What you remember
My wife and I were talking yesterday about memories. What do we remember? What makes events in our lives memorable? Why is it that I can remember a specific incident that happened when we went out to eat 12 years ago and she can’t? And the same with her. It might have been a minor dining experience, yet some little thing happened like it was the meal my favorite tie got ruined in the soup I was eating; Now I can remember the whole dinner. The tie was trivial to my wife but it was a trigger event for me.
So yesterday we were remembering 9/11 and where we were. I remembered I was teaching fifth grade. It was early morning and my class was in P.E. I was wandering the halls after leaving my class off, as I tended to do when I passed another 5th-grade classroom; Paul, their teacher, also on prep, came rushing out to me and said that I had to turn on the news. I went back to my room and needless to say, continued to follow most of what happened throughout the day without letting the students know.
An emergency meeting of the staff was called at lunch. We were informed not to say a word to the students. A number of parents picked up their kids early either out of fear or because a family member was connected to the event. There was only one student in my class that left early. Some parents even picked up their kids after school rather than let them ride the bus.
I called my wife when I found out and let her know what was happening. My son was in third grade at the time in the same school that I worked in. We walked home after school and I didn’t say anything to him about what had happened.
The staff had another meeting before school the next day to discuss how to proceed with students. We knew that some students would not have been told what had happened (my school was a 2nd-5th grade building, so the feeling was a number of students would not have heard due to their parents wanting to protect their young children) so we were to be open to talk individually with students that brought it up and school counselors would be made available to those students or staff that needed to talk, but we were not allowed to bring up the topic ourselves with the whole class. We knew that wasn’t going to work since the students who had been told about it were sure to share that knowledge with others in the class.
In fact, when my son came home the next day, he was upset that most of the people in his class had seen all the images and videos on TV and he hadn’t. We may have talked about what happened with him the day it happened, but chose not to share the visuals with him.
So now it is 18 years later. There are a lot of triggers in my mind that makes me remember that day. I also think about other tragic and horrific events, some of which I wasn’t even there for. When 9/11 happened every comic published had some reference to it. Yesterday, I counted 2. When did we stop remembering as a nation and in school systems about Pearl Harbor? the Holocaust? the Kennedy assassination? the Challenger disaster? The students in school right now weren’t alive during 9/11; where is their connection, their trigger that makes those remembrances meaningful? And I don’t mean to limit those memories only to bad events; the same goes for good ones.
Time moves on as memories fade. Memorable events are connected to trivial and meaningful triggers in our individual minds. Hopefully, we can keep those memories alive in the stories we share with others, generation to generation, that place those same triggers that we have in our minds in the people we share them with. Only then will we truly remember.
