No Greater Sorrow Than to Recall a Happy Time
“Our minds shape reality … that is why superstitious peasants burn witches, jealous lovers murder their beloved, and lonely veterans put nooses around their necks.”
― Nicolas Lietzau, Dreams of the Dying
From my perspective, our memories shape our dreams, and it depends on us which realms we would live in.
I often drowned in a dream that brought me back in memory two days before Grandma’s death in the hospital. It was a hot afternoon. The only wind and pump rotation come from a large window covered in navy blue curtains.
I rested on the hospital floor reading a journal about synesthesia that was so boring that it felt interesting a week ago before I got stuck in an isolation room that was like a spaceship without command with this drug-filled smell.
In a journal titled Synesthesia: a sixth sense or a sensation: a research project based upon interviewing persons with color synesthetes written by Lynn Kate Goode, I quote a sentence I really feel:
There will be colors of trauma that often create bad memories or unpleasant feelings.
While inhaling the hospital wind through two masks covering nearly half my face, I remembered and traced a row of dreams in the nights before.
I fall from the snowy ground of blue Tosca color. immersed in the blue waters of the sea. Eaten by dark purple whales.
the colors reflect what is around the hospital. curtains are sea blue. oxygen number on the ECG screen in blue Tosca. And pulse rate numbers on the ECG screen are dark purple.
But that a moment when I’m crumbling under the window, listening to Grandma’s constant pulse sounding fast like a racehorse, and thinking what technique I’m going to use to make Grandma want to eat again, is a moment of no taste but a lot of meaning.
It was empty. I just want to get out of that place. all healed and healthy as ever.
It turned out to be a living-free moment in my head, which I wanted to get rid of.
Pinus’s mother, who left her first home, about 7 years ago, left the same memories and moments as I had in Pinus’s head. Pinus said death is nothing but regret.
“All you can do is just reminisce the good thing, and forget the bad one,”
I don’t agree. I’m still based on what Dante Alighieri said that there is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time when miserable.
Or “There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.” also well said by Dante.
“So what is miserable?” he asked me,
“When we can't have the good old days,”
“Because you overshadowed by your fault, which only happened in your mind,”
“The worst feeling on grief is the guilt because I can't save them,”
“Save them from what?”
“From the death,”
“Life is either no good. You perceive death as a bad toll because you have no experience of it. Why would you hold them to moving on? Death is not the end of the journey. It’s about perceiving the core of the life,"
“What about my guilt?”
“That’s your business. not their business. Guilt is just the ego that makes your life pathetic,”
We were on our way back home after bought some bread. As he drove, he pats my head and gave his last advice. I always consider every sentence from him as advice because he experiences everything I felt before.
His grief takes years by years. He sometimes remembered his Mother when we talked about motherhood stuff or planning to have a child one day.
“That’s why people need to make a bunch of good memories. so that they would be remembered,”
