My husband and I talk about the past to keep it alive. We went through a really bad experience with his family three years ago. It was over (until recently) and we had moved on, yet we found ourselves filling long car rides or late night conversations in bed with a “re-hashing” or the events. During the first year after we’d moved away, we were filled with frustration and unresolved anger; bringing up the memories only made the feelings fresh again. Yet it helped us work through what had happened to us; even though it meant repeating the memories over and over again.

By the second year we revisited the memories less often and with a much lower degree of emotion involved. We repeated the events in order as if to preserve them, to keep them whole in our minds. By the third year we didn’t talk about it as much. Just once in a while one of us would dip their toe into the past and stir up the muck that has settled at the back of our minds.

The memories of this time allowed us to heal. Like scrap books, we could choose to open them whenever we wanted and relive moments that caused us pain. This process was in a way cathartic; allowing us to sort through how we felt and find resolution in our own way. Memories reflected the pain and confusion of those events; which in the beginning ran fresh through our daily lives. By the third year the anger had subsided. We didn’t think about the past anymore, yet when we needed to we could pull the memories down from the shelf and open the pages of preserved emotion to remember.

With current events in our life forcing us back down the route we escaped from three years ago, I can now see the value in memory.  It has given us the healing we needed and prepared us for this new challenge we are facing with his family. By revisiting and keeping those memories alive we are confident in ourselves and what happened in the past so that we can face the present with strength.