The Restoration of Memory
What I want from heaven is way more precious than a treasure chest full of gold.
This spring has been tough for me mentally. I’m sure it’s partly because my body remembers what it was like at this time two years ago—anticipating the birth of my twins—my skin so stretched, and all of me aching. My heart was so full of love, longing, and quite a bit of fear.
I knew it would be the hardest thing I had ever done. It was so much harder than I had ever imagined.
I’m sure it’s partly because I’m watching a few friends and family members welcome their new babies. My third nephew was born at the end of January. We are expecting a niece in September. Another friend of mine gave birth to her first child in the late evening yesterday. These are of course joyous occasions, but for me they bring up some mixed emotions.
A couple months ago I saw a friend at our chiropractic office. Her tiny little newborn son was getting one of his first adjustments, and as I walked by, I smiled at his tiny little arms waving, his little voice wavering in the cry I knew was so loud in my friend’s ears, even as it was so quiet in mine.
“Does this bring you back to when the twins were this little?” My chiropractor asked, smiling at me where I stood in the hall.
“Yeah, it totally does,” I said without thinking, chasing said toddler twins towards the front door.
I didn’t mean to lie.
But I realized as I shoved my way out the glass doors, one baby on my hip, and another tiny hand held in my own, that I don’t actually remember that time. It’s all lost in a fog of intense sleep deprivation and horrible trauma. My memory of my last season of newborn cuddles is in tatters—the bits and pieces I have left are like the shreds of a runaway kite stuck high in a tree, forever out of reach.
The twins turn two in July, and as all Moms do as their kids grow up, I find myself overwhelmed by the bitter and the sweet of it. Jordan walks with such determined ferocity these days; her little arms pumping back and forth with determination. Nathan wants to take everything apart like his older brother Boaz, and it seems he is no longer interested in toys, only kitchen appliances. They both learn a handful of new words every day.
They are growing up. And the hardest part is that they are my last babies, and I feel like I missed it.
So much of that tiny baby phase—a phase I tried so hard to prepare for—has been lost to me. I didn’t get my peaceful blissed out fourth trimester just soaking up the newborn cuddles.
I spent the first four days of the twins life staring vacantly at our hospital room, my nervous system so keyed up, and my babies so hungry that sleep was impossible.
I spent the first week at home weeping constantly.
I spent the second week battling a gross area of infection on my scar from a steristrip that had somehow tucked itself inside my incision. I was anxious every day that I was going to have to return to the place and the people that harmed me.
I spent the following four weeks home alone with five children, trying to figure out what the rest of my life was going to look like now that everything had changed. And then I packed our entire life up in preparation for a move we had neither planned nor expected.
When the twins were six weeks old, we moved away from the city where we’d spent over a decade—away from the backyard with the peach tree I had planted, and the garden I had tended. Away from the tiny home which was everything I had ever wanted in a first home and more—I touched every single wall of that place with a paint brush, and my decorative eye. I’d even picked out a color for the nursery and painted like a crazy woman—my twin belly barely sliding past the bunk beds of the tiny room as I rolled on the light mint color, “Snowbound,” like my life and sanity had depended on it.
It was the right thing. But that didn’t make it any easier.
It wasn’t until close to the end of 2021 that I finally heeded the command of my midwives to find a therapist. That’s when things began to turn around for me—with the help of the a Somatic Experiencing modality, I finally broke free of the dissociation that had me trapped behind a frosted glass for the first four months of my twins lives.
Four months I can never get back.
If you are a mother too, I know you know this—the grief of time you can never get back. The squishy newborn phase you can never return to. The sweetness of the way your two year old said, “stoof” for “stool,” and “dike” for “dark.” The way your middle child communicated in varying pitches of squeaks and squeals his entire second year of life.
Or perhaps you aren’t a mother, but this stirs to mind moments with another loved one whom you have since lost touch with—or perhaps grievously—lost altogether. Perhaps you too feel the weight of the memories and moments that seems to slip through your fingers like so much sand—there is no containing them.
My mother was always a whiz at scrapbooking. When I was a child, I determined to be just like her in every way. But it didn’t take me long into adulthood to realize that this just wasn't my thing. And like many millennials, I struggle to even print off pictures at all, let alone cut out and arrange them into artful designs. I try and write about precious moments with my kids of course, but I know that for every moment I actually capture with the pen and the page, a dozen more slip through the sieve of my mind and are subsequently lost forever.
How many times have I thought to myself, “I will never forget this moment.” Only to know that I have forgotten most of the moments about which I have declared those words.
Sleep deprivation doesn’t help. I have spent a lot of time vainly hoping that there is some sort of backup server in my mind squirreling away all the precious memories I have made over the past two years, and as soon as I start actually sleeping again, they will all come online like a screensaver of beauty floating behind my eyelids.
This loss of memory, of moments we can never get back—this is the reason that even the joy of my life is so often tinged with grief.
But this past year I have begun to believe something that has brought me hope. If you are from my hyper-conservative evangelical past, you might be afraid of this imaginative thinking—but bear with me.
It’s true, there isn’t a verse anywhere in the Bible that I can point to and say, “yes! See! I’m right. What I believe about this is true.” But I do think that some of the following thoughts flow from the truth that at the end of all this grief, this life—everything good will be restored. “The restoration of all things,” they call it.
Some of these thoughts are fueled by John Eldridge’s imaginative book, The Restoration of All Things, though he doesn’t mention this idea in particular in that work. But he brought into sharp relief that beautiful turn of phrase for me, at a time in my life when I really needed it—so I hope you’ll allow me to inject this hopeful idea into whatever grief clouds your present.
After that, you can take it or leave it. It’s truly up to you.
So here is my theory that gives me hope:
Perhaps, at the end of all this; after we’ve wrapped our arms around the spear-pierced, yet solid middle of Jesus—the God-Man with scars in his hands—we will see that none of these moments were actually lost. Perhaps instead, like the tears we shed, they are being kept somewhere sacred and treasured.
Perhaps, the “treasures in heaven” includes things such as this: the feeling of my newborn daughter held tight against my chest. The smell of her head on that first inhale. The way her tiny fingers fisted around my thumb immediately.
Perhaps it includes, the first time she ever said, “I love you.” The first time she said she was sorry, and really meant it. The first time she held her brothers, then later, her sister—her eyes filling with grateful tears she could not understand. Perhaps these treasures even include the memories of moments I didn’t get, but should have had.
Those first four hours with my son Boaz—spent with him in my arms and not somewhere else in the hospital, on monitors far away from where I could see or touch or smell him, only a weak cell phone signal and shoddy reception tying us together.
The first time Jordan cried. This time, she’d be in my arms wailing, and not on the other side of the operating room. This time, I’d know immediately she was fine, and I wouldn’t have to ask anyone, “is she okay?”
The moment of holding my twins for the first time against my chest, not clouded with pain and grief as it was in this life, but whole and pure and perfect the way it should have been. A WHOLE memory. Or a memory somehow brought into perfect wholeness, by the God who witnessed it all and held it for me, broken as it was.
I don’t even know what that would be like. But I like to imagine it. And you are free to imagine it with me if that doesn’t scare you too much—if you can let go of the anxiety to have everything right all the time long enough to lean into the God of mystery.
What if all these moments and memories that now feel tinged with sadness and loss, were destined to be restored to you? Would it lessen the weight of grief, even just a bit?
I believe—and it comforts me more than I can say—that nothing truly good is ever lost forever.1 I believe in the resurrection. I believe in restoration. I believe in a treasure trove of memories waiting for me in heaven.
I want that a heck of a lot more than a bunch of gold anyway. I’m betting you do too.
C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle