The Art of Remembering

Five.

Five seconds of chaos after you made a familiar turn, trusting the rules of the LEDs that illuminated the signals above you.

Five minutes awake in a hotel in Alabama before a phone call that would change my life.

Five hours of forcing my body to keep moving until I’m back home in Indiana, hugging my family.

Five days—days absent from my memory—of planning your funeral and trying to find the words to honor everything you are.

Five weeks, and several more, sharing the gospel from the stage. Each week, before my eyes were hundreds of children whose bright smiles mirrored my own. 

Meanwhile, 

behind my eyes, 

behind my smile, 

festered a wound that threatened to rot me from the inside out.

Five months and we’re facing our first holiday season without you.

Five years and your absence is a missing limb, but I’m still forcing my body to keep moving until I’m back home hugging you again.

Numbers are strange.

A simple change in units, or even just context, can mean a major difference in the weight a numerical value carries.

Your mind barely registers the passing of an hour spent scrolling through the curated lives of strangers, 

but all of your awareness is seized in seconds after seeing a loved one’s face appear on your phone,

when the plane of glass in your palm is the closest you’ll ever get to that person on this plane of existence.

In the time it takes for air to fill your lungs, it is stolen just as quickly by the impact of grief flooding the mind instantaneously. 

A lifetime condensed into seconds.

Synapses flashing between neurons like lightning, an electric web of thought and emotion—

The brain’s impressively efficient, yet imperfect process.

Imperfect because it doesn’t quite hold everything—it’s not a vault.

It’s a flimsy box of jumbled pieces that gets mishandled by the process of struggling to remember, 

and struggling to forget.

Thus, some of the pieces fall through the cracks of time:

An exact quote

The specifics of a conversation

How they moved their hands when they spoke

The distinct combination of aromas that greeted your nostrils during a hug

The little mannerisms that once annoyed you

How the skin around their eyes looked when they were tired

The melodies of their laugh

Bits and pieces.

Puzzle pieces.

Missing. Lost.

Albeit, not all of them,

And not most, either.

But blank spaces, unmistakably.

Nevertheless, you put the pieces together. 

You step back.

Your frustration with the process fades,

and is replaced by your fondness for the incomplete work of art staring back at you. 

It’s no longer just a puzzle, but a picture, and the image is unmistakable.  

Not simple. Not soft. 

But powerful. Priceless.

And so you carry this picture, and others like it, not in the pocket of your jeans, but in your heart, kept close.

Guarded as they are, you’re reminded that photographs, too, are subject to the effects of time.

Creases.

Folds.

Rips.

Tears.

Warping.

Curling.

Frayed edges.

Fading.

Fading.

Fading.

Thankfully, the puzzle pieces drifting around in your mind,

And the curated images clutched by your heart,

Gave life to murals painted on the walls of your soul.

They are, of course, exposed to the elements.

But they’re not hidden away—

Rather, they’re laid bare.

Although few people will get a chance to see these murals up close,

This artwork is still experienced by those who interact with you,

For you are the product of those murals,

And the people who inspired them.

I stand before one of my own murals today. The story of two lives intertwined. Her out-of-the-blue yet well-timed texts saying, “I love you!” The venomous retorts hurled through doors slammed shut. The words I wanted to say but couldn’t seem to express. Arguments waged from two sides that could only see part of the picture, and misunderstood half of what they did see. Conversations that took place days or even weeks later in which we finally tried to understand. The necessary questions no one else would ask. Watching her tired laughter turn to sobs as I realized she had been barely hanging on that semester.

A weathered collage of words, information, images, and feelings captured on the canvas of time.

Time.

Growing up is learning that time isn’t linear.

Growing up

is learning that pain and healing, 

grief and joy

aren’t mutually exclusive. 

Rather, there’s overlap.

Shared space.

In fact, they’re messy.

Crowded.

And finding peace with the scary process of growing up

Is discovering the abundant beauty in the mess.

It’s noticing that numbers are strange.

Like how five minutes with a special person you’ve lost

become hundreds 

when multiplied by all the times you pull that moment out of the pocket of your memory.

Or how their age at the time of their passing

Is so much more than a number that stopped accumulating,

It’s a number that held decades of experiences and connections.

Or how the number of laps around the sun without them,

Is also the number of years you got to stay. 

The number of years you chose to stay.

The number of years you chose to leave your bed even when you didn’t want to.

The number of years you didn’t give up on the person in the mirror looking back at you after you walked away from that bed.

The number of years you kept moving.

Years of falling. 

Years of getting up. 

Years of failing. 

Years of trying again. 

Years of broken. 

Years of healing. 

Years seeing, 

hearing, 

touching, 

tasting, 

smelling. 

Years doing. 

Years helping.

Years wondering. 

Years learning. 

Years creating. 

Years. 

Years. 

Years.

So here I stand,

With my puzzles and their missing pieces,

My pictures with their frayed edges and discoloration,

My murals with their chipped paint and rain-runoff-stained bricks—

Art produced not by some professional but by the unsteady, untrained hands of the messy, imperfect child that is me, still figuring out the world and life.

All of these my treasure trove

of the stories I got to read and write, 

the stories I’ll never know, 

and the ones still being written.

This is the plight 

of the art of living and of loving.

Plight,

“A difficult, dangerous, or unfortunate situation.” 

The truth about difficult things is that they’re worth doing.

Dangerous acts are opportunities to be bold and to build courage.

Unfortunate situations can highlight all the fortune we do possess.  

And so,

I will continue to ponder the peculiarity of numbers.

I will find peace with the perplexity of time, 

and relinquish my desperate need to control it.

And I will contend with this plight,

the art of remembering.

I promise to make meaning with the blank pages of my own story. And I look forward to the day I can go over every page with you, and tell you about all those years.

In the meantime, I turn my face toward the years to come, knowing they’re more than just years of missing you.

They’re years of still loving you, and still being changed by having known you.

6/6/26