The anatomy of a memory of my father

Friday Fragment #23

A memory is the impression of something retained. It’s not a repeat of the original remembrance of what once was experienced, but crucially the recall of the last time that we remembered it. With each remembrance we are inevitably prone to degrading that original. I don’t quite trust all that I recall. I can turn to the memory of others, to a brother of identical years, months, days and hours. Or to an older brother, more than one thousand days and many thousand recollections my senior. The gaps and the graininess are all part of a diminishing and ageing sense of self that I have acquiesced to. There’s a memory of my father that is scuffed and gritty. I was eleven years old and my father was in the last year of his life, when I followed him to the cold, white bathroom to help him wash. It was the first time I had ever seen him – ever known him – take a bath. He was ill, frail, old. I don’t know if my help was requested or volunteered, but I understood the value of what I was doing, that he was unable to cope in that room, that bathtub, on his own. I don’t have a beginning-to-end narrative of events, merely the recapture of two distinct images. The first of those is of my father seated, huddled into an awkward position, water scant in the tub around him, with alabaster arms and legs outstretched; skin that had not been exposed to light in a long, long time. Unable to straighten his back, his head remained dipped throughout most of what we were about to do. The effort to lift his head and turn back over his shoulder to peer at me – as he did, just before we began – must have been considerable. It was a look that conveyed sadness and gratitude, one that seemed to permit his son to begin, one that apologised for his wretched naked form in front of me. So much time has elapsed since then; it distresses me to think that I might have embellished this particular idea of what passed between us with that glance. Perhaps it was something far more prosaic or meaningless, but maybe it was something that I’ve learned over time as a father myself to safely label ‘love’. The second image is of my hand rubbing a flannel against his back; watching dead skin and sweat clump together into beads and scrapes of detritus. I remember them sticking when I tried to rinse them from his back, resistant to the water like globs of fat congealed to a pan underneath a running tap. I applied more soap, then more water, and then more soap, until the filthy flannel finally glided down his spine and the water ran down the white of his back with ease. He was able to wash his front without my help. I cleaned the flannel once again and then ran it over his neck and behind his ears. I remember the dirt bobbing on the water, finding its way to the edges of the bath, where it hemmed grey against the white enamel. The water was cold. The room was cold too, and Dad was shivering. And it ends there. That’s all there is. No watching brother to corroborate, no living father to revise or expand on something that we shared. Because memories are both sharp and soft and clear and opaque, they are also impressions that we can either trust or distrust. When those recollections are so few in number, that trust feels like the glue beneath the photo in an album: we hope it will be enough to hold the image in place.

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