Memory Day

I have not been mentioning anniversaries this year. In fact I have been deliberately avoiding the topic, both here and in my life – to lesser and greater degrees of success.

Today is different, though I’m not entirely sure why it is so important to me personally. Maybe it’s because I remember it.

You see, that’s the whole point of the day. September 9th is the day I started to remember things after being taken off the sedatives. I wasn’t remembering much, and even at the time I knew that I wasn’t remembering things in order. I have memories over a three day period that even then I knew that I couldn’t tell what day a particular memory was from. It wasn’t until the 12th that I started remembering things sequentially.

But I was conscious, more or less, and remembering. And I know for sure that it started on the 9th. There are fragments from when I was sedated, but they aren’t full or accurate memories, just bits and pieces that I held onto. The real memories are important. I imagine that it makes me think of myself as a real person. Damn, this is hard to write about.

There’s a big gap in my life that covers things that have changed my life dramatically. Maybe that’s why I care about today. In some ways my mind knew that I had been in the hospital for a long time and this signaled an end to the weeks of sedation in the ICU. I don’t know. Maybe there’s no good reason for it, except that I could think.

I still have problems with my memory. I forget some things and I can’t recall other things from the past. It’s a real mess in there. I may not always know right away what day of the week it is, but I’m always pretty sure that today isn’t yesterday. In a way it should really be September 12th that’s important because that was when I started to experience life more normally again. Being able to understand how the days are ordered is a very significant thing. Yet I can’t help having a special feeling about today. It was a triumph of sorts that can actually only be realized after the fact.

If it hadn’t been for that other breakthrough on the 12th when the memories became more ordered – and I attribute that to being more recovered from the sedation – then I wouldn’t really know that the 9th was a special day at all. It would just be another day in a jumble of memories that I couldn’t sort out.

Maybe I should combine the two, the way official holidays are merged, and celebrate Memory Day. I can make it the Monday closest to the time between the 9th and the 12th. I think I’ll do that, if I can remember to.