Memory as Life, Life as Memory

As he lay dying near the close of the movie Saving Private Ryan, Stephen Spielberg’s award winning movie about D-Day in World War II, Captain John Miller (played by Tom Hanks) says to Private Ryan (played by Matt Damon), “Earn it.” In other words, Private Ryan, I died—I gave up my life—in order to find you and get you home to be with your mother (Ryan’s three other male siblings had all been lost in the War). Remember me, Private Ryan, remember me. Remember what I did for you—and live it. After Private Ryan dies, however, will anyone remember John Miller, the man who rescued him? We would hope so, but we will not fully know. So does the slogan of the organization Wounded Warrior Project, a group dedicated to serving the physical and emotional needs of those wounded in combat since 2001, contend, “The greatest casualty is being forgotten.” While we cannot disagree with this sentiment, how do we, in this life, stop this from happening? Memory is the paradox of being human. Even if it will not change anything, even if it will not bring anyone back, we remember. Whether it is small or large, trivial or profound, memory enables us to attach meaning and purpose to the joys and losses of existence. Even if life means nothing other than it will one day end, we will always wish to remember. We do not like to think that we live and die in vain and without point. We do not like to set our lives in the burnishes of the rock band Ten Years After’s song, “As the Sun Burns Away,” their achingly depressing, almost Schopenaueran paean to the utter mediocrity and vanity of life and living. We do not like to think of ourselves as trapped in a circle of meaningless turns and random events. And we do not like to think that our memories are nothing more than a vast and unexplainable waste. Like the son-in-law in Cloud Atlas; like my friends and their three day old baby; or like Velma and Jeanne, we want to think that life is meaningful, and that our memories of it are similarly so. We want to think that our memories are, and always will be, wonderful and inherently meaningful parts of our lives. Fleeting or not, we see our memories, even if they seem hopelessly pointless, as the essential “stuff” of existence. We believe our memories frame our days and years on this planet. Yet we also know that if there is no God and no afterlife, our memory will not last. And then what do we do? In Living on the Edge: The Winter Ascent of Kanchenjunga, author Cherie Bremer-Kamp writes eloquently about her 1985 attempt to climb Kanchenjunga, which at 28,169 feet is the third highest mountain in the world. Tragically, the person with whom she partnered to do the peak, Chris Chandler, perished along the way. He succumbed, unexpectedly, as he had much experience climbing at these altitudes, to cerebral edema. Although Cherie did everything she could to keep Chris going and connected to the work of scaling the mountain, in the end, she could not stop the inevitable. After Chris died, Cherie left him, propped on a slope, ice axe in hand, gazing over the valley out of which they had come some days earlier. His body is likely still there today, frozen for an earthly eternity. As Cherie recounts the episode, when Chris knew he would die, he did everything he could to bond with her, to stir her, to fill her with the memory and thought of him. Although we will never know what went through Chris’s mind as he finally drifted into the grip of mortality, we certainly can conclude that he did not wish to go unforgotten. He wanted to be remembered. And if, and only if God is there, he will be. Before Rob Hall, a mountain guide from New Zealand who, along with six other people, perished on the slopes of Mt. Everest in 1986 (a story documented in Jon Krakauer’s best-selling Into Thin Air), left for Nepal, he told his wife that rescue on these slopes is impossible, that, “You may as well be on the moon.” Yet Hall’s awareness that people were remembering him surely sustained him as later in the expedition, trapped by cold and darkness on the upper slopes of the mountain, he drifted into the grip of death. Although Hall was acutely aware that he was fading into a place where no one else could follow him, he likely felt significant. He knew he was thought about; he knew he was remembered. For a while, he will be. As will Chris Chandler. Without God, however, one day, one perhaps distant but nonetheless inevitable day, they will not. Unless there is God, and unless there is eternity, Chris Chandler and Rob Hall are gone, irretrievably gone. And no one will care. Thousands of miles from the Himalayas, signs posted at several places in the upper reaches of the backcountry of Colorado’s Rocky National Park tell every hiker who passes by them that, “Mountains don’t care.” If you, the hiker, die in these mountains, the mountains will not care one whit that you’re gone. It will not matter how important you had been to people. Like Chris Chandler, Rob Hall, or Steve Fischer, another guide who perished on Everest the same night as Hall, like all other backpackers and mountaineers who die alone, you’re gone. And although you will want to be remembered, only God, and the mountain, will really know where you are. Again: that’s the point. Over and above it all, God, if he is indeed there, knows. Over and above it all, God will remember. In God, memory will endure. Without God, however, no one, absolutely no one, will, in the exasperatingly lengthy and unknowable fullness of space and time, ever do likewise. And what will we then do?