Remembering a Trauma

Have you ever lived through something that turns out to have very little to no information at all in your memory? Why is this? Perhaps, we are so overwhelmed with information that the overload of things to process prevents adequate encoding and processing; perhaps the event overrides the other information from the day and we lose either some or a lot of what happened; or maybe, the moment is not merely steeped in strong emotional information, but the uniqueness of the event, of the emotions experienced are so novel and foreign to us that we just don’t have the necessary concepts to properly process it. In my own personal life, I think the combination of the 3 has happened quite a bit.

Sometimes I recall vague facts that I know to be true biographically, even if just by relation and storytelling. Sometimes I have a shadow of a memory that contains traces of facts but lack any kind of detail. Other times, I know I felt some way, but I have no feeling of being in the moment, like it’s a story that I’ve heard about some far off character in a fictional world. This is the case with Christmas 1992.

I remember other Christmases. I remember a Christmas when I was 4 years old in McAdoo (1983) and the awe and surprise of getting a giant Hershey’s Kiss that seemed the size of my head. I remember Christmas 1984 when I got a desk and how huge it seemed! I remember when I was 8 years old (Christmas 1987), in our new house that my parents had decided to remodel, and we didn’t have doors or carpeting. I remember the torn-up floor and the air feeling cold. I remember the butterflies-in-the-stomach excitement and surprise of seeing a ridiculous amount of presents and the fist-pumping joy of getting Grimlock as a gift (a transformer I really wanted as a kid). I have a ton of memories, ripe with images, sounds, feelings and facts. Christmas 1992 was different.

I don’t remember what I got. I don’t remember having dinner on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. I don’t remember if family came over. I know my cousin Jonathan was there and was spending the night. I know someone was sleeping on the floor in my bedroom though I’m not sure if it was him, or me or both of us. I remember it was dark, so it must have been late. I think I might have been sleeping or maybe we were awake and talking. I really can’t recall because what happened next has seemed to swallow the details of that time like a blackhole.

I can remember the dim yellow light of the hallway, like stained yellow teeth, shining into my room. I remember the way the light reflected off of the ugly textured plaster design on the walls in the hallway. I can remember hearing the rip of the front door being yanked open. What I absolutely remember is my uncle Jeff’s voice coming from down the stairs and travelling up and through the hallway into my room. It wasn’t his voice though. I mean, I knew it was him, but something was off. Trembling, maybe? A shakiness? No, distress and tears. At least that’s how I remember it now. I’m not sure if that’s how I heard it then. He said and just kept saying, “They found him… they found him, Rocky… they found him, oh my God, they found him…” I can’t see the surroundings. I can’t see faces, just figures and movement, like a whirlwind in a cartoon. Like the Tasmanian Devil or Tom and Jerry, but just shadows. I must have gotten up to go see what was happening because I remember the sharp and harsh punch of my dad’s voice, “Get back in your rooms!”

I don’t remember anything else. Was I scared? Was I sad? Was I horrified? Was I happy before that moment and then it was cut to shreds? I don’t know. I know in the days that followed after that I was lost, devastated, wrought with sorrow and grief like I had never known before. I was angry, maybe. I was shocked, for sure. In that moment, when my uncle busted into our house to tell us they found my oldest cousin, my idol, my hero; they found him hanging, dead in the woods, I was shocked. Traumatized and shocked to my core.

I remember in the days, weeks, months after that night, I physically and emotionally felt the sting of how you feel when your foot falls asleep. It’s numb and foreign but hurts as well. I think that’s the best way I can describe how it felt when I found out that my cousin had taken his own life. At 13, what kind of emotional granularity or experience did I have to integrate this into my life story? Someone I loved, looked up to, admired, aspired to be like, was not only gone, but was so miserable, depressed and unhappy with his life that he ended it. A life that for me was so full of joy and fun memories… How unaware was I of reality? Did I even know him? Did I know anyone? I experienced a literal break in realities. The world I lived in before had snapped and broken off, leaving a chasm between the past and world I was newly inhabiting in that moment; and there was no bridge to fill in the gap between the two.

You know when you see in movies, someone who was close to an explosion, and afterward, they are aimlessly meandering away from the blast site; and the movie plays a sound to portray deafening tinnitus; and the actor just stares off into the distance, sort of shellshocked and lost; and you can do nothing but feel anxious for them because you know there’s nothing they can do for themselves but blindly keep going, keep moving forward, anywhere, nowhere, somewhere…? That’s how my adolescent years were for me. I didn’t know how to process this event. I didn’t know what to feel, what to think, what to do. I remember feeling like I was supposed to know what to do. I remember feeling like I needed to make other people feel reassured and safe. I remember feeling that if I made others feel safe, I would feel safe. I remember feeling guilty that I couldn’t do any of these things, for myself or anyone else. I remember remembering the shock of the moment, the break in reality, the drifting into the abyss of trauma. It’s not dark and terrifying. It’s not alone and cold. It’s not sad and heavy… at least not for me. It was disconnection. Light was there, but it fell short of me. Sure, life was colorful, but the colors were just a bit faded. I wasn’t alone, but I wasn’t in company, there was no togetherness. Feelings and events sort of lacked meaning. I laughed, but it was hollow. I smiled, but it was empty. I cried but it was mechanical. I was… but not quite.

I don’t remember coming out of this mode either. It’s not like there was some moment when things started getting better or where I started to feel like my former self again. I think there is a common misconception that after some traumatic event, we can find a way back to our previous self. I say misconception because this has not been my experience, though I have often heard (and still hear) people allude to this notion. This traumatic event started off as being something that happened, then something that happened to me, and then back to being something that had happened in my life. I’m not sure if the nuances are clear, so I’ll try to explain it a little more clearly. Initially, I experienced this like hearing about some character in a story, completely disconnected, a fugue state. In the weeks, months and years that followed, I lamented about how this was something that happened to me, like I was the intentional target of this event. For me the event was the trauma, and I kept reliving it in different manifestations over and over again. Eventually, I began to see the trauma as my internal experience (perceptions, thoughts, emotions and responses) to a traumatizing event that no longer happened to me but rather happened in my life.

I’m still impacted by this. The trauma is still there and informs a part of my perceptions and meanings that I give things. I’m still emotionally connected to what had happened, and I know that I still have some trauma-informed responses directly connected to this event. It’s a process, not a thing; life is a journey that moves through us and that we move through. I understand the notion of wanting to get back to one’s “former self”, but this is as useless and pointless as it is impossible. Time and life move in one direction, forward. There is no going back. I understand why someone would want to turn back. If you left to go on a journey and came across danger, anyone’s instinct would be to turn back. But what would you do if you did go back with your new experience? Wherever you came from wouldn’t know or understand any of what you had gone through and more importantly, your experience wouldn’t be of any help to you. You would be changed, and you wouldn’t be able to reintegrate back into a world that has no conception of your encountered danger. You wouldn’t fit and what you know as a result of your experiences would have no use. I get it… going back to safety would make sense, but going back is not an option, and even if it was, you would have no place there. This is, at least, how I’ve experienced this. I’ve regained a sense of the self that I once lost as my experience moved from being external to extremely internal and then finally to adjacently parallel. It was an event that moved through me and then became a part of my story.

My cousin, my hero, my tragic and desperate idol that taught me to play with matchbox cars, pushed me on swings, came to family barbecues, got me interested in martial arts, poetry and playing the drums will always be a person I look up to. For sure, I didn’t know everything about him. I didn’t know his struggles, his deep sadness, his disorientation in life. But likewise, he didn’t know how much he was loved, admired and how much he inspired. His struggles gave me deep compassion and empathy for others. His sadness taught me to revel as much as possible in the joys of life, no matter how small. His being lost was my beacon away from despair and hopelessness. He may no longer be with us, but he is with me in a lot of what I do as a sort of experiential wisdom and moral guide for what matters in life. I’m not whole, not by a long shot, but I’m no longer broken. My pieces might be cracked or tarnished, they might be held together with paperclips and scotch tape and glue dripping down the sides. But those things are still coming together. I am still healing. It’s a process, but that’s ok. I’m not expecting anything more from it other than for the process to continue.

A smile is nothing without smiling; a tear is nothing without crying; a game is nothing without playing; and a life is nothing without living.