Towers of Memory
Walking home from McDonald’s one night, he thought there was time to safely cross the boulevard, though against the light and oncoming traffic. A grave miscalculation. His legs and pelvis shattered. Witnesses say his body was thrown 50 feet in the air before landing on the pavement.
Initially, the moment of impact and its immediate aftermath was blocked from his memory. But upon waking some days later, he re-lived the sensations — the feelings of the accident and said it was horrible: “I am alive, and I shouldn’t be but I am.”
When I come to visit, the hospital room is dim with curtains drawn. Members of his medical team are constantly checking, feeding, changing —monitors, TV, instruments, tubes. Upon entering the room, the surgeon notices me and asks him who I am. “My younger brother... We don’t live close but we’re close.” Trying to make conversation, the surgeon asks, “Were you good to him when you were growing up?” A pause, then “Not really.” A lifetime of accumulated, often painful memories compressed and distilled into a brew of conflicting emotions in that cramped hospital room. Though I traveled 2000 miles to offer personal comfort and support, I feel an urgent need to escape the room’s physical and psychic confines. When I can stand it no longer, I take my leave. I’m not sure my brother even notices, as his shrunken self drifts in and out of an opioid induced haze.
Upon escaping the hospital complex, I can take a full breath. Walking a few blocks south, I come upon a large open space adjacent to a cemetery. The April sky is gray and silent with snow flurries swirling like tiny ghosts. I find myself attracted to the trees scattered about the prairie landscape and begin photographing their still bare forms. It feels almost as though the tips of their branches are exchanging electrical impulses with other trees. I fall into a meditative state in which passing minutes recede into the background.
Looming over the landscape is an unwelcoming structure vaguely reminiscent of an asylum or penitentiary. I subsequently learn it is a mausoleum dubbed Tower of Memories. Breaking ground in 1929, the original builder went bankrupt before finishing the project. Because the building already housed remains of many bodies, another builder completed it. Today, the structure holds about 6,000 crypts and 5,000 niches for ashes.
On-line sources are silent as to the name Tower of Memories. Does it refer to memories of those who departed the earthly realm along with their physical hosts? Or to the memories about those dead that are kept alive by visitors to the Mausoleum? Are we not fully gone until we are not remembered?
When scientists first studied the structure of nerve cells that comprise the human brain, they noted their resemblance to microscopic trees (as shown in the MIT micro-photograph below). The term “dendrites”, which describes projections from these cells, derives from the Greek word Dendron, for “tree.” Thousands of dendrites exist on the surface of some nerve cells in the brain. Because dendrites can change shape and size quickly, some research suggests that dendrites are where memories are created and stored in the brain.[1] According to this research, when an animal experiences an event, the structure of a dendrite may change. Otherwise, a memory of the event is not stored.
[1] https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2014/10/activity-in-dendrites-is-critical-in-memory-formation/
Scientists are discovering that trees have their own sort of nervous system capable of communication with other trees, memory, and learning. The form of memory they exhibit is the ability to retain information about their state at a given point in time and to access it subsequently. And via changes in their growth patterns, plants can exhibit memories of past traumas, such as from the removal of a bud. Plants also have the capacity to epigenetically “forget” memories that no longer serve their well-being.
Moving through the silent trees, my agitation subsides. Wandering and photographing without clear purpose help to consolidate my seventy plus years of fractured and contradictory recollections.
Neuroscientists have found evidence that PTSD can impair memory in humans. For decades, my father locked up (in his private “tower of memories), all the horrors that he experienced as a World War 2 infantry soldier. Repressing those memories was at the cost of damping down his emotions. Though an understandable survival mechanism, doing so may have blinded my dad to adverse family dynamics that I experienced while growing up.
After all these years, I can more readily access the emotional content of these dynamics than their factual details. Do I hold onto residual anger toward my brother? I must admit that I do. Do I also feel compassion toward him in his current vulnerable and compromised state? Yes. As I walk, I recognize that I choose how to move forward, and that I can accept living with the murky stew of contradictory emotions. I linger in the damp cold until the flurries thicken to flakes wet enough to risk my camera.
Later on, I sit again at his bedside. Setting aside residual inner turmoil, I take his hand gently in mine. He offers no physical or verbal response.
