I’ve been in London this week. Coincidentally, I’ve been reading my diaries from my junior year abroad. It’s 43 years later and here are all the things I can’t believe: I can’t believe I survived my depressive and manic episodes. I can’t believe I’ve been stable for 30 years. I can’t believe I married at all and that I’m still married. I can’t believe I have a daughter and we are close. I can’t believe I’ve published three books and have just written, at 63, my first novel. I can’t believe this blog helped me develop my voice and bring a community of like-minded writers to my door. I can’t believe I cherish life no matter the slings and arrows I still aim at myself. I can’t believe this city holds so many sad and lonely memories and that I’m around to indulge.
Where are you saddest memories lodged?
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Betsy Lerner 
Powerful!
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When I look at all the “I can’t believes…” in my life it is a miracle I’ve made it to where I am. That’s the funny thing about surviving. It has a way of tickling us with I told you so.
To actually answer the question asked, my saddest memories are lodged in Johannesburg, South Africa fifty-five years ago. He was young, blond, tall, beautiful and gay. I was female.
Lately I’ve been working with Ira Prokoff’s At a Journal Workshop and Julia Cameron’s (The Artist’s Way) Morning pages. Also, ironically, listening on audio to Cameron’s A Listening Path. Doing this in response to a famiily trauma. Going back hurts a lot but I feel it’s the only way to start to clean out all that old stuff. I’m lucky that I married both men I really loved. I have a wonderful son. Both of my husbands are dead but my writing dream is still alive despite rejection and deadends. I consider myself a very lucky woman. And I appreciate this blog for letting me connect with others who are like me. That’s not so easy to find.
I absolutely adored London when we were there.
“Where are you saddest memories lodged?”
So, so many places. The vet’s office, where on a steel, unforgiving table, I lost my best friends.
In my mother’s hospice bed, lying beside her in the final days.
And possibly on the dance floor, in the 80s.
Sidebar, where has Tetman been lately????
“Where are you saddest memories lodged?”
My hippocampus and related structures in my temporal lobe. Yes, I had to look that up.
Backup copies are in my computer files, electronic documents with such arcane appendages as doc, docx, jpg, jpeg, tiff, pdf, wpd, txt — to name the rogues’ gallery of usual suspects.
Then there are the haunted physical objects — paintings, books, photographs, other trivialities that mean nothing or very little to anyone but me. God, all I have to do is take one quick look around this room where I sit. There, by one wall, near but not too near to the radiator, is The Olive Drab Footlocker, repository of treasured keepsakes both memorable and unmentionable.
If I’m looking for saddest memories, I can find them all around me, and within me. But I can find happy memories there, too.
There you are. 🙂
I want to thank you for writing the blog and for sticking with it all these years. I imagine it is cathartic for you, but I also suspect that it is also an attempt to connect with all the people that you can’t possibly represent, yet feel some empathy towards. I can only imagine, that as an agent, that you have had to reject thousands of authors and probably are forced by time constraints to ignore twice as many more. From the author’s perspective, all this rejection is grueling, but rarely do we consider the emotional toll it takes on the person doing the rejection. No one likes to be the one who has to say, “No.” The blog does give the author (reader) an insight into the fact that you are a human being that pours her heart and soul into the craft of writing, and into the cause of literature, more broadly. So…again, thank you for letting us peek behind the curtain.
As a boomer, I can’t believe all the crap that I have witnessed and survived, also. Kelly Clarkson’s, “If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.” I thought 1968 was the epitome of chaos, and now I marvel at just how out of control things are, and the thing about chaos is that it always favors the corrupt, because they are the ones that can never get enough of it and know how to profit from it.
To answer the question specifically – my saddest memory is Kent State, because, at that moment, we all knew that Nixon and his tin soldiers had won. When Watergate took him down, and he stood on that helicopter’s staircase flashing the victory sign (an abomination to the peace symbol if there ever was one), and then they took him away, for the first time in my life I truly believed that there was a God.
thank you so much.
It is always a pleasure to read of your many successes–and this post was especially wonderful! Enjoy your trip and continue keeping us in the loop; you are inspirational. BRAVO!
West Genesee Middle School. I found out I was too tall and fat to be a girl. It didn’t stop me, but I’d never be lifted up in the Dirty Dancing movie or be taken to the prom or even seen really, despite my size. And if I’m really honest there is a lot of shit in the house on Richards Road. A whole novel of shit. And Betsy, this post made me so emotional. So many feelings stuck in my chest. You help me with every post and story. XO Marie
thank you so much.
I can’t believe the prices in London!
Thanks, as always, for the candid posts, and with this one, many congrats on being stubborn enough to keep going and find what life could be. I’ve been thinking of reading my college journals from the ’80s, if just to get off my own back about what I now think I should have done back then. Once I see what shape I was in, and how negative my thinking was, I’m sure I’ll have much more respect for that kid. Even if he never did marry or publish, he was stubborn, too.
I studied abroad in London, too. Oh, the historical sites, the culture, the cold wet days of frizzed-out hair.
I dislodge any sad memories that pop up.
At the old Heartbreak Hotel on the corner of Pain and Falsewisdom. Just go up the stairs and head for the room with a revolving door. Float along on a carpet of smoke and fog until you get to the window with a view of a sliver of the river. Set sail on the wings of an angel from down Montgomery way and wonder again why this living is such a hard way to go. Remember to smile when you come down from the clouds, helping to ease the burden of others who may be suffering too.
you constantly provide me with a sense of comfort, like I’m reading my own passages but only years from now. All my anxieties about my youth you and your words seem to ease. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for that.
I think my saddest memories are left behind in my home state down south, but still I see them follow me to New England. A year or so ago, a song I used to sing with an ex boyfriend came on, which made me upset, and my friend told me that it is just as important to make new memories as it is to remember the bad ones.