(Originally posted to Facebook on February 29, 2016 at 12:39 PM)
Audie turned 1 year old this past week, and Andy arranged twelve photos of him in sequence, one photo for each month of the past year. The difference between March-2015 Audie and February-2016 Audie visually annunciated how quickly the year had passed, and I began to feel and understand the same pangs of sadness that have afflicted Andy for a few months now. From chatting with other parents about this sadness, we concluded that it’s inapt to classify it as the mere sting of nostalgia. It’s really a kind of grief over moments we’ve lost, mostly to nebulous memory and sleep deprivation (or both), and the same sort of grief we feel when we miss an opportunity that will never come again, or when we do the math and realize a beloved dog is 105 in dog years, or when we remember a dear friend who died young, half our life ago, and think about what might have been. We want to keep the substance of those experiences immutably preserved, but we know the futility of keeping even their memory intact. Like that Robert Frost poem you had to memorize in school–“Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold”–we long for eternity despite knowing that we cannot have it, at least not in this world, where “nothing gold can stay.”
It’s instructive that we even have a concept of eternity, given how seldom we see evidence of it. Actually, eternity occurs nowhere in the Universe we now inhabit: Even the trusty Sun will begin to sputter out 5 billion years from now. So why should we have a word for eternity to express our desire for it? C.S. Lewis wrote “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” This is where people who are determined to be miserable “realistic” usually depart from the conversation, and I think Lewis sensed that when he wrote: “In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.”
And I guess I’m writing this because it doesn’t settle the matter at all. Instead, it callously trivializes our sense of loss. And it also widely misses the mark: “Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” (The Weight of Glory, http://bit.ly/1TN0J59)
When Audie is 25 years old, I want to remember him at 1 year old. I want to remember his giggle, his grabbing my nose at breakfast with wet banana-hands, his arms outstretched for me to pick him up at 3:00 AM when he’s just had a nightmare. I want to remember a million other details that I can’t now describe because I’ve already forgotten them. For now, Andy and I will have to make do with photos and videos and journal entries, things that outlast our memories but still won’t last forever. And that’s okay, because we know that eternity is ultimately not the object of our longing. Eternity is an attribute of a Person, and every moment Andy and I have forgotten, that eternal Person has remembered. Everything we’ve misplaced, that Person has recovered. Everything we’ve lost, He has saved. And one day, when we’re at home in that far-off country we’ve never been to before, He will return it all to us.