Memory

The ability to remember events from a very early age has always been easy for me and to this day, decades afterwards with clarity, I can remember being in a stroller very close to a large fountain that has water cascading down an ornate center piece. It is very hot out and I can feel the misty spray hitting my face.

That is as far back as I can go with memories of real events and I was probably two when it took place. There is another memory that I believe comes earlier, but doesn't line up to anything factual. I am in a room lying in an older style bed with vertical metal bars at the end of it. There is a person in the room I sense to be a nurse and the overall style of everything appears to be from the 1940's.

The feeling that I get when I reflect on this memory is that the person in the bed is dying. When I recall the memory - which is always easy to do with the same detail - it is very different in the sense that there is a strong emotion that ties to it. What I feel is a great sadness that involves longing and a fear of dying alone. Since this memory doesn't belong to this lifetime, I feel it is the last images of a real moment; an event that took place in another time and place. The emotion of this memory is so strong and surpasses the visual details.

Here's my Hollywood version of what might have happened: I was a soldier once fighting on foreign soil with only a short time left before my tour of duty was over. My wife was at home preparing to give birth and this is all I thought about, her image remaining a constant. Her letters were tied together and I kept them in the pocket that was right above my heart. Whenever I touched the bundle, her sweet smile took shape before my eyes and reminded me of what was right in the world. There was one last mission to do, a simple supply run within a safe zone. While enroute our convoy was ambushed and the truck I was riding in overturned. The last thing I remember is something that felt like a bee sting, then seeing a pool of red form which quickly engulfed the bundle of letters I always held close to me.

I wonder about this early memory and if I glimpsed into something that I should not have. Or maybe this memory is something that I should have which is a natural part of the process? Perhaps the memory will make sense later and is something that will happen in the future on a foreign landscape. Or maybe it was a carry-over from a past life? Whatever should become of this memory, I feel that it possibly holds an answer and will one day make sense. At times it doesn't seem that there can be any promise in death, however, in death perhaps there is a new beginning and occasionally something slips through with it that should have remained behind.