Don’t Tell Me He Lives in My Memory

I wasn’t planning to read a book on flowers.

My sister and I had just finished a spontaneous coffee date before she had to leave for work and I was alone, sitting on the coffee shop couch and looking out over the water. I sat there for what felt like a long time, just thinking, watching the boats lying still at anchor, and the seagulls hailing shells into the sand.

A pile of books sat next to me, waiting for a solitary idler to sift through them. At the moment, I fit the rank of solitary idlers pretty well, so I picked a few up and looked at the titles. A children’s book on birds. A paperback novel from the 60’s. An old, pictorial guide on flowers. I flipped through it, intending just to look at a couple pictures when a quote caught my eye. It was a historical recounting of a story in which a woman entered a hidden garden and wrote: “I saw what might be made of it. It was Sleeping Beauty’s castle… a garden crying out for rescue.”

A garden crying out for rescue.

My mind swept back through centuries, through millennia. Pictures. Flashes. The Garden of Eden, the first garden to cry, I am certain, the garden of which every other garden cries tears of remembrance, the garden every other garden fights to echo and reclaim. Then there was Sleeping Beauty’s castle, there were fairy tales in general, with deep enchantments that made dark the beautiful, waiting, waiting for the king, for the prince, for a bloody battle and a slain dragon, waiting and sleeping through all the chaos for the silence in which it could awake. I thought of the Secret Garden, and childhood hiding places, and the strange, sad, hopeful longing that lies in seeing things as they might be, in seeing the way you might mold a lump of clay, lump of words, lump of colors, lump of earth.

Okay.

So maybe I didn’t want to just look at the pictures.

I went back to the beginning of the book and flipped through, slower this time, scanning each page for the hidden stories and histories I never knew I was interested in. I always knew flowers were beautiful. I never knew they could be sad. That they hid layers of truth and mythos. I never knew tulips used to symbolize hopeless love, and that French women whispered to their children how pansies sacrificed their fragrance to save their fellow plants.

Greek legend had a world of all white roses, until a god fell in the throes of a cosmic prank, and his lover pricked her foot on a thorn rushing to his side, the roses around them turning red with their now joined blood. (Hence why red roses have come to be romantic. This romantic vein—no pun intended—comes from lost love, violence, and death. Hopefully, we can all forget this by Valentine’s Day.)

But there was one story that gripped my attention most. A true story. A story that gave me my new favorite flower.

In 1935, a French gardener named Francis Meilland was experimenting with cross-breeding roses but had never achieved the results he desired. Meilland however, like all gardeners I suppose, saw the beauty in what might one day be and he never discarded the failed cuttings. A year later, he walked into his garden and saw something beautiful: A lush, vibrant cream-yellow rose, tinged with blush-pink on the border of each petal.

It was exactly what he had been hoping for, working toward, all his life. But then something happened that must have made Meilland believe this was the worst time of all history to make a flower.

France entered World War Two.

Desperate to save his rose, which symbolized his entire life’s work, Meilland drew the cuttings and sent them to herbologists all across Europe and the United States, hoping that at least one of them would survive the war. The last cutting flew out on the last plane to leave France before Germany invaded.

The war raged on and as the world fell to ruin, it stopped believing in flower gardens. Meilland and his family were forced to uproot their life work and plant victory gardens to help a failing French resistance. Communication was disrupted, and then impossible. Nothing was heard of Meilland’s rose for nearly ten years, and dark had been made the beautiful.

But on May 7th, 1945, Germany officially surrendered to the Allies. The dragon of war had ended, and Meilland got word he would have certainly believed impossible: One of his cuttings had lived. Where so much else had fallen, his rose had survived the war.

This rose, born out of war and ruin, suddenly became to Meilland a symbol of so much more than his life’s work; this was a rose of hope, this was the rose that lived.

On the same day that the war in Japan ended, the rose was introduced to the public, to all the nations that had been at war on both sides—and awarded. Names were proposed for this victory flower and it was suggested that it be called Madame de Meilland after Meilland himself.

“No,” he said, “in a few years my name will be forgotten. But there is one name the world will not forget: Peace.”

On the day of the formal surrender of Germany, each of the 49 delegates to the newly created United Nations were presented with a bloom of “Peace”, a flower that had come to mean hope to a new world, both having been born in chaos, both reawakened in the silence brought by victory.

And that was the beginning of hybrid roses.

________

In between coffee shop dates and books on flowers, the last two weeks have been hard. Nights have gotten bad again and days are permeated with exhaustion. My mind is loud and dark. Thoughts and images flashing, ceaseless, frightening, in a body that just yearns to sleep.

I’ve cried a lot the last few days. I hadn’t been able to cry for a while. I don’t always know which is worse—feeling everything, or feeling nothing. But sometimes, to me, it feels like they’re the same thing.

I’ve been missing a lot. Missing memories. Missing moments—moments I never knew to appreciate when I had them. Missing people. Missing Isaiah. Missing, longing, grieving, permeated with bleeding veins of regret.

“Your brother was a special person,” people tell me. “I know you’re sad, but you’ll never really lose him. He will always live on in your heart. He will always live on in your memory.”

No, he doesn’t. And no, he won’t. He doesn’t live in my heart. He doesn’t live in my memory. He lives in heaven—beautiful yes, joyous, wonderful–but remembering him doesn’t make him seem close, and it doesn’t take away the pain.

There is no action in memory—there is no life. There is the past, stagnated, remembering what was, seeing a flash, frozen in time, one you can never reach. No matter how many times you link “heart” and “memory” together with the name of the person I love, it will never fill the loss, it will never make him feel alive again. If anything it makes him feel more dead—my brother was never meant to be a memory.

A memory? How hopeless is that? What point is there in giving my aching hands another shell? I want my brother again. I want real, present, normal.

I want to fold laundry again with big piles on the floor while he huddles in a ball with a blanket over his head, and tries to find the warmest pieces of clothing to put on over his pajamas.

I want him to come out when he’s supposed to be sleeping to see what movie we’re watching, and then pretend he came out for a glass of water instead. I want his hugs, his half-annoyed, secretly-enjoyed, “I love you’s”. I want to kiss his cowlick, ruffle his hair, and feel his thin, wiry body against me in a tight hug.

I want to watch him shove his glasses up his nose so that his long eyelashes are smashed up against the lens. I want to watch a million expressions cross his face as a million thoughts run through his mind at once. I want to hear his lame jokes that aren’t even funny and listen to him doing all the voices for Harry Potter and The Hobbit. I want to watch him eat four helpings for breakfast, pass on the crispy bacon in favor of “the soft”, and put on the spiderman suit beneath his normal clothes so he can pretend to have abs.

I want what I saw in the beautiful ordinary of what I thought was going to happen—the next 60 years of growing up together. I want to meet the girl I thought he would fall in love with who would change his views on marriage once and for all. I want to see all the kids I pictured him having, with big smiles and bigger laughs, who begin every fight with, “I’m warning you, I take martial arts” because Daddy taught them well.

I want to say, “I love you” and have him here to hear me. I miss what his hugs felt like. I miss wondering about what kind of man he would be when he got older.

Don’t tell me he lives in my memory. I don’t want him there, but here. A memory in my heart is just an ache, a reminder, a shell.

I don’t want to remember. I want to have. I want to have and never lose. I want to keep, keep, keep; tight-fist a beautiful, crazy, ordinary life that is crying out for rescue.

But the truth is, it was always crying out for rescue.

It’s just that now—I’m crying out too.

_______

My memory is beautiful and broken.

It is a lot of things.

It is the root of my self-identity, my life loves, my PTSD, my success at work, my nightmares, my favorite things. It is the root of how I experience the world, sunsets, depression, beautiful days, graveyards, summertime, joy, fear, grief, hope, memory itself.

Beyond those hard and wonderful things however—beyond all of what influences me and the tiny circle of lives my life affects—my memory is pretty pointless. It lives and ends with its own experiences. Thought can extend the basis of memory to other things, but only so far. It doesn’t live. It doesn’t resurrect. Sometimes, it lies and fails me.

We are never told in Scripture that “God has a memory”. Living on in God’s memory—the basis of doctrines such as soul sleep and ideological sentiment—is about as stagnant as living in my own. There’s nothing active in a memory.

We serve a God who remembers.

And unlike me, when God remembers, He can act. 

When God remembered Noah, mountains of water rolled off the face of the world.

When God remembered Israel, millions of Hebrew slaves walked from the most powerful kingdom on earth through a desert, through an ocean, led by fire and clouds, into a land that had been promised them for over 500 years.

A thief hung on a Cross and turned to Jesus, dying beside him. “Remember me,” the thief pleaded. “I will remember you,” Jesus said.

Not, “You will live in my memory,” but, “Because I remember you, you will live.” Really live. Today. Forever.

So what does that have to do with flowers? Or with death?

Mielland didn’t want the world to remember the flower by remembering his name. He wanted the world to remember the flower by a name he believed they could never forget: Peace. The flower wouldn’t be encased in the name of a man gone by, but in a victorious, active, pervading presence the world had fought and died for, and into which it had been reborn.

When the 49 UN delegates received a bloom of the Peace Rose, they also received the following message: “We hope the ‘Peace’ rose will influence men’s thoughts for everlasting world peace.”

It didn’t.

The world is still in the throes of war, of chaos, of loss, bloodshed, and throbbing, painful, broken, hope.

But not forever.

In the throes of a cosmic battle, God fell to the earth and died, a Divine heel was pricked, and mortal blood seeped from pure white into the thorny.

And from the ruin and bloodshed of a world at war, Christ Rose.

The gardens crying will one day be restored and the beautiful will be resurrected again from the darkness.

For God will remember.

And when God remembers, things happen. What God remembers never truly dies.

Soli Deo Gloria,