What will not burn

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I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to remember. We all want to believe that our most salient memories are seared into our brains forevermore — that we’ll never, ever forget what it felt like to drive for the first time or watch our children take their first steps or say goodbye to someone we love.

Though, of course that’s not true. Even the best memories are fallible, vulnerable to context, faulty interpretation and forces outside of our control. Perspective and time shape the way different people experience the same events; what’s “true” is often in the eyes of the beholder — malleable, uncertain, glinting in the light.

Memory is a “dynamic phenomenon” that has “evolved to meet the challenges of survival,” explains Dr. Charan Ranganth, a neuropsychologist at U.C. Davis and author of the book “Why We Remember.” Memory isn’t static, by design, and it doesn’t have to make perfect sense.

Perhaps this helps to explain the battles underway, every day, big and small, personal and political, about what stories endure. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to document facts and experiences — individually and collectively.

But what happens when history is revised? Or dulled by illness? Or lost in a fire that turns all that’s familiar to dust? What then?

When I think about the attack on the U.S. Capitol, on January 6, 2021, for example, I remember watching the violence unfold on television. I remember listening to Lisa Dejardins, reporting for PBS News, as she described — live on air — the sound of protestors using blunt objects to break glass and ram the doors. I remember the whisper of fear in Dejardin’s voice, and the look of concern on Judy Woodruff’s face.

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Once law enforcement had regained control of the building, I remember the chorus of bipartisan voices condemning the violence and destruction: then-President Donald Trump called it “a heinous attack.” Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y. delivered a passionate statement from the House floor that night, saying: “This has been a truly tragic day for America.”

But four years later, the story about that day has changed.

Now, in Trump’s and Stefanik’s (and others’) retelling, January 6 was “a day of love.” They say the rioters who assaulted police officers and defecated in the halls of the Capitol were peaceful citizens making their voices heard.

Stefanik’s 2021 statement has been removed from her website — effectively erasing it from her version of history, or at least trying to. (You can still see it thanks to a tool called the Wayback Machine, which my colleagues at On Point talked all about in a recent show.)

It begs the question: which version of that day will history remember?

In the Los Angeles wildfires, tens of thousands of structures have been turned to ash. We’ve been bearing witness to the mass destruction of personal property, and the memories that go with them.

Andrea Meyer’s family lost their home in the Pacific Palisades. Her mom, Miriam, suffers from dementia. When Miriam evacuated, with the help of Andrea’s sister, she packed up some clothing, toiletries and a small box of jewelry. She didn’t bring family photos or her late husband’s violin because she didn’t think she’d need to; she’d been through wildfires before, they’d never come across the canyon.

Now, without her beloved home — her vessel for a lifetime of memories— Miriam is adrift, untethered, disoriented.

Physical objects like yearbooks and artwork, photo albums and recipes, handwritten notes and emails, tether us to who we are or once were. When those things are lost, do we also lose part of what we know about ourselves? Madeleine L’Engle, the author of “A Wrinkle in Time,” one of my very favorite books as a kid, wrote: “We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn.”

What will not burn? Maybe that is one of the key questions now.

No one among us can say for sure what will happen in the next four years, but I am certain that the stories we tell about this time will matter. And how we record history, with a reverence for facts and humanity, is important.

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