I have a tradition of sharing my personal reflections at the year’s end with friends, colleagues, and supporters of our work at the National Health Law Program (NHeLP). This year, I am musing about memory and time and how our personal lives intersect with history.
I have been experiencing a strange sense that I have called “surreal,” though I’m not sure that’s the best description. I felt it acutely at Thanksgiving, as we snuggled into the warmth and comfort of our family while also fearing that the world as we know it may be about to end. I feel it again as we gather for the holidays, everyone teasing each other and telling stories about family adventures. It’s not exactly a sense that we are being hypocritical in espousing profound fear about what’s ahead for low-income people and immigrants in our country, about the future of our democracy, about the last hours of our opportunity to save our climate, about the fate of Ukraine, about the lack of hope for real peace between Israel and Palestine, when we are so safe and warm. There is some of that, but our fears are genuine. It’s more a sense of living in two different worlds, one private and almost timeless and one intersecting with our current history.
I have just finished Annie Ernaux’s The Years. It is Ernaux’s memoir, told in both the first and third persons: “we” and “she.” Ernaux uses old photographs of herself with friends or family to connect 60 years of her life with the history that was unfolding as the pictures were taken. It is, in her words, an effort to describe “a woman’s destiny,” conveying the passage of time inside and outside of herself. This resonates with my sense of living both in and out of time.
Ernaux begins the book with a quote from Chekhov reminding us that we will be forgotten. Unless we happen to do something great or terrible that gets marked in history, our lives won’t be remembered much beyond the lives of the people who know us. That seems true, even if it is sobering. Think of the old family photos we throw away when no one any longer knows who the people in the photos are.
Ernaux also muses about the way we experience time. We don’t know our future—even how large the reservoir of our days and hours is—and, with time, images of our past float out of sequence. There are events that are seared in our memories—where we were when we learned that President Kennedy was killed; the image of the planes flying into the World Trade Center; and, for many of us, the births of our children. For the most part, though, our personal histories blur over time and we have to do some mental digging to connect them with what was going on in our collective history. I remember how cold it was in January of 2009 because I remember going to the inauguration with my son who was 18 and had voted for the first time, but so many other memories of those years have no anchor in time or connection to history.
Though a bit depressing, Ernaux’s musings help put words to my feelings. I feel disconnected to the events unfolding in our country and across the world; I’m not sure I even recognize this present that we are all living in and I find it hard to imagine the future. I know I’m not alone. That’s part of our collective problem—so many people don’t see themselves in our country’s present or future that it doesn’t even make sense to push out of “I” and think about “we.” This is evident in our actions: prioritizing short-term savings over the health of millions of children and the long-term future of our planet.
I also find some inspiration in Ernaux’s musings. Ernaux helps me understand why so many of us refuse to just retreat into our personal worlds. Despite the reality of what we will remember and who will remember us, Ernaux still is driven to tell her story and to connect it with the history that she lived in. She explains her motivation with a phrase: “the palimpsest sensation,” which she warns is not a perfect fit but I find helpful. “Palimpsest” means a manuscript on which the original writing has been scratched out to make room for later writing but on which traces of the original—the underwriting—remain.
The “palimpsest” image is one worth holding onto in this disconnected time. For me, it is motivation to push out of our holiday bubbles and connect with the events in our time. Even when our marks on the manuscript of time are overwritten, traces of our lives will remain to shape the history for those who come after us, though they only know our names from an annotation on a digital picture. I hope to make marks that matter on the manuscript my children and grandchildren will write over. I want the history they live in to offer them a chance to laugh a lot at holiday tables about wonderful family adventures and I want other children to have this same chance, perhaps in part because traces of what I have done and said will faintly remain. And I hope that, even after memories and traces fade, my children and grandchildren will continue making their own positive impressions on the manuscript they pass on.
Our names or the things we do or say may not be remembered, but what we do will matter. Our actions will shape the way the later manuscript appears. It’s why the collective “we” of NHeLP and the larger collective “we” of our partnerships are headed into 2025 with a determination to make a positive difference in the history that is being written. Against threats that seem even greater than those we have encountered before, we will do our best to prevent this from being a time marked in history as the retreat from our country’s progress toward equity, from our vision of a time when everyone has access to health care and what they need to thrive. What we do and how hard we fight will matter.
We do not know how big the reservoir of our days and hours is, so we have no time to waste. I commit to continue reminding myself to push out of “I” and live as part of “we.” I invite you to do the same.
Happy Holidays and let’s overcome the divide of disconnection and do some good together in 2025.
