We are each a walking memorial

Heading toward another US Memorial Day, I think of service members lost, all the individual lives that get further lost when they’re added into some awful, anonymous, overly abundant number.

About 655,000 lost in the Civil War. 116,516 in World War I and 405,399 in World War II. 36,574 in the Korean War. 58,220 in Vietnam. 294 in the Gulf War. 2,432 in Afghanistan. 4,576 in Iraq. Numbers vary by source, but you get the idea.

These are the US military lives extinguished, the numbers are magnitudes bigger when you tally up all the beings gone through war globally.

Right now more than 110 reported armed conflicts are scattered around our planet as I write and you read.

Totalling the deaths, paying attention to the terrible numbers, serves a purpose, mostly to remind us of what we trade—someone else’s life, many others’ lives—so we can go on living, not so much in peace, but in possibility.

The only way to fully understand the value of this ‘trade deal’ is by remembering at the level of the person and the personal. You and I both know individuals, by name, who didn’t come home from war.

Part of grief’s purpose is to confirm that, even on a planet with more than 8 billion humans, each life holds meaning. Who we think we are is always shaped by the others whose lives flow into ours.

We carry each other’s stories, which become our own. Storytelling, then, is as essential as breath.

For a soundtrack as you read, here’s Sarah Bhalla playing ▸ Harp in a Redwood Tree, literally.

From my journal | May 19, 2025

How do we remember ourselves?

Slicing red peppers and slipping salmon into a bowl with olive oil and coconut aminos to marinate, I’m listening to one of my favorite writers, Maggie Smith, in an online writing workshop. She’s challenging attendees to write for 5 minutes around the prompt, “I remember….”

I’ve taught writing, too, and this prompt is one of the oldest in the book as well as one of the best for opening the emotive as well as the logical self.

Setting down the paring knife, I go grab my journal and pencil, and play along.

Seven quick ‘I remembers’ scrawled before she calls time. Fragments, tiny memorials to be explored. I’ll be playing with these all week.

From my journal | May 20, 2025 (three memories)

Years ago I slept under a friend’s coffee table, only a few nights in her tiny home.

Lying there, awaiting sleep in the moonlit darkness, I discovered a little heart carved in the raw under-wood, a pair of initials, filigree of leaves, and what looked like a racoon paw print, though it may have been a petite human hand, crudely etched.

Those nights I dreamt of unfamiliar people, wild-gossamer sagas about how they came to dig that heart into the wood’s hard grain. Once, there was a raccoon with an Exacto-knife, wordless and heartbroken, hewing her story about unrequited love into a bare patch on a felled tree.

Waking in the wee hours, wanting water, and wondering what’s real in a world where coffee tables know secrets, I noted how the moon had moved each night, shifting the images and initials into deepening shadows, then out of sight.

I never told my friend about the carvings, or the mind-movies that played in my sleep. The table was a witness, and we had an unspoken pact. She eventually sold it at a garage sale. I’m another story it will never tell.

Have you ever looked at a picture so many times that you don’t need it right in front of you to see it, to feel what it means?

An image comes to me of my mother wearing a sombrero, sitting on a stone donkey outside our Ensenada motel in Mexico. Still young, she’s smiling as my father takes the photo of us. I’m beside her on a smaller donkey, my front tooth freshly missing, my sombrero so big I’m tilting my head back to look out from under it.

Film was precious and pricey then, so we held our smiles, frozen grins, waiting for the flashbulb. Two of her children were already in graves, her own childhood a grave of abuse buried deeply.

Forever in that photo she is smiling. If you saw only this picture, you would think she was happy.

An anniversary several years ago, when big fires ravaged to the north, east, and south of us.

We sat in the corner window of a coastal restaurant, looking west, out beyond Moonstone Beach, to vast ocean and vaster sky.

Magenta, crimson, surreal orange—such a clash of colors—then purple-black deepening at the horizon where salt water and sooty air met.

Why do we tend to look far? What were we seeking out there?

My eyes, curious, wanting here, looked down and peered into the Little River, which moves its mouth up and down the beach from year-to-year.

That August it flowed just below us. Tide coming in, the Pacific pushed itself upstream.

“Look,” I said, surprised by my own voice, “the water is on fire!” My husband’s eyes followed mine.

The strange way sunlight fell, murky and muted, on the convergence of stream and sea, two currents pushing in opposite directions, created hundreds of little waves on Little River’s surface.

Each crest and ripple was a flame, flashing and flickering, blazing and buoyant. Light and water, conspiring.

In stunned silence, my husband and I shared this bit of organic alchemy, this earthly art created from tragedy unfolding elsewhere.

Then, as if this magic weren’t enough, the faces of two Harbor seals bobbed up, gazing at us, their eyes firey-bright, their foreheads shiny-dark, streaked with rivulets of red and amber, their long whiskers dripping sparks.

I wondered then, as I do now, Could we ever look that beautiful?

From my journal | May 21, 2025

Reading through my journal this morning, I notice something.

I remember the secret of a certain table. I remember my mother riding a stone donkey, and what her smile held. I remember a magical moment of fire and light and water.

But. This question still lingering …

How do we remember ourselves?

How do I remember myself?

Each of us as a single, sovereign being?

Looking for an old document backed up in cloud-land, surprise, an old CV (Curriculum Vitae) and three resumes. Back then, approaching mid-career, I’d listed literary accomplishments among my working skills and knowledge.

Reading these old docs is as if reading about someone else. So much about the earlier versions of me lost in layers of time.

There was the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, specifically poetry, which included publication in an annual journal and a $5,000 award. That was a big deal to me. Still is.

There was the William Stafford Poetry Award and the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Prize.

Also forgotten is how I’d been honored as the Wise Woman of the Year by a local YWCA, then presented with a Nonprofit Entrepreneur Award by a regional business journal. My mother and father, so proud.

That woman seems more like a distant destination than a person. How did I get from there to here?

Opening the square annual journal of the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts from 2000, there’s a blurb where I was asked to write about why I write.

As I read the first line, the distance from her to here dissolves.

“I write to celebrate and explore the experience of being alive.”

Each of us changes, evolves, adapts, adding loss after loss, letting go of some dreams, always in the simultaneous process of being and becoming more of who we are.

Yet, there is always an invisible thread, constant and unchanging, woven through every moment of your existence, that is the immutable core of the one-and-only you.

From my journal | May 22, 2025

I open my laptop, and go the the North Coast Journal, typing my name in the search bar. Upcomes the list of my poems published there between 2009 and 2014.

A twinge of disappointment. More than 10 years since I’ve submitted anything to that regional journal.

A few big jobs, career-topping opportunities, long hours, weary brain, yes, still scribbling in the notebook most days, but never the time to create a finished something and send it out to live on its own in the world. At least, not until the pandemic and the writing of my second book, Grieving Us.

I look through the poems on the site. First one, from 2009, seems as relevant today as it was then, though against the current geo-political backdrop, what the poem proposes seems harder to achieve:

Returning

We can go back to that place,
let's believe in it, where ferns drip
and the little winter wrens drink then sing.
Our hands will be warm and clasped together,
our muscles, electric, our eyes as fast and blue
as the birds we try to follow into the sky.
Yes, there are the terrible wars
and the terrible words, but we won't let
what's been done and said
follow. It's morning. We can feel the cool fog
touch our skin and our skin touch back,
hear the quail cooing and shuffling
out of the woods, smell the chai tea,
taste the sweet jellied toast,
see a whole day, lush with time and choice,
still ahead of us.

A poem from 2012, darker in tone, makes me think back to what was happening then, what news story kindled my words:

After the News, Walking

Full moon: from the trees, shadows spill
as if blood, that red honey. 'Venison is sweet
if the kill is calm,' I recall. Also, more than one woman
has died with a baby's mouth at her breast.

My skin tenses. It is a border,
my private country safe, contained.
Among a thousand redwoods, a dewy luster
of moss, tunneled, under the feathered waiting
of Barred owl. So much wanting,
though no one wants to be 'other.'

There are arcs of darkness, where a deer
or mouse could step away into light,
where someone surely watched, allowed,
the quick collapse of body into death.
All those babies, what did they taste? Everywhere
the ground is layered in little bones.

Later that same year, this prose-poem, written when I lived with a different pair of cats now buried in the garden, though I could just as easily have written it this morning:

A Possibly True Story

Once there was a woman speaking poems, whispering really, as she wrote them, only her cats in that bookish room. Two cats. They licked in her words, licked in her solitary voice, licked in the rhythmic rise and fall and pausing, licked in subtle quivers in her breathing, as they licked in soft slivers of their own fur. Soon each cat became a poem. They were good poems, quiet and clean, their meaning a pulse, a muffled rumbling at her touch, as if buried in such dazzling pelts, some animal motor churned, perpetually out of reach. For long moments, the woman held the cats, stroked them, sometimes their claws kneading into her belly, wounding and comforting. She loved the mystery of them, the drift and sway of their tails, sensuous, through air, or gone limp, curled into question marks asleep in her lap. No matter how many poems she spoke, whispered usually, there were only those two cats in the room, 'love' she thought and 'death,' oh they were beautiful, wild things, leaping about, oblivious to names.

Further thoughts on the power of remembering

How do you remember yourself?

You return to yourself by remembering your others. Their presence in your days, the impact of their loss on who you are without them, discovering how their absence becomes a new form of presence—the hole within, filled with holding them.

You savor who you are by recalling, out of the immense network of mostly ordinary, unnoticed moments, those achingly sad or profoundly beautiful experiences. The dark valleys, the brief peaks. If you’re wise, you try to see the miraculous tucked in every moment, so you have more to recall, to savor as you keep stepping forward.

You pause every so often to pull from old drawers or boxes or online archives parts of your past selves, rummaging through years, so that when you arrive at the the mirror each morning, greeting your face, you see how far you’ve come.

The face this morning isn’t entirely the same as yesterday’s or tomorrow’s, yet it is your one face.

Smile. See you smiling at you.

Do that every day in the bathroom mirror or the surface of a pond or a glossy store window you’re walking by or the shimmer of a chrome bumper.

I remember you. Think that. Whisper it in the mind’s busy room.

Why?

You are more that you think you are. You forget yourself as you move through your days, don't you?

We need what only you can bring to this world, and if you don’t believe that and honor that and remember that, well, it’s as if you’ve left a story before it’s over.

Your story, certainly, but our story, too.

Three links to remember (one pure fun)

🎧 Click the colored hyperlinks to watch or listen ...

How Do You Choose by Scotty Hasting (Purple Heart recipient who served in Afghanistan)

"Love after Love" by Derek Walcott (read by Helena Bonham Carter)

How Deep Is Your Love, with BikoStar, Manna & Mfundo aka TauLion (this is a lovely listen, though you must watch for the fun)

This week's question

If you feel up to sharing how you're answering this question, comments are incredibly welcomed—and I will respond. Your shared experience may be just the support and inspiration someone else needs.