The Great Forgetting

Monthly Newsletter | Spain, October 2023

Abuelo y abuela, circa 1950, Cantabria, Spain

Listen via audio:

Good morning,

I’m writing to you today from Northern Spain where I’ve come to visit my grandmother. She’s on the early onsets of dementia, and our days are steady loops of repetition. Repeated questions, repeated answers, repeated panics. It’s full on.

There is a very precise heartache that comes from seeing someone you love forget.

She is entering another space now, one that slowly wipes out an entire life. Eight decades in her case. Though she doesn’t seem to forget her memories of eating honey off the comb from her aunt’s hives as a girl, or the sweet beginnings of love with my grandfather and the tenderness in his first kiss, or the late summer climbs up her fig tree that is the very muse of this publication.

Memory is a strange thing. It keeps us tethered to this world. And when it goes, we go. Our identity. Our place here. Dementia is like the beginning of orienting ourselves towards the Otherworld for the ultimate departure.

And so I’m writing to you today from the plaza in my grandmother’s city. This is where I used to come as a child. My cousins and I would play hide and seek here, counting behind the wide bark of the magnolia - my grandfather’s favourite tree - and scrambling up the twisting trunks of the olive trees that seemed to wind up to the sky like Jack’s bean stalk. Or at least I would imagine it did. We would work out dance routines and sing Disney soundtracks in the gazebo to invisible audiences, and some days we’d even ride the wild steeds on the merry-go-round.

Coming back to Santander is a mixed experience for me. It’s one of the most conservative cities in Spain. And my family is very traditional. My father left in his early twenties with a plan to go to Australia - the furthest-most point on the map - never to return. My family were Falangists. My grandfathers on both sides fought for Franco during the civil war.

For those of you who don’t know, Spain had a brutal civil war in the thirties between the liberal reformists, or republicans, and the conservatives led by the military general Franco. The war resulted in a dictatorship that lasted for almost forty years.

My father was born and raised under Franco. A concept that seems utterly surreal to me when I think about it. I can’t imagine living under a dictator. Falangism believes in total authority, hierarchy and order. It is essentially a fascist movement. My grandmother certainly maintains that in her household. Order may be her favourite word. Even now in her old age. In her forgetting.

I really just come back here to see her. Especially now that she’s beginning to forget. Her dementia has been spreading like ink in water and every time I see her she has forgotten a little bit more.

My extended family was the oppressor. They killed poets like Lorca. Indirectly. But the hands here drip with blood. It oozes off the pearl earrings that are the signature jewellery of these parts and so I have always hated pearls. And even the picture-perfect babies in their prams of traditional pinks for girls and blues for boys look somehow guilty. Perhaps because I know the violence they are capable of. An oppressiveness I felt myself here even as a child dressed in brightly-coloured dungarees and so mistaken for a boy. We never quite fit in here, my parents, sister and I. In this place of manicured impressions and blood dripping hands and Lacoste jumpers that men drape over their shoulders like capes gone wrong.

Sometimes I feel a repulsion here so obsolete it makes me shudder. And yet, as is the great paradox of things, I also feel love. Belonging, even. A part of me is of this place, after all. Flesh and bone. I wouldn’t have lasted very long in the thirties, no doubt.

In my early twenties I tried to understand what could have driven the extremism of these parts. To find a mercy of sorts.

Wars are terribly nuanced. There is no one ideology. Not really. It is made of individuals. Each bringing their own universe inside them and fighting for what they believe to be true.

I know very little about my grandfather’s experience of the war. He refused to speak of it. But I do know that he was too young to be enlisted and so he went as a volunteer; of his own free will. A brave move even if I don’t agree with his politics. I know that he was driven to take up arms after his cousin was executed by the Republicans.

My dad recently told me that he had actually been taken to be executed too. But his father, my great-grandfather Leon had been a kind man to the land-workers, giving his lands away freely to those in need. And so his son was spared. My abuelo.

Over the years, in my struggle to understand him, I have read accounts that argue the majority of men who fought for Franco are not proud of what they did, and are remembered as loving grandfathers who never spoke about the war. I imagine this silence to be the case in veterans of any war. The majority of men with weapons are not murderers. They are not evil. They are victims of a broken system and chess pieces; ploys.

And there is a great silence here. A great forgetting.

The devastation that resulted from the civil war and the four decades of Franco’s rule is still too fresh. My grandmother still denies that there are mass graves, attributing their mention to communist propaganda whenever they’re mentioned on TV.

But historians estimate that about 114,000 people disappeared or were buried in mass graves scattered across the country, massacred by supporters of Franco during or after the civil war. And eighty years on from one of the country's darkest chapters, the ditches and mass graves are still unidentified. And we are no nearer to resolving how to deal with this dark past.

I wonder if it is things like these that cause us to forget in our old age. Aside from the obvious physical and neuronic reasons, it seems pretty likely to me that there comes a point in a person’s life when the vessel is just full. I certainly feel it at times.

You know when you reach those levels of stress and exhaustion, or when you’re pushed to an emotional edge, and the body just shuts down. It’s almost like dementia is a prolonged version of that. When the mind just can’t take in any more. And it begins to shut down.

My grandmother has had a tough life. Yet since I arrived, she keeps repeating to me how lucky she has been; how good she’s had it. It’s wonderful how the mind can do that. It’s almost liberating. Life’s ultimate benefaction: the Great Forgetting.

And it is hell. No doubt. Especially when the person experiencing it knows it’s happening. And for their inner circle and all those who love them. I imagine it to be like purgatory. Not in the sense of it being the place where sinners are judged, but rather it being a stage of life that cleanses and purifies. An experience that can at times feel infernal, but it is essentially the ultimate release.

When we forget, we are free.

I think of the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where a couple go through a medical procedure to erase each other from their memories when their relationship goes south.

How often I have wished to forget moments of pain, or betrayal, or the great shames from my own dishonesty and deceptions.

There is a quality of redemption in forgetting. And this is the aspect I choose to focus on when I watch her forget. My grandmother who was a woman of elegance and dignity and totalitarianism, now reduced to a parroting of questions repeated over and over again. A record broken inside her.

Entering her world demands total awareness. Otherwise, she casts a web and catches you in it and before you know it you have been wholly consumed. My partner reflected the other day that spending time with someone with dementia ends up making you feel like you have it too!

And to be distracted is certain death. She doesn’t mean to spin her web. But her forgetting turns her into the Black Widow and all who hold themselves without total attention will doubtless be caught and eaten.

Entering her world means resisting the urge to numb out. It is the ultimate test of patience. After all, there’s only so many times you can respond to the same question without losing your own mind. It is, essentially, the ultimate act of devotion. To stay when everything screams “run”.

I catch myself wanting to check out sometimes. My mind escaping to more pleasant things - thoughts of future plans or memories of laughter and summer swims or my beloved’s kisses. And it takes everything to bring myself back. To be present with her. To offer her the only thing I can give her now: my undivided attention. As Simone Weill would say, attention is the ultimate form of generosity. And absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.¹

Perhaps this is religious. There is really no need for a church when you have a loved one who is forgetting. Our devoutness is not demonstrated by our presence in man-made structures and empty rituals, but in how we show up at the feet of our loved ones when they suffer. This is serving at the temple of the gods.

Coming to accompany her for periods of time means the ultimate push into a totality of presence. Total awareness. Which means there is just no more space for nonsense. When I come here, everything that is untrue in my life gets pulled apart. And it hurts. And I often dread coming because I know what it takes.

And now here I am. Sitting at the plaza, the magnolias and olives who knew me when my imagination was still freshly baptised holding the invisible fort around me, still, so that in these moments of peace I can summon the energy it will take to be there for her. To serve at my grandmother’s temple as she moves through purgatory.

The mythic imagination helps to make sense of impossible things. It doesn’t make them any less impossible. But it does offer a shred of insight that, should we be so lucky, can bestow us the grace of a little peace.

---

Poetry Offering

This poem is by Antonio Machado (1875), a Spanish poet known here as the Poet of the People.

And Must It Die With You…?

And must the magical world die with you, 
where the memory keeps 
the purest breaths of life, 
the white shadow of love first,
the voice that went to your heart, 
the hand that you wanted to hold in dreams, 
and all the loves
that reached the soul, to the deep sky?
And must your world die with you, 
the old life in order yours and new?
Do the anvils and crucibles of your soul 
work for the dust and for the wind?

---

This next poem is one I wrote in the early hours of the morning on one of the harder days, while abuela slept and the house was as it had always been and it was as though she was somehow still there in her fullness.

The Likelihood of a Godless World
It is perhaps in the mornings
when we are most alone. 
When the stillness of sleep lingers 
like mist 
over those that we love 
and a great dream 
we are no longer a part of 
continues without us. 

There is a heart break 
in waking, in the stirring 
of a peace known only in sleep
and - I imagine - in death. 

I tail the shadow of this untroubled place
that is free from the chains of my worries. 
I hunt for it in fields of wild flowers 
and in the silences of my lover
before he regathers his words and
we stumble once more in the dark.

But alone in the morning, 
there is an existentialism acute and sharp, 
a banality in the memory of encounters 
that the bright of day deem fated,
and a Godless world all the more likely. 

---

Announcements

As usual, I will be running the monthly rite for women on the New Moon, and the dismemberment ceremony on the last Sunday of the month (open to all).

For Samhain on October 31st, I’ll be holding another round of oracular guidance with my colleague Chelsy Arber.

I’m also excited to be beginning a monthly series of three online lectures via the Psychedelic Society on the female shamans of prehistory.

And lastly I’ll be teaching my last online course of the year The Three Secret Selves in November.

Here are all the links:

5th October: Online Lecture Series: When Women Were the Shamans

14th October: New Moon Rite

29th October: Dismemberment Ceremony

31st October: Oraculum

9th November: The Three Secret Selves

1. Simone Weill (1952) Gravity and Grace, Routledge Classics