BECAUSE, THAT'S WHY (FIVE THOUGHTS ON MEMORIALS AND GRIEVING).

Stick it high. 

Raise your hand if you love going to memorials.

No one? 

No one does. 

But we go. This family goes. Because we will be present. 

Raise your hand if you've ever said "...but I don't know what to say!"

Nobody does. 

But we say something, even if our mouths are silent.

If nothing else, we can give our time and we can bring our presence. 

Just playin'. 

So many people die on Game of Thrones. So many. 

Not gonna turn this into some 'desensitizing effect of violence depiction in pop culture.' Let me say this: 

It's ridiculous to pretend that the way we absorb death in film and television doesn't affect us. 

I am as strong a First Amendment advocate as some are for the Second (let's also be intellectually honest and consistent: you don't get to cherrypick which amendments you support and which ones you don't. Common sense, people. Common sense.). 

Point is, I support free expression and speech-related issues in many incarnations, including often unpleasant ones, and including the right of film and television to portray violence and death in exceptionally prolific and graphic ways. First Amendment ain't a little thing you apply when convenient and yank away when it applies to content you don't like. 

But let's be serious: of course those things desensitize us. Anything you experience over and over desensitizes you. I'm not saying violent content should be banned or censored. I'm saying it's irresponsible and asinine to pretend it doesn't affect us and take some sort of toll on our psyche. 

So what I meant when I said "not gonna turn this into some 'desensitizing effect of violence in pop culture' issue is that I'm going to do exactly that. 

We see death over and over and over, en masse, on screens. And it's often justified and makes us feel good because it's the righteous response to some atrocity we have the right to feel indignant about. So we cheer when violence begats violence and the bad dudes get what's coming. 

But it's all in long shot. It's a comedy cause it's in long shot, like Charlie Chaplin says. It doesn't get tragic until it's up close and you see who's actually getting hurt. 

And that's the thing about memorials: it's an opportunity to hurt together. En masse. To forgo the long shot of death at a distance, whether on a screen or a newspaper, and to experience it close up with those who are truly hurt and to feel the tragedy alongside, if only for a brief period. 

Maybe it's a statement that means only a tiny fraction of something. But I think it's better to do something that may mean something good, even if it's a fraction's fraction, than to take the easy route and do nothing. To make excuses, mostly under the valid banner of "...I don't think ____ cares whether I'm there or not."

We show up. Because our presence matters.

Walter

There are two episodes of television that I will probably return to for comfort at some point when my dad dies. I hope that time is a long, long time off. 

One of them takes place in a later season of the medical comedy Scrubs.

One of them is in a later season of the wonderful and underwatched science fiction show Fringe. 

The latter, especially, is a reminder of the beauty and the pain of having deep, deep relationships that hurt so much to lose. But you wouldn't give up having had them even though it hurts so much. Because they were special, they were beautiful, and they meant something meaningful that you will carry with you always. 

Who woulda thought?

For some reason, I usually feel like listening to Tame Impala after a funeral, memorial, or celebration of life service. 

Someday

Someday, I plan to research (for a short while, probably on Wikipedia) the social trend of moving from "funeral" to "memorial" to "celebration of life." 

I get it. Our choices of words are important. And there are distinctions amongst the three. But sometimes it seems like everything is about a 'a celebration of life' rather than the cold, formal 'funeral,' or slightly-more casual 'memorial service.' In the end, they're all about the same thing: acknowledging the passing of someone from one state to another; from life to death. 

Those little sugary nuts, please

If anyone ever asked my opinion about whether I would prefer to a) have food or b) not have food at a memorial service, I would generally say, 'a' most of the time. 

By 'generally,' I mean 'one hundred percent of the time.'

Don't skimp

Make sure people can hear. It's great to be able to see what people are saying about the deceased, but even more important, it's important to be able to hear what they're saying. 

So do what must be done to get appropriate amplification.

The clock

We all have better things to do.

Of course we do.

Death is not convenient. It often doesn't come at times that fit into our schedule.

But we drop those other things and show our respect by gifting our time.

Time is one of the few things we all have to give. And it's meaningful because there's no shortcuts or way of getting around it.

Until you're dead, you have no choice of whether or not to use your time. You're always using it in some way. It's a little like voting: a non-vote is still a vote, if nothing else for the status quo.

But unlike a vote, your time will be and can be used by only you.* 

If you were looking for the most efficient and effective way of using your time, then you should definitely not go to memorials. There are a thousand more productive ways to spend your time.

If we were robots or even androids, we should definitely just do away with funerals and memorials.

But we are people, and if the relationships we hold are a defining part of what makes us human, then the memorials we choose to attend should be defining reminders of the most beautiful and illogical traits that make us human to begin with.

The fragile and beautiful strength of relationships that are not about productivity or efficiency or logic.

They're about the ways in which we are bound to one another, by blood or friendship or many other ways; all ways that forge meaningful and lasting relationships that inevitably, at some point, will always, always come to an end.

And we can choose to give our time. One more time.

___

*the very fun 2011 Justin Timberlake science-fiction thriller notwithstanding, in which time is very much a tradable commodity. 

Suffer the ?

Children belong at these things. They may not understand exactly what's going on, but it is an opportunity for us to show them, to model for them, what it means to show respect and empathy and how to grieve as a community. 

Although he was referring to entirely different situations (innovation at MIT), I like how Hal Gregersen refers to "constant, generative questioning." Few things are harder to think about, and even more difficult to talk about, than death.

Of course we want to shelter and protect our kids from dealing with pain or tragedy or "adult things," yet I also think it's valuable to begin conversations about grief and empathy early. And death is usually the ultimate catalyst for bringing grief. It sucks. 

Children are good at asking questions, and maybe that's a good thing to have around more when we're dealing with grief and death. Death doesn't make sense. There's no good answers. 

But there's a million questions. Death is a catalyst for talking and trying to understand what it means to really live, the kind of lives we want to live, and the ways in which our lives are connected and impact with others. 

Death is a catalyst for a billion questions. And we should encourage those questions and be okay with not having great answers. Or good answers. Or any answers. Because that's one of the great lies embedded into a lot of formal education: the importance of learning super good answers.

No. The important part is the question; encouraging the questions. It is okay to talk about these things. We don't need to be afraid of having difficult conversations about tough things. And it absolutely, totally, and completely is...

...okay to keep asking questions for which there are not good answers. 

Talk about a great life lesson to get from death. 

Kids are great at figuring out when adults shoo them away from certain topics. There's the Big Two. Politics and religion. But death is the third, I think, possibly followed by sex. Or preceded by. But why?

I don't advocate for dumping 'adult stresses' on kids. But I do advocate for encouraging the asking of questions and a response to those questions that is authentic, open-ended if need be, and respectful of the fact that they simply asked those questions.

Do we want kids to stop asking questions, to stop exploring and discovering and wondering?

Most would say no. 

Our kids don't enjoy memorial services any more than any other kids. They don't get excited about going. But they know it's something we do when we need to, as a family. They know it's a ritual, a part of something bigger than ourselves and outside ourselves that we can contribute to, if only with our presence. 

It's not a bad thing for kids to understand there's pain, there's bad things that happen, and we can run away from those things or we can try to be part of something to make the world better. They might not understand a lot of it, depending on their age and development, but we can help them understand the importance of sharing these rituals together and bringing something important to them...

...ourselves.

So we show up. Because our presence matters. 

IT'S THE _____ TIME OF THE YEAR.

I've been thinking a lot about the experience of Christmas.

I've always loved it. December, the holiday season, lights, swirling people, the feeling of joy and humanity mingling amidst once-a-year melodies and buttered-up treats everywhere.

I still love it. Or I will again. But this has been a tough year. A very challenging one in multiple ways. 

I have not had the same experience this season. I've tried. And had many good moments and made some good memories. 

I've loved the people I've been with. Drank some good coffee. A lot. Eaten some sugar. Listened to Pentatonix. Tchaikovsky, and Sufjan Stevens incessantly. Every time I try to play something else - say, Cat Power, then I hear "...but Daddy, it's Christmas season, can we PLEASE just listen to Christmas music!" I acquiesce the majority of the time on that one. It's a battle where I'm the perpetual villain.

It's also been a tough season. This post isn't about the reasons that it's been tough. It's about the feeling I've had this season that's different. Right now, it's the present. But someday it will be a memory. 

Someday it will be a memory. 

I love the fragility of memory and how it lets us move on with life and leave things behind; often times things that should be left behind out of survival or necessity or in order to prioritize new focuses and opportunities. 

But some things need to be remembered, and remembered not just as concrete experiences (what, when, who, where, etc.), but as emotional passages. My heart has gone through some deep tunnels and twisty turns this year and I'm having a difficult time finding the familiar joy I've always felt this time of year. 

I don't think it's a bad thing to try and hang on to the feeling. Not to drag it out or make it more acute, but to make sure I remember. Because some things don't make sense until you experience them. And I feel like I'm having an experience; a passage of something that will pass, but that I should remember. 

I'm sad. At the happiest time of the year. 

The logical part of my brain - and I am very logical in certain ways when it comes to finding clarity - knows that there are many joyful experiences and wonderful times ahead and some of the feelings I have now will dissipate; compost away into the heap of forgotten months that shape you without consciously realizing. I have so many people I care about, so many good things going on, so much to practice gratitude for. I am grateful for these things. Most of all the people; the many people I am surrounded with who bring support and joy in so many ways. 

This is a hard month this time around. Maybe there will be other Decembers like this in my future; I'm guessing the classic ones I'm used to will likely outweigh these. 

But I don't want to forget how tough this has been. I think I need to remember. 

Because I want to understand better, going forward, the people who experience this every year. Every December, every holiday season. The sadness.

The sadness and even loneliness amidst being surrounded by joy and love. Even when you're in the middle of that and it's directed at you. You can still have those feelings; if I deal with some of these things with the support system I have, then I don't know how so many people deal when they're truly alone and have everything crumbling around.

I don't know, and I want to keep a little piece of that feeling with me; a slice of this month's experience to keep handy and accessible for the coming years when I'm feeling jollygood and it's almost impossible to understand how anyone could not be feeling the holiday spirit. 

So yeah, I wanna remember. Ideally the right amount. It's hard hanging on to hope sometimes, or trying to find it or resurrect it, but it's still important to keep alive, and maybe, maybe 

I will be there in a future December to be there for someone who understands. Even if it's just a little bit. Who understands how hard joy and jolly can be sometimes. 

In a left turn here, I subscribe to the dual and perhaps dueling ideas that 1) you can and should own up to your feelings and emotions honestly and 2) you can also push yourself to own up to them, and then to continue moving on and sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, even (platitude coming up)...

...fake it til you make it. There is something to that. 

The idea of trying to bring your best, of trying to model for others, especially children, of how you can respond in the face of adversity or things not going your way, and creating joy and joyful experiences, EVEN WHEN YOU DON'T FEEL LIKE IT, and realizing at some point, sometimes, you get sucked into it and it turns real. 

Lot of good moments this season. Lot to remember.

Joyeux Noel, all. Love you. Especially my wife, the delectable and patient Countess Becca who brings joy to so many surrounding her. 

Including me. 

POEM : WHEN I WAS A KID, KID.

When I was a kid,
I did everything right, I did, I did.
Said proper things almost always,
Like ‘you’re welcome, thank you, and another jelly donut, please.’

When I was a kid, I was so good to be around.
A more delightful child could rarely be found.
That’s how I remember those things
Ah, the rush of memories my childhood brings.

I’m an adult now and way bigger than you
Because I obeyed my parents, I grew, and grew, and grew.
Every time they said do this, do that!
I said of course, I’ll do all my chores, a rat a tat tat!

They’d ask me once to do my choring
And if I recall, never once did I call them boring.
See, as a big person now,
I remember things exactly right,
Like how I used to say perfect prayers beside bedside at night.

Did I do everything a child should do just as it should be?
Whose to say? well, since you’re asking me, I’ll set the truth free.
I probably made mistakes,
Like leaving sharp end facing up on garden rakes

- Poor Grandma, sorry!

But really, the way I remember my days as a child
Is how I did it all perfect, and never ever was wild.
Did I ever do anything wrong?
Maybe twice, but didn’t last very long.

See, I’m super big now, and you’re a still a tiny kid.
So when I tell you all these things that I did.
You’re gonna have to trust me that I was super good at being a little child person,
Like you could be now, except I spoke proper grammar one hunnert percent and hardly ever used cursin.

There wasn’t the gramming of insta post racing
Or the chat snap post making of photo book facing.
Social meed wasn’t around when I was a kid
To share with the world all that I did.

So when I tell you all the true things about me,
Trust me and don’t read my teenage about me diary, you see, you can
Believe me that all I say to you now
Is exactly how I did it right, pretty much exactly almost how.

So when you do something wrong kid, when you misbehave,
When you’re a naughty, imperfect whiny kinda grumbling knave,
Trust me when I say I was the opposite,
I wasn’t like that, totally not, not one little iota or bit.

I managed childhood quite well,
And washed my hair good so I wouldn’t horribly smell.
I never peed on the potty seat
And I volunteered to help mom handgrind the wheat.

I said yes mommy, yes daddy dear,
Shall I clear everyone’s plates, it’s no prob, I’m really quite near!
In fact, shall I hand wash the cups and the delicate dishes,
Are there other chores you need done or tasks your heart wishes?

Dad, I can do four or five loads of laundry,
And mom, should I rewire the track lights, I’ll give you a good deal, how about for you...free!
I jumped in to tackle with both feet
My ego in check and initiative discrete.

Merely doing what needed to be dones
Because I was a child, like you now, daughters and sons
I didn’t grumble or mumble or fret or frown,
I knew those would let mom and dad dreadfully down.

I swept and I mopped and I made dinner for many
And accepted no earnings or pay, not a single bent penny.
I was a kid, and I did what had to be done,
Even the things that weren’t very much fun.

When my parents said ‘mow the yard,’
I said ‘OK, and then can I do another chore that’s even more hard?’
If there was a problem I had,
It was being too obedient a lad.

Children, doesn’t that sound like a fun problem to possess?
To be the best kid around and a little more, not less.
Cause being a kid is following orders exact
I think that’s how I remember what I tried to enact.

Please don’t ask my parents about when I was a kid.
Their memories are not always right about what I didn’t or did.
Just trust me when I say,
‘When I was a kid, I did things so perfect in every way.

Every day.’

Remember to not ask my parents about me.

Forgot

We drove into Portland this evening. Made one stop. To return Mom's purse. She forgot it yesterday.

Here, at our home, is where she forgot it.

I forgot where I put the charger for my camera.
I also forgot where my hot glue gun is.
I think I forgot to respond to some emails today too. I don't remember which ones.

Forgetting gets such a bad rap. Like it's always a negative thing. I am frustrated with myself right now over having a dead camera and a missing glue gun.

One of the reasons I am an obsessive listmaker and journalerist is that I don't trust my memory very much.

I think one of the things that makes me a decent person - specifically parent - is a recognition of memory's nebulous nature. I can't choose what memories people will have of me. I can't choose exactly what will be Johannes and Magdelana's formative memories. I can't pick those moments, those experiences where I was "a really good dad" and cram them into their long-term easy retrieval memory storage. It's impossible.

I cannot pick or control the memories other people have of me. It's like a corollary to:

Live your life like there's always a camera watching you.

Which in our case, there usually is.

There's an accountability that comes with knowing that any experience you have with your children, particularly early in their life, could be one of those memories their independent little brain plucks from obscurity and chooses to save as a personal highlight reel.

I hope, I hope so badly that someday when Magdelana is sitting a classroom corner and the question is asked,

What is your first memory?

that her answer will be a really great one.

Something having to do with making art, or humming along to Tom Waits in the automobile, or swimming in frigid Pacific waters...

And I desperately hope it is not the time I got mad at her for stacking LEGO blocks in my coffee, or when I yelled at her for waking up her just-fallen asleep baby brother.

Or even worse: when I have been working and responded to repeated requests to "come play with me Daddy," with absentminded,

Okay Magdelana...just a minute.

And a minute turns into five.

I believe in elevating the Mundane to the level of Spectacle. Every day, our ragtag bohemian foursome tries to rock heavy and sing loud. I have no idea what will be remembered and what will be forgotten in our children's minds over time, but as their parents we are gonna cheat bigtime and cram in all the play and dancing and artmaking and impromptu expeditions to city and forest that we can so that something just might stick in those noggins.

Who knows what they will latch onto, but by the whitebeard of Odin, let their memories be ones that are filled with love, joy, empathy, and Kimya Dawson melody lines.

Why did Abraham Lincoln write the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope? I like to think it was because he forgot his Moleskine notebook and was creatively repurposing what would have been a scrap of trash.

I am glad that our brains have a filtering mechanism that allows us to prioritize information and learn how to train our brains to have some degree of control over what we allow into the memory banks to begin with.

(Also, I am well aware of how I am indiscriminately referring to generic Memory without acknowledgment of different types (short-term, long-term, explicit, implicit, autobiographical, etc.)
Thank you for noticing.)

Eventually, that process of learning to filter and thus prioritize is what allows some people to become highly-effective decisionmakers.* Sherlock Holmes refused to allow many types of information into his consciousness**; he didn't want to clutter his head with extraneous information.

*Malcolm Gladwell talks about this part of the brain, the ventralmedial prefrontal cortex, in Blink. It's kind of the gateway to rapid decision making and good judgment skills. And Yes, I did remember that without looking it up. It was important to me to remember it :) Read his book. Monumentally interesting.


**Although he was highly hypocritical on this point, particularly later on in his fictional life...

Wish I didn't remember some information so unconsciously. A decade since I last heard it, why am I able to recite the lyrics for the Beastie Boys' Paul Revere (1986) verbatim without even thinking about it? How did those get lodged in my fast-retrieval storage in so permanent a fashion?

I am grateful for forgetting. I hope that the gift of forgetting is one that our children will be blessed with when it comes to those times when our actions or words don't live up to our ideal.

That said, I am sure grateful to Google Calendar. There is a freedom in being able to dump all your schedule worries and stresses into a piece of cloud software...

So we returned my Mom's purse. Still haven't found my battery charger or glue gun, and I still don't remember who I was supposed to call back today...

Our family trip to return the purse: Was it a trip we had planned on taking? No. But it became an Opportunity. An opportunity to cruise through Christmas-lit neighborhoods and start making our Best of 2010 music lists.

(All Smiles will certainly be on my list. As will Sufjan Stevens, School of Seven Bells, MGMT, and Jeremy M. Long. And uhh, some others I don't remember).

Better go to bed. I have something important in the morning,  I think.

GUEST: MEMORY & DECLARATIVE INFORMATION (DR. JOHN MEDINA)

Excerpted and transcribed from Dr. John Medina’s keynote lecture.
“We live in a multi-cultural world. Does that mean we also have a multi-cultural brain?” 
2010 PNAIS Fall Educator’s Conference October 8, 2010 at Catlin Gable School

The following is from Dr. Medina’s Q&A session after his main address it was in response to a question from the audience about the value of reading a textbook chapter once.
___

The question is, if you read a chapter once, is it any good? What do we do with the clutter situation in this case?

There are many memory gadgets within the brain that only partially work with each other. So if you ever attend a conference by a non-brain scientist and they say “this is how memory works,” I want you to run out of the room, okay? Or at least stop your ears.

Because memory systems are not understood as a single unit. There’s no hard drive in the brain for memory...there are twelve different memory gadgets within the brain that exist, that operate in a semi-independent fashion. Where you learn to ride a bicycle is not in the same place that you learned that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Those are separate memory systems..

So, we have to talk about one memory system. Let’s talk about reading a chapter. Being able to read a chapter and regurgitate it isn’t what education is about. But it’s a simple figure that can be measured in a laboratory. It’s called declarative information. The Battle of Hastings in 1066 is about something you can declare. Six times seven is 42 is something you can declare. It’s used a lot in classrooms. What do we know about the declarative memory system within the pantheon of twelve memory systems? Here it is:

You can hold seven pieces of declarative information for 30 seconds. If you don’t repeat it, the brain will toss it. You have 30 seconds to hold it. This is called immediate memory. If you don’t repeat it within 30 seconds, it will go away. If you do repeat it within 30 seconds, it goes through another buffer, where it will reside for approximately two hours. It will now reside in your head for two hours.  So if you pass the 30 second mark, it will now go into this buffer called working memory. If you don’t repeat it within two hours, the brain will chuck it again! It will get rid of it! Most of human learning is controlled forgetting, which is why forgetting is as as much a part of the process as active learning is.

If you don’t repeat it within two hours, it will go away. If that’s the case, homework is not review, if it is way past the two hour mark. Homework is new learning, as far as the brain is concerned with declarative information.

If that were the case, it begs a great question for brain scientists and education professionals whenever we get together. You know what I do? I take a standard 60-minute lecture in high school - say there are normally six periods in this school, where you have 1-2-3-4-5-6 hours of unrepeated, declarative, firehosed information!

Instead, what if we did this: what if we busted that 60 minutes up into three 20-minute segments and then repeated each those 20-minute chunks every two hours throughout the course of the day? Over and over and over again, where there was constant repetition. Where you captured not only that 30-second gauntlet, but the two-hour gauntlet. Would that work? Would that obviate the need for homework?

Tons of standardized testing has occurred throughout the land. Most brain scientists go, “And what is this based on again?” No matter what we do, we ask that question a lot. If that’s the case with declarative information - you have 30 seconds, you have two hours...notice what I was saying, if you do repeat it within two hours, you have recruited it for long-term storage so that you might need it for a standardized test. But note that I said recruited. I didn’t say sorted. The question I will ask rhetorically is:

How long does it take after you’ve gone through 30 seconds, and you’ve gone through two hours, and all the repetition has occurred, how long does it take for that declarative memory trace to fully consolidate into the brain, such that it is infinitely retrievable, and not subject to corruption at retrieval? How long does it take?

Does it take a day? Does it take a week? Does it take a month? I will tell you how long it takes. Now this is declarative memory only. It takes about a decade. It takes ten years. It’s called systems consolidation and the guy’s name is Bob Stickgold. Systems consolidation. For declarative memory. Ten years. And in those ten years, it is not infinitely retrievable and it is subject to corruption. You know what that means?

It means that if somebody has learned something in the First Grade, they have not consolidated a unique declarative memory transfer until they are a Sophomore in high school. And, by the time they are a Senior, you are not graduating a Senior, you are graduating a Fourth Grader!

And if that’s the case, I have a research suggestion.

I’d do something like this: what if treated important important bodies of knowledge the same way we treated booster shots? And every year, just go ahead and revisit it. Stuff that’s already been learned. I would argue...a real good example: in Sixth Grade math, you have fractions. They seem to be a big deal. Why not repeat fractions over and over again from Grades Four to Six? If it takes ten years anyway, why not give it a course correction? That is research question. We don’t know what the answer to those questions might be, but the Ten-Year Journey is not an opinion, it is actually how the thing works.

____

*loosely transcribed by Joseph Long