Reminders of my mom were everywhere. I found her senior yearbook tucked away in her old nightstand drawer with an inscription from my father: I think you'll do all right in that cruel thoughtless world. I think you'll get a lot of your wishes if you work for them because you're a very capable person. I went walking along the river to the old ferry landing on the St. Croix. It was late autumn and the leaves had mostly fallen from the trees, littering the narrow dirt path and releasing a sweet smell of decay into the air. I was within walking distance of where my father grew up with four siblings of his own. He spent his childhood exploring the river and the woods surrounding their farm. As I walked alongside the river, taking in a landscape that has probably looked the same for centuries, I felt like I was pulled out of the present. I hadn't meant to think about my dad, but here I was retracing footsteps he had taken decades ago, as if it had been no time at all. When I returned to my grandmother's house, I almost expected to find my mother and her siblings crowded around their tiny black-and-white television set or playing badminton on the lawn. Only my grandmother greeted me at the front door, and I felt a jolt of homesickness for a time that was never even mine.Hofer provided a name for nostalgia and was the first to categorize it as a pathological condition, but the concept was older than that. The Swiss at this time were thought to be more disposed in general to homesickness, or mal du Suisse, than anyone. Many young Swiss men worked as mercenaries in foreign armies. The young men, far from home, became sick with missing their home. It was so bad that a particular kind of music, the Kuhrehein—a traditional, simple melody played on the horn by Alpine cattle herdsmen—was banned from their camps because of the severe nostalgia it would produce. The music was thought to lead to nostalgia severe enough to cause desertion, illness, even death. There wasn't a single Kuhreihen, but many regional variations that would have been recognizable to lifelong listeners.In his book Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease, Helmut Illbruck argues that it was this distinctiveness of the song that made it so haunting and alienating: “The nostalgia of the Swiss is essentially a nostalgia for particularity, a particularity so singular that it cannot be replaced or reproduced elsewhere, a nostalgia for the distinctive thusness of the original sound, for the alphorn he first heard on the hilltop of his youth. In that sense, indeed, the nostalgic mountaineer cannot hear the sound of the Kuhreihen he longs for even when he seemingly does. Whatever he can hear, when abroad, is a copy or a weak substitute for the real thing.”The song, heard elsewhere, was enough to recall home, but the difference between one's own Kuhreihen and the one heard abroad only reinforced the distance.A song can be a Kuhreihen. A smell. The way the light comes through your window on a cloudy morning. The first breath of warm Santa Ana wind on an October evening in Southern California. The color of the sky on a sunny winter day. The smell of lilacs are my Kuhreihen for a summer day I spent at my maternal grandmother's house in Wisconsin. I was visiting from California, either 12 or 13 years old, swinging in a porch swing while sipping a cold drink. The lilacs were blooming just behind me, the house was a crisp white, cicadas were buzzing in the trees. The porch was a pocket of cool on a hot summer day, and in the swing I was weightless, supported and safe. Lilacs don't bloom in Southern California, so for years the only time I would smell this memory was when someone walked by me wearing lilac perfume.Then I moved to Portland. That first spring there, lilacs were everywhere, and the smell of them and of that summer day in my childhood was everywhere too. I collected flowering branches by the armful and filled my house. My grandmother was alive back then, so the smell made me happy, made me think of her and look forward to the next time I would talk to her, or the next time I would visit her Wisconsin home.I moved back to Southern California after four years in Portland, and I spent two more years there before this most recent move to Minnesota. My grandmother, meanwhile, developed dementia, and her condition rapidly deteriorated. She was moved to a nursing home outside of Orlando.I visited her there for three days the January before I moved. The nursing home stunk of human urine. Patients were brought out into the hallways in their wheelchairs and left there, lined up back-to-front, so that the view for most was of the back of the chair of the person in front of them. The staff was inattentive, and my grandma developed terrible bedsores from not being moved frequently enough, and painful rashes from not being changed out of her diapers as soon as needed. It was a terrible place to spend the last months of her life.I brought adult coloring books and colored pencils, and CDs I found in a thrift store, music that my aunt remembered her liking. My aunt and I sat and colored and talked about the past to a soundtrack of Simon and Garfunkel, Dixie Chicks and Enya. We showed my grandmother our pictures as we worked, like we were children showing off kindergarten crafts, and she brightened. I asked my aunt to tell me stories about my mother and her growing up on their Wisconsin farm, and my grandmother's eyes followed us as we spoke. She knew.The dementia had progressed quickly, and by the time I came, she had lost most of her ability to speak or feed herself. I had thought of dementia as a condition of missing memory, but being there with her, it seemed like memory was all she had left. Her cognitive processing was very much in decline, her recall and short-term memory seemed to be almost completely gone. She wasn't very much there with us, in the present, but she was all in the past. Thinking about it after she passed, it was like she was floating on a sea of nostalgia, too busy returning home to cope with the needs of the present.She died less than a month after my visit, just hours after being moved into a nicer hospice facility. My family had a memorial in California and two weeks later I moved to Minnesota. The lilacs started blooming just after our arrival, and their smell was everywhere. For the first time, I didn't welcome their fragrance or the memories it brought. It brought to my mind the most recent memories of my grandma, and the memory of the smell of that time—the old stale urine of the residents of her nursing facility—came back to me as well. They were two competing Kuhreihens, in discord with one another.Illbruck describes one of Hofer's case studies, a fellow student studying at Basel: He suffered from dejection, developed a continuous fever and other symptoms suggesting imminent death. When the attending apothecary discovered the student was suffering from homesickness, he advised that the student be sent home in a litter, even though death appeared so close. Not unlike Odysseus, who only upon approaching Ithaca is able ‘at last’ to sleep ‘serene, his long-tired mind at rest,’ the student's anticipation of being returned home soon seemed to affect an instant and quite miraculous change already: being on the road for only a few miles already soothed his pain, and even before arriving in Bern he had completely recovered.Hofer was himself a student. At the time of his dissertation, he was only 19 years old. I wonder, was he far from home too? Was his interest in this newly identified disease a reflection of his own homesickness? Were his studies a way to distance himself from his own melancholy? I can't find much information on Hofer himself, but I like to think that the term he invented reveals as much about him as it does his patients.Hofer believed nostalgia to be primarily a dysfunction of the imagination. The weakening of the body in the worst cases is due to an excess of imaginative strength—imagination so caught up retracing the lines of familiar memories that the brain is unable to perform its other life-sustaining duties. “In truth,” Hofer wrote, “where the animal spirits are regenerated in niggardly supply, and at the same time are devoured on account of the continuous quasi-ecstasy of the mind in the brain, and by degrees partly the voluntary motions and partly the natural, grow quiet, languor of the whole arises.” To suffer nostalgia is to be held captive, in thrall, to our memory, to the exclusion of all else.The nostalgic suffers, but it is a delicious suffering, a kind of addiction, to bring the past and the lost home to life in one's mind again, and again, and again. That's the danger—eventually, we prefer that imagined past to the present.Home is a wound that never heals. I've never stayed in one place long enough for any feeling of permanence to set in, and each time I move, it's like ripping a scab and letting the blood flow again. I've moved 18 times. I have to count on my fingers to remember, and then I run out of fingers. Wisconsin to Michigan to California to Oregon to California to Minnesota, city to city, apartment to apartment, neighborhood to neighborhood. The reasons for the moves can tell the story of my life: father gets a new job, then father dies. Mother remarries, then gets divorced. Move to start college, move in with boyfriend, get married and move for grad school. Move back after graduating, move again because two children need more space that I can afford where I am.There aren't any constants, aside from the things that we packed up and brought with us from place to place. There were pictures that went up on the walls of every house I ever lived in with my family. There was furniture we kept, boxes of mementos that grew and grew. In the homes I've made with my husband, there is a collection of Ikea furniture that we've broken down and reassembled too many times in different configurations in different spaces. There's an old leather couch that we bought at an antique store when we moved into our first apartment together. There are some pictures we keep on the wall, the same books, the same DVDs, the same records. They all combine to create spaces that look recognizably home-ish, whether they're in Portland, San Diego or Minneapolis. Close enough in their various configurations that I can forget, for a moment, where I am, that I can be transported to another time and place and think, for a moment, that I can walk out my front door and find my old favorite coffee shop in my old town just a short walk away. Sometimes I dwell in the memory long enough that it feels cozy, then I snap back to the present feeling dislocated and confused. It's never a pleasant experience in the end.A ghost is a wound on time. A tear stretching backwards and forwards into the past and future like a pebble dropped on the surface of water spreading waves of concentric ripples in all directions.Wounds aren't all bad. They are merely openings, breaks, holes that let in what is otherwise kept out. The wound can be a reminder, a lesson, a map of the road that brought you where you are, a map of the road home. There are wounds everywhere. Sometimes, you can enter them and dwell inside them for a while. Nostalgia is the state of dwelling inside the wound of the past. Living in nostalgia is living in a house haunted by the ghosts of your own history.I like to watch ghost hunting shows. I know they're staged and edited, but I like the idea of them. The hosts, calling themselves “paranormal investigators,” find the places where wounded souls dwell, or the places where souls wound time and space itself, and they stay there. They seek out abandoned sanitariums or hospitals or prisons and they lay on the beds of prisoners and patients and let the weight of years press down on them. They yell challenges to shadows in dark rooms. They conduct hi-tech seances with elaborate equipment that seems to work along the lines of a Ouija board by giving ghosts the tools for intelligent conversation.I love watching the hosts get scared. I love when they try to heal troubled spirits through communication, ritual, or smudging with smoke. I love the most when they offer their theories about the cause of these hauntings, even when (especially when) their theories contradict one another. The hosts, along with scholars and investigators in the paranormal community as a whole, appeal to (and misapply): Einstein's work on the conservation of energy and mass, the Bible, New Age spirituality, Native American beliefs, Voodoo, quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpretation, the multiverse theory, the holographic theory of the universe. I will entertain any theory, and I'm not too concerned with whether they're true or not. What I appreciate is the creativity of this community in grappling with rational explanations for an irrational, but universal, truth: the past has a weight and a mass in the present. This work they do, with their EVP readings and ghost photography and spirit box-mediated seances, is very important work if it can remind the rest of us of this truth.One of the theories the ghost hunters frequently mention is the Stone Tape Theory. It goes like this: hauntings are like tape recordings. Strong emotions can impress themselves on rocks, dirt, personal belongings, the air, trees, water. The recording can be played back—the emotions and sensations and sounds and sights of the instigating event echoing forward through time. In The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837), the mathematician Charles Babbage claimed: The pulsations of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to exist with the sounds to which they gave rise. Strong and audible as they may be in the immediate neighborhood of the speaker, and at the immediate moment of utterance, their quickly attenuated force soon becomes inaudible to human ears. The motions they have impressed on the particles of one portion of our atmosphere, are communicated to constantly increasing numbers.The physics and psychical researcher Eleanor Sidgwick suggested the idea of “place-memory”—the theory that the locations or objects themselves stored residue from events. The theory has been picked up and elaborated upon for the past couple of centuries by paranormal researchers, psychics, physicists, geologists, and many others. Its enduring popularity most likely comes from its ability to explain almost any supposed haunting or “manifestation” of a paranormal nature with language that seems scientific.As far as I'm concerned, I don't need the science. I can pick up almost any item in one of my mom's boxes and hear the echo of the past play itself back like a recording. I can hear the tape unspool in my mind. Does it matter whether it's in my imagination? Does that make it any less true?We moved to Minnesota so that we could make a home for ourselves that would stay. We hope to buy the home here that we couldn't have afforded in California. We want to put the furniture back together once more and leave it. We want to put the pictures on the wall and leave them so long that their outlines form on the wall. We want a closet or attic where our junk can just accumulate over decades until someone, one of my daughters, perhaps, or maybe even their children, brings them out again, and lets the years stored in my old belongings play out like a tape recording. I want the years to layer one on top of the other in the same place. I want my children to have a feeling of what home is that doesn't feel like a wound, that comforts them instead.Soon after arriving in Minneapolis, we drove across the St Croix River to Wisconsin to visit my living grandmother, my father's mother. She still lived in the house that my father grew up in, in the same town that my mother lived with her family, where the two of them met and fell in love.My other grandmother's house was just a little way down the road, off the main highway. My uncles sold the house the year before she died. It was a large farmhouse built in 1900 on 41 acres of land, painted a creamy white and set back from the road along a long gravel driveway. My grandma and grandpa bought it when they were young, when my mother was just a small child. Grandpa worked as a copy writer in the cities and he commuted each day. There was a wooded area behind the house with the remains of an old dump. I liked to dig through the junk and pull out antique bottles and cans. Down under the woods, near the driveway, there were wild raspberries every summer. One summer a black bear found the berries and we had to watch for him when we stuffed ourselves with the fruit. There was an old barn in faded red paint with the floor caving in and gaps between the pine panels allowing sunlight to stream through in narrow beams that lit up the dusty air in luminous shafts.The house itself was always well-kept. Bright and welcoming. My grandma mixed patterned wallpaper with brightly colored baseboards, hung black and white pictures of our ancestors all over the walls, placed chairs and end tables in corners of the rooms so that there was always a place to cozy up with a book. There was a library full of antique and rare books that I loved looking through. After my family moved to California, we would visit in the summers. She had converted her grown children's rooms to comfortable guest rooms. Tiny tree frogs climbed up the side of the house and pasted their wet abdomens to the upstairs windows of the room I stayed in. I liked to tap their bellies through the glass.When I try to imagine what home should feel like, I think of this place.No one I know lives in that house anymore. On my way to my other grandma's house, I pulled off the highway to the start of the driveway. The house is now painted a dark purple. The barn has been pulled down. Only the concrete silo remains, and stands alone now, isolated and out of place.I have one memory of the first home I lived in: a mobile home in Lake Elmo, Minnesota. I was very young. My mother and father were arguing, and my father threw an orange electric typewriter at her. It missed and hit the wall. It's probably my earliest memory, and it lacks context in the way that childhood memories sometimes can, but what I do remember is precise. I remember the precise sound of the typewriter hitting the wall, which can't be described other than to say it's the precise sound of a heavy metal object colliding against the flimsy faux-wood paneling on the walls of a small mobile home in a depressed rural community.I found and scanned a series of tiny 126 negatives in my mother's boxes that contained pictures of my older sister in the house, before I was born. The wood paneling—brown with a subtle greenish undertone—matches my memory. Other details fill in the blank: the mottled shag carpet in various shades of brown, the olive-green curtains over small windows, the wood and brown Herculon plaid sofa in the living room with matching lamp and ottoman. In the pictures, my sister, maybe one at the time, sits in the crook of my father's arm while he reads the newspaper. She's facing the camera and smiling. Or she sits at a plastic brown highchair in the brown paneled kitchen on a brown linoleum tiled floor. Or they smile at each other, my father and my sister, as he crouches low o