Photo by Mihail Macri on Unsplash
I have a scar on the palm of my left hand. It's pale white, about an inch long, fitting in with the creases. I don't notice it much anymore, but it's always there in the bed of my hand.
The moment I got the scar was when I fell off the side of Derek's car.
When I was seventeen I thought it would be cool to own a 1970 Volkswagen Beetle (spoiler: it wasn't). Ignoring the top speed of fifty; or how the inside frosted over as much as the outside in cold temperatures; or the absence of power brakes and steering; or the heat not working, so I had to layer up even more because it acted like an icebox; or the engine being on its last legs, meaning when I pushed in the clutch the car died, resulting in three winter months where I stopped the car by using the emergency brake while continually giving it gas. Ignoring all of these grievances, the most annoying aspect of a 1970 Volkswagen Beetle was how much the car weighed. It was light enough that if a few of my friends stood at each corner they could pick it up and move it somewhere other than where I left it. More often than not, this meant I'd find my blue Beetle in a grassed median.
One day I wasn't feeling the prank. I stood in front of my car—its front tires sunk in the mud and the back wet from the grass. I wasn't ready to get in to drive the car back and forth until it was released from the confines of its temporary prison.
Derek pulled up next to me and asked how it was going. I assumed he was part of the group that moved my car that day. I yelled, “You son of a bitch!” and charged his car, but by the time I grasped the handle he'd locked the doors and slammed on the gas. I ran a hundred meters, hanging on the side of his car before my feet tripped me up and I fell.
When Derek parked and handed me a clean oil rag for my bleeding hand he told me he got up to twenty-five miles per hour before I tripped. He also claimed he had nothing to do with relocating my car. I didn't have any real reason to think he was lying. I tightened the rag around my hand and walked back to my Beetle. I drove off the grass and went home to clean the gravel out of my palm. I had to work that night. I spent the evening worried patrons were going to point at the bloodied bandage on my hand and demand someone else make them their sandwich. No one seemed to notice.
This all happened over ten years ago.
When I wrote this Derek was on the verge of being disconnected from life support.
He'd been living in southern Germany for five years. He loved mountaineering, and there isn't a better spot for climbing than the Alps. In January of 2016 there was a blizzard and he was in a climbing accident, falling five hundred feet. His friend, James, died on impact. Derek survived the fall and spent the next ten months in the ICU. He had both legs amputated, nine fingers removed, and a liver transplant. Still, it wasn't enough.
Derek and I were the only two people in the parking lot the day I fell off the side of his car and cut my hand. The moment he died was the one when I became the sole participant remembering the incident resulting in the scar. What's scarier than the isolation is knowing I can't even trust everything I told you about that day.
Daniella Schiller, a neuroscientist who leads the lab for Affective Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, told MIT Technology Review that “each time you retrieve a memory it undergoes this storage process.” Essentially, we put normal wear and tear on our memories, just like we do with our homes. Each subsequent time we think about something we don't “remember the original; we remember the revised version.” With all our biases and current life experience we put a spin on the memories we have. Our perception changes, and with that, our attitudes of events that have happened in our past. Because of the way our brains work our memory is fallible.
When I get together with friends it is fun to reminisce—as I'm sure other people know. Everyone has experienced being wrong about a memory. One friend says it happened a certain way, while another says differently. With the added information we can build a more conclusive memory. But when someone who shares a memory dies it's hard to “fact check” a story, and knowing our brains alter what we remember we're left with our memories and experiences being a fiction. Think of it this way: these memories with friends are like a shared consciousness, and as you lose friends (through death or other life changes) you lose that commonality with the doors shutting to the memories.
At this point I don't have anyone to fact check my fall on the asphalt. No one to corroborate that I even fell from the side of Derek's car.
Every time I've looked at my scar over the years and thought about the event small changes have taken place. I can either believe the false memory as fact, or I can accept it in its altered form, even if I don't know what specific alteration took place. That's the next part—since I can't know with certainty what has been skewed over the years, there is the chance my mind is impenetrable. Maybe my memory of tripping while running at twenty-five miles an hour holds to its original integrity. Could I have a perfect callback to moments in my life? Can I really hold onto the possibility it might be fact? That my mind is that perfect? Or do I concede to it being a comforting fiction, accepting this as the more likely scenario? Something that didn't directly happen to me, but helped shape who the am today.
For me, my history turning from reality to a sort-of-fiction started nine years ago when another one of my friends died. There were moments when I'd hear a joke and know he'd love it, but then remembered he was dead. I'd have a joke lingering inside of me with no one else to share it with. In the same way the joke hung and dissipated, my history started to hang inside of me tethered to nothing tangible. I had to write memories down because the more I thought about them the greater my fear they were going to slip away was—and with them my childhood.
One night I was with my good friend, Ethan, and he was talking about when he played Munchkin with friends. I told him I didn't know what the game was, and he took a step back—almost offended—and told me, “Of course you know what it is, you were there that night.” I wasn't. Ethan was stunned, and he looked away and I could see him reworking the night in his head. He put his right arm out, and said, “No, you were. You were sitting just to the right of me. I had to keep turning to talk to you. We had a lot of fun.” Again, I told him I wasn't there, and I was sorry he had such fond memories of a night that never took place. If it wasn't for us talking about that board game he would have gone on believing I was a part of that night, but because we were able to disassemble his memory he now has a more accurate picture (unless, of course, I was there and I simply don't have any memory of it anymore).
We were both able to ground the memory.
I've known Derek since first grade, so I've had this bridge to my past. He was one person I was able to go to and confirm a memory—someone to piece history together with. To prove it was all real. But now, those support beams are knocked out, and I've lost connections to my own history. I don't know whether I fell off Derek's car going twenty-five, or if it was just a dream I once had. The history I've built over the past thirty years is being eaten away by the absence of shared moments.
While I talked to my wife about this idea she brought up another thought. There are times when you're with friends and someone will begin, “Hey, do you remember that time...” and as they tell a story your own memory kicks in and you start to remember the situation. As they paint the picture your brain is able to fill in the holes. This is a representation of something that happened, but since your brain in filling in the gaps while a friend describes the story you can feel confident it is something that happened, give or take some accuracy. It is a shared moment between more than yourself. With the absence of Derek I will miss those moments. My elementary school years will disappear with him. Sure I'm going to have the shadows of what I remember, but all those have developed into nice dreams floating around my synapses, being revised anytime my mind touches upon them.
It doesn't feel like I'm only losing a friend in Derek's death, but it feels like I'm losing a decade of my own life. It's moving from a full and substantial past to an ever-changing dream-state—a convenient fiction.
I have the scar on my hand. Whether I got it from a tumble onto hot asphalt one spring afternoon when I was high school, or if it was from something long forgotten, I've convinced myself it's important enough to remember. Derek isn't here to tell me he was driving twenty miles per hour instead of twenty-five. He's not here to correct the small details, or tell me the whole thing is fabricated, but none of that matters now. What matters is I have this memory of Derek getting out of his car to help wrap my bleeding hand. He took the time to make sure I was okay even when I was accusing him of something he didn't do. Real or not, it gets to the root of who Derek was as a person and that's more important. As a friend of mine said in memoriam of a friend, “The souls of the people we love echo in the memories we have of them, and in the kind of people they motivated us to be.” Maybe the accuracy of events don't actually matter, anyway.
Joseph Edwin Haeger is the author of Learn to Swim (University of Hell Press, 2015). He has had work published in Gap Tooth, RiverLit, The Spokesman-Review, at Zygote in My Coffee, Hippocampus Magazine, and others. He lives in Spokane, WA with his wife and sons.