The Desistance of Memory

Depression, memory loss, and the limited usefulness of the past

I wrote this essay last fall, and have spent the intervening months waiting for it to be rejected by a few fancy lit mags I submitted it to. As all but one have now turned it down and I expect the last to do the same, I’m sharing it here.

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (source)

O the dense melancholy of memories!

-Isaac Babel, “Gedali” (trans. Walter Morison)

It’s around 7:30 in the evening, and I’m idly scrolling through old pictures on my phone while I wait for my shift to end. I happen on one that puzzles me. A massive white grain elevator with CHAPPELL emblazoned on the side in huge black capital letters. It looks vaguely familiar. Is it a screenshot? It doesn’t look like any place I remember visiting in the years I’ve owned a smartphone. Still, I have an uneasy sense that this rural scene is meaningful to me. I just can’t remember how.

I consult the metadata: The picture was taken in Chappell, Nebraska at 7:02 PM on May 28, 2016. (The day before my birthday, I note.) But that can’t be true—I’ve never been to Nebraska.

I scroll through a few more pictures. A storefront church. An antique sign advertising a flooring showroom probably long since closed. Another featuring the legend WYOMING STATE HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT.

Wyoming? I know I’ve never been to Wyoming. Is something wrong with my phone? Am I seeing someone else’s pictures?

A couple more unremarkable small-town buildings. Several pictures of random signs. (I like taking pictures of random signs. Did I take these pictures?) A motel sign. A motel room interior. My backpack, sitting on the floor.

Huh. I guess that settles it. I text Lior: Did I drive across the country in 2016?

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Early in 2021—March, I think—I was laid off from my job. COVID. I had already been depressed for some time. On and off for most of my life, but in a particularly bad stretch in recent months. My doctor suggested something I hadn’t tried before: Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. ECT is prescribed for depression that has resisted the effects of oral medications, as mine had been doing repeatedly for years. The treatment was to last for several months, during which time I would not be able to drive. The job I’d just lost was driving buses, so this was a uniquely opportune moment to get my brain zapped. Besides, the list of notable people who have undergone ECT includes such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway . . . Sylvia Plath . . . David Foster Wallace . . . I would be in distinguished company.

Throughout that spring and summer, I was driven up to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore by David, a family friend. We were joined in the beginning by Lior, who had also been laid off and wanted to help. I had ECT three days a week to begin with, then two, then one, until I got my job back in August and needed to be able to drive again. 

ECT has a bad reputation, due in no small part to its famous portrayal in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the 1975 film based on the 1962 Ken Kesey novel. Asylum inmate R. P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) lies on a table, surrounded by no fewer than eight doctors, nurses, and orderlies. “This won’t hurt,” the doctor assures him. A nurse smears a gelatinous goo on his temples (“conductant,” she explains), jams a bite guard in his mouth to protect his tongue, and places a device resembling a headphone set over his head. The doctor turns a dial on a machine, and a jolt of electricity is delivered to the patient’s brain, inducing a grand mal seizure. McMurphy’s face turns beet red as he grunts and writhes, belying the doctor’s promise. 

The therapy is administered under general anesthesia these days, so I remained blissfully unaware as the electricity hit and my muscles seized. My experience with ECT was different in other ways, chief among which was that in contrast to McMurphy, it actually had an effect on me. Unfortunately, its primary effect was what should have been the side effect: Temporary anterograde and longer-lasting retrograde amnesia. In other words, my brain formed hardly any lasting memories while the treatment continued—think Memento, but a bit less extreme—and many past memories were dimmed or erased. The five years prior to the treatment were mostly obliterated, and the preceding five are Swiss cheese, at best. Turns out you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few neural circuits.

My few memories of that time are of repeated routine activities that I recall cumulatively, not as singular events. Being dropped off at the hospital. The ECT suite with its rows of hospital beds. The Indo-Caribbean security guard-cum-receptionist. Melinda, the head nurse, and the other nurses, whose names I don’t recall. One of them was an Orthodox Jew with a kippah; another always had fancy nails. The bathroom, which I learned to be sure to visit immediately prior to the treatment. The ECT room itself, the doctor, the anesthesiologist, the mask over my face that put me to sleep.

I have only one specific memory. This must have been late in the summer, for me to remember it at all. I’m at David’s house, and we’re watching old episodes of Jeopardy. I used to be good at Jeopardy. But now, though I know the answers are buried somewhere deep in my mind, I can’t bring them to the surface. They’re like precious gems buried too far down to dig up. I can sense that they’re there, but I don’t know how to get at them. I used to know state capitals like I know my own name. Now I can’t remember the capital of Michigan. What is . . . Detroit? Damn, shouldn’t’ve wagered it all. Sorry Alex, maybe I’m not as smart as I thought I was.

The list of things I don’t remember is far more expansive. 

In May 2021, a number of weeks after starting ECT, I spent a week in the hospital with a collapsed lung. There is still a ghost of a scar on my upper right side where a tube was inserted to drain the fluid. I recently learned Lior spent time with me during visiting hours. That was nice of him. I was there for my birthday. There’s a picture on my phone of a gift my father sent. My mother informs me I was in terrible pain. I know about all of this the same way I know about World War I or the Protestant Reformation—it’s well-documented, and there seems to be a general consensus that it happened. My little scar is the only physical evidence.

In 2019, I went to Chicago for my niece’s bat mitzvah. I have a few vague memories associated with this event, but they’re like single frames from a destroyed reel of film, lacking context or greater relevance. There must have been a party. I’m told I was in my brother’s house. When I returned last November for my nephew’s bar mitzvah, I entered the same house as though for the first time. I’d been wondering if anything would spark even a flicker of a memory. Nothing did.

In 2018, I quit bus driving for what turned out to be a brief foray into trucking. More memories of this experience have returned to me, mostly of the people I met in the training program of the Arkansas company I worked for. Joe, a chain-smoking Mississippian fifty-something. Jarmarcus, a young Alabaman about whom I remember nothing in particular but his warm smile. A nameless guy from Missouri who hated me for some reason. I bonded with two fellow-northerners: Jorge from New Jersey, and another guy from upstate New York or Long Island, I think. I don’t recall his name or face. I did my over-the-road training with a Guatemalan-American named Jaime who I liked at first and gradually came to loathe. My only clues as to where we went come from the fridge magnets I collected at truck stops along the way. One is from Tucumcari, New Mexico, so we must have made it at least that far.

And in 2016, I drove to Wyoming, apparently. 

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

-George Bernard Shaw, The Irrational Knot

In the hours and days after the Wyoming trip was confirmed, the basic shape of the event returned to me. The fact of the trip was reestablished in my mind. The pictures in my phone filled in some detail, and I supplemented these with old texts I exhumed from my message history. Some of these appeared to have been exchanged with a Colorado man I must have met on a dating app, though whether we met in person remains unknown.

In the months that followed, I continued to discover new details. Of this trip, of my trucking adventure, of dozens of events and incidents from the momentous to the trivial. I don’t quite know what to do with these. I don’t know how to classify them, how to relate to them. If I am made aware that an event took place, but can’t conjure a single image or thought or emotion associated with it, can I truly say I remember it? Do a handful of photos and text messages amount to a memory? Or do I remember these events as I “remember” World War I, hazy and dim, half-understood, only as real as whatever documents and images I happen to lay eyes on all these years later? If I hadn’t photographed that grain elevator, that motel room, would I have remained oblivious of the trip for the rest of my life? Even now, it feels dishonest to say I have been to those places, experienced the sensation of breathing the rural Nebraska air, walking the quiet small-town streets, sleeping in the off-brand roadside motels.

This problem is not confined to places I went and things I did. In 2010, I started listing every movie and TV show I watch in a little black notebook. A few years later, I began marking the flyleaf of each book I read with the date of completion. Thanks to this obsessive impulse to chronicle everything I do, I have a thorough list of books and movies I now need to revisit. Between October 2020 and March 2021, I read nine Anthony Trollope novels. I couldn’t tell you the first thing about any of them. There’s a bookmark nearly two hundred pages into a tenth, which I assume I left there when I started ECT. Why read something you know you won’t remember? What I did instead that spring and summer was watch a lot of Netflix. According to my notebook, I watched dozens of seasons of television between April and August, many of which I can’t picture at all now. Flipping back a few pages to 2020, I see as many titles that baffle me as ones I can remember. Can I say that I’ve really seen these movies, read these books?

The further back I go, the less is clouded by ECT. On the other hand, the further back I go, the more is clouded by time. It’s often difficult to tell if a blurry recollection is a casualty of the therapy or simply of a lousy memory. Did I have a good memory before ECT? I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. And why do I remember one movie (or book, or event, or conversation) from, say, seven years ago, but not another one I watched (or read, or participated in) around the same time? Something makes those specific titles shine brighter. Maybe I read an article about this one that set off a chain reaction of associations that withstood the ECT, at least in part. Maybe that one provoked a strong emotional response. I’ve noticed that many seemingly random memories I have are associated with a strong emotion—usually a negative one. Embarrassment, more often than not. One early childhood memory—one of very few—is of me at a single-digit age, sitting on a hard gym floor at summer camp, a growing puddle flowing outward with me in its center as the other kids scramble away to escape its approach. I can picture this incident (or, rather, accident), but I couldn’t tell you a single thing I did at camp that summer, or in school the next year, or anywhere at any time in my first decade of life. 

Is this what memory is? A greatest hits of embarrassments and disappointments, with some state capitals thrown in for good measure? I had these thoughts the first time I looked at my college transcript, still incomplete after almost twenty years, post-ECT. It’s marred by Ws from the numerous semesters I had to withdraw from my classes, and quite a few Fs from semesters I was too depressed to bother. I’ll never finish anyway, I figured, so what difference does it make? I was doomed to spend the rest of my life as an underpaid bus driver, driving around in circles, depression blocking all the exits. And sure enough, that’s exactly where I was that evening as I scrolled through the pictures from my forgotten trip. Back at the dead-end job, not taking classes, only slightly less depressed than I’d been pre-ECT, unable to remember years of my life.

Maybe this last wasn’t that bad. If life was so terrible, why shouldn’t I forget it? At times I feel nostalgia for ECT. There was something thrilling about that moment the mask would slip over my face, and I knew that in seconds I’d be dead to the world. The prospect of oblivion has a certain appeal. You get into bed at the end of a hard day and just want to drop off the face of the earth, to not have to think about anything, worry about anything, even dream about anything.  Oblivion. From the Latin oblivisci, to forget. There’s a comfort in forgetting. Not all of my resurfaced memories have been welcome. And there are others I never lost, but maybe wish I had. 

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

-Christina Rossetti, “Remember”

I’m on a date with a guy I met on an app. We’re at his place, a cramped little house on a dead-end street that he shares with a few Georgetown students. His housemates are hosting a party. The small backyard is crammed with people talking, drinking, and smoking. A stereo is blaring out a playlist of folk rock, Americana, and alt-country. A song ends. Pause. A new song starts: A chorus of whistling, accompanied by guitar and tambourine. 

I sit up erect, startled, as if someone has fired a gun in the room. My eyes widen. My heart rate speeds up. 

“What is this song?”

My date, mildly alarmed, doesn’t know.

“I know this song, it’s—”

It’s what? What is it? Why is it arousing this response in me?

The song keeps playing. The lyrics are familiar. I can almost sing along. I pull out my phone and identify it with an app. The name is familiar, too. It’s called “Home.”

Felipe? I think to myself.

I don’t stay much longer. I politely take my leave. I don’t tell him I don’t want to see him again.

In my car, I find the song and play it as I drive home. Felipe, I think, more confident this time.

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I met Felipe in the summer of 2016. It must have been just days after I got home from my road trip. Things got very serious very fast. We fell in love. Moved in together. Talked about getting married. And then, two months later, I pulled the plug. I only have a vague sense of why I cut short what seemed like a fairytale romance. I can’t solely blame ECT for this—unlike the trip, I never forgot Felipe. The therapy may have blurred some of the details, but the major bullet points were still there. No, I’m not sure why I ended it because I’m not sure I knew at the time.

Felipe played the song for me. “Home.” It might even have been on our first date. He had heard it and liked it and wanted me to hear it too. I suppose it was “our song,” or would have been, if given more time. “Home is wherever I’m with you,” the chorus goes. We exchanged a meaningful look when that line came around. Lame, I know, but c’est l’amour.

I played a song for him, too. “Young Americans,” by David Bowie. I thought of it when Felipe, a recent immigrant from Colombia, insisted that he too was an American. We listened to both songs frequently, his sappy love song and my catchy Bowie song.

Songs amass associations in the listener’s psyche, as circumstances of time and place accrete like nacre on a pearl, or litter on an ocean garbage patch. I keep a playlist of dozens of nineties songs that, whether about sex or suicide, masturbation or meth addiction, evoke memories of being in seventh grade, when my oldest brother would drive me to school and we’d listen to one or another of the DC rock stations. Some of the songs call up more specific memories of places I heard them or people I was with. Until quite recently, listening to these songs made me feel like I was a seventh grader. They transported me back to that time. I didn’t feel I was hearing them as an adult.

In 2016, I worried something similar would happen with “Young Americans.” It didn’t take long for me to second-guess my decision to break up with Felipe, and I didn’t want this song I liked to be tainted by painful memories. So I listened to it constantly. Every morning, afternoon, and night,¹ three times in a row or more, cleansing it of the accumulated sadness and regret. I didn’t listen to the other song, though. “Home.” I left it alone, let it sink below the surface and recede into the depths of my memory, shrouded in images of Felipe. The ECT buried it deeper still, transmuted it into one of those gems, lodged in my brain but hiding out of reach, till the night those opening whistles hit me like a slap in the face and the raw emotion of the images and associations overcame me before I knew why.

No man and no force can abolish memory.

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The two-month Felipe affair wasn’t my first “fairytale romance.” A much longer-lasting one burned bright for a time before fizzling out and falling apart, and it casts a much longer shadow. It substantiates the notion of my memory—my past, my life—as a catalogue of embarrassments and disappointments, failed classes and failed relationships.

But maybe that’s not quite right. Depression warps the mind, distorting the sufferer’s perception of events and experiences. Throw in the additional damage wrought by ECT, and you’re left with an unreliable narrator who may not be fit to tell his own story without an unfair negative bias.

The journalist Michael C. Moynihan, cohost of The Fifth Column podcast, has observed that there are two common and equally bad genres of popular U.S. history. One mythologizes the past, portraying the United States as a shining city upon a hill, a beacon of freedom and paragon of democracy, an exceptional force for good in the world, while minimizing or eliding the darker chapters of our history. The other claims to bust the myths, presenting a straightforward tale of greed, colonialism, genocide, slavery, and war—unmitigated evil from beginning to end. Both narratives may be factual, but neither is true. They are comprised of facts, but omit other facts that would complicate the predetermined narrative. While pure, unbiased objectivity may not be possible, a writer whose primary aim is to advance an agenda is not a trustworthy historian.

Yes, my college transcript could be described as a long, slow-motion car crash. True, my past relationships did not turn out as expected. It hasn’t been hard in my lowest moments to compose a narrative about a sad, pathetic loser who will never accomplish anything in life, who’s not even driving in circles but stalled on the side of the road, trying now and then to restart the engine. There are facts in that narrative. But it leaves out a great deal, including the simple fact that each time I broke down, I did eventually get moving again. I’ve even had my fair share of successes—the As on my transcript far outnumber the Fs. And is the only successful relationship one that ends in death? Can’t a failed one still be a net positive if, for example, you come out of it with a lifelong friend who is there for you when you need him, who visits you in the hospital and remembers the last decade of your life better than you do?

But here’s an even better reason not to worry about the past too much: It’s over. Time is unidirectional. One gear, no reverse. Obsessing over history does little to help navigate the road going forward. Learn from it as best you can, but don’t live by it. Rather than guiding you into the future, it’ll keep you idling in a never-ending present.

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In the spring of 2022, about eight months after finishing ECT, I embarked on a different kind of trip: Ketamine therapy. It has—to borrow a phrase from another popular song—got my motor running.

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1. Aaaalllllllll night