THE TREACHERY OF MEMORY WHILE GRIEVING

Memory is unreliable. I've recently landed on an interpretation of a memory from my son Lucas' last moments alive two years ago. He didn't struggle much but if it was clear to us he was shutting down and not likely to rally. Of course we tried to rally him anyway. This is the clear memory I have of his last moment with us:

After some effort to rouse him, Lucas managed to open his eyes halfway and only briefly. As my mind replays this now I see it as only one of his eyes opening. But I'm sure it was both eyes. Perhaps one a bit more than the other. That might make sense. As always there was kindness and still some sparkle in his eyes, but now muted, tempered by exhaustion.

And my recent re-interpretation of that last look is that my non-verbal boy was saying:

I know you want me to connect with you now, and this is as much as I can give you.

If that is what he would have spoken could he speak, he would have been entirely justified given his struggles. And I sometimes latch on to this as the proof he was ready to let go of his connections to this life.

As much as this feels like an accurate recollection of the final moments, today (with two years of hindsight), I'm unsure how much I'm forcing or refocusing my memory. A bit of each, no doubt, but is a balance required? This memory feels too important to let drift in and out on its own schedule. I wish I understood better is recall a muscle that must be exercised to stay strong or is it pulling from a finite supply of flashbacks and if over tapped I'll one day discover the well has been depleted.

This final memory can feel so precious and yet torturous too. I wonder if the pain of it serves another purpose. Penance? The least one could do after losing a child is feel some suffering. Do I owe my son's memory the effort of facing the hardest part of that memory? And that difficulty, the hardship, perhaps it's more than penance, what if it signals truth to me? The memory is too powerfully uncomfortable to be false, because why would my mind invent or welcome such distress. If it is unbidden and unbearable it must be true? Today, at least, that's what I've decided.

[Lucas, lost his battle with Menkes Syndrome June 5, 2020 at age 11.5.]
Note: the photo shown here was from April, 2020 so it is not the look in his eye I try to recall in the above.