Memories Encoded

I’ve been trying to share a text a day from Adri, and the one that I used today was from 2018 where she talks about wanting tangible photos instead of just relying on digital representations stored somewhere in the cloud. She has memories, she explains, but the boys have none of when they were babies:

5/27/2018 8:54:05 AM

 

I want to do photo albums, because I like tangible pictures but I guess with technology THAT would be the best bet. I want some, and also they need it. What if the internet or Facebook or Instagram or iCloud are gone or get destroyed? They won't have anything. I have memories, but want hard things, but they won't have memories of being BABIES.

 

So maybe I start working in it and maybe like part their graduation present I'll give them all of them.

Of course this got me thinking yet again about the nature of consciousness in general and memories, in this case, in particular. How and why do they manifest themselves, and what is their nature? How are they encoded within our brains, these organic repositories of a lifetime of experiences? And what happens to those memories when, somehow, that brain stops receiving oxygen?

Each of us have a warehouse of memories and recollections within our mind, a vast library of moments, experiences, images, sounds, aromas, ideas, notions, results, and a myriad of other interactions with our environment that are somehow stored away inside our brains. Some do this better than others, of course, but we all do it.

But unlike a public library or wiki page, these vast storehouses are individual to us, inaccessible, really, by anyone else, each reflecting and filtered through our own unique individual interactions with the world around us. And that’s where they remain for the most part. Creative types such as artists and writers and actors may be more adept at sharing these memories or at least create a reflection or echo of these experiences, but even then they’re just echoes, inadequate stand-ins for the real things.

This then adds to the tragedy of death, because when one dies all of those encoded memories of a life lived are gone forever. It’s equivalent to the burning of the Library of Alexandria but occurs multiple times a day, year in and year out, and there’s nothing we can do about it. A lifetime of accrued knowledge and experiences here one moment and lost forever the next.

Adri mentioned in the above text that she had memories, and her unique take and experience of life that formed those memories are now gone forever. They were there on May 21, 2025, but then by mid-morning on May 22, 2025 they were lost, along with the rest of her, no longer accessible to anyone.

They were there inside her head and consciousness, a real thing if not exactly tangible, and then they were not. Where did they go? And this, the loss of a lifetime of memories of too-short life and all the unique perspectives they brought to the table wrecks me about as much as anything else wrecks me.

I am forced to live the rest of my life with Adrianna only existing now in my own memories of experiences and interactions, of sights and sounds, of moments both exhilarating and heartbreaking. That’s all I have.

And when I’m gone, even those won’t exist anymore.

 

Over Again

If I could start over with her today (right now, this second), I’d live each moment with her again.

All of her allotted thirty-six years, eleven months, and four days, as promised and bestowed.

A do-over of sorts, starting today (right now, this second), moving forward in real time once again.

And after all of her allotted thirty-six years, eleven months, and four days, had slipped away once more,

I’d be ninety-nine… and she’d be gone again.
Right now, this second.

 

Seven Crises

I spent a lifetime worrying about my daughter. I have no idea if it was more or less than the average parent, because of course I only have myself as a reference point. I’m guessing more, however, since I am a worrier.

I had recurring dreams quite often for several years about the start of a nuclear war and me trying to get to Adri to make sure she was safe. It always began with me outside on the balcony of whatever apartment I might be living when suddenly in the distant horizon I’d see a mushroom cloud form and then feel a rumble. The dream would turn into a post-apocalypse story that later Cormac McCarthy would seemingly crib from my subconscious (somehow) when he published The Road in 2006.

Or maybe such fears and images are universal.

I got pretty good at waking myself up eventually after first seeing the mushroom cloud. Not quite lucid dreaming but more as a psychological defense mechanism, but it would still take me a few waking moments to calm down and convince myself that it was just “that dream” again.

And while I take full credit, or rather blame, for perhaps being a bit too fatalistic and dark worrying about the worst-case scenarios that might involve Adrianna, the truth is she also gave me a lifetime of occurrences and events that only encouraged and reinforced such worries. Seven, to be exact, not counting the final one, of course.

The first was her birth. We were in Austin trying for a more natural birth that still took place at a hospital, and things were progressing as normal a week past her due date once we were admitted to our room at the hospital that Saturday night on June 17th. Things took a turn, however, when the fetal heart monitor showed she was going into distress, and they had to perform an emergency C-section.

They seemed pretty concerned and it all happened so fast and we were all scarred and afraid. I still got to be in the operating room, however, but when they removed Adri I didn’t hear her cry and was petrified. I saw them with her in the corner of the room. Finally, after a minute or two that seemed like a lifetime, they brought her over so we could see her. She was fine, alert with eyes wide open looking around with wonder as if nothing had happened.

Crisis averted.

The second was a couple of months later. She had been acting as if her stomach hurt quite often, was extremely colicky, and started projectile vomiting, at which point we took her back to the hospital where they determined she had pyloric stenosis, a condition where the valve between the stomach and small intestine doesn’t function properly.

She had to have surgery to correct this, and again we were afraid and terrified. She was so little, so seemingly fragile, and the thought of her all alone on the operating table was almost too much to bear. But she did fine and we were able to take her home a day or so later.

Crisis averted.

The next incident is probably a silly one that probably happens countless times over the course of a childhood that still that had a profound and lasting effect on me none the less: Adri had learned to ride her two-wheeler and we’d ride around the block often after dinner when it was a bit cooler. She’d be on her Little Mermaid bike and I’d walk next to her. We stayed on sidewalks and occasionally alleys, usually riding to a pasture that was somewhat near so she could see the cows. We had great conversations during these rides, and they are some of the highlights of my life with her.

My mom lived on the corner, and one of the streets was a fairly busy affair with two lanes each direction divided by a median in the middle. In order to get from the back of the house to the front we’d have to traverse a sidewalk next to the house on the busier road.

I’d usually try to walk between the street and Adri to provide a buffer “just in case,” but this one day she got ahead of me, and then suddenly teetered and fell… into the street. I quickly reached over and pulled her up out of the street and back onto the sidewalk just as a car zoomed past in that very lane.

I was shaking and terrified, imagining how close she came to getting hit and how I could have let that happen. I kept telling myself that it didn’t happen, though, and it didn’t happen because I was watching closely, but I don’t listen to myself that well usually. I could not stop thinking about “what ifs” after that. For years, even though nothing happened.

 The crisis had been averted.

The fourth event was her heart surgery. In her mid-teens it was discovered she had Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a congenital heart defect where there is an extra pathway between the upper and lower chambers of the heart which causes a fast heartbeat. It’s usually not life-threating, but it can lead to sudden cardiac death in children and young adults. There are examples of children dying during sporting events and it only being discovered after the fact that they had WPW.

So of course, the worrying commenced. It was recommended she undergo heart surgery to correct it, usually a cardiac ablation to sort of “turn off” or permanently disable the extra node causing the problem. Heart surgery is all I heard and all I worried about.

The surgery was successful, and another (huge) crisis was averted.

The fifth incident was a biggie, but one I’m not ready to talk about publicly yet, and one that I’ve been careful editing out when sharing some of her texts. I think it’s important to talk about, but for some reason I’m hesitant, so for now I’ll continue and speak in vague terms.

This happened not long after her surgery, and I was made known about it by a call from her mother late one evening. She told me that she wasn’t yet stable but the doctors, including Adri’s uncle who was a surgeon, were doing the best they could. She’d call me back when she had more news, she said, but that we should “pray for her” in the meantime.

This was around midnight, and I had to wait for another call that would tell me is she survived or not, if my daughter was still alive. Needless to say, it was not a pleasant three or so hours while I waited, helpless, wishing I was there and could do something.

But when the call finally occurred it was good news, and another (extremely huge) crisis was averted.

The sixth event I’ve mentioned before, as recently as a couple of days ago, when Adri broke down physically and mentally after both her great grandmother and Stephen’s mother died relatively around the same time. I came over she was in bad shape. I tried to stay with her overnight and ride it out, whatever it was, but she only seemed to get worse. I tried holding her and talking to her calmly and reassuring her that it would be okay, but it got worse and worse, so I had to eventually take her to the emergency room.

She was admitted to the hospital and her vital signs improved, but then they insisted she be admitted to an inpatient program as condition of release from the hospital, and she was there a week, alone, until they thought she was healthy enough to go home. I’m being vague about this as well, but there were no illegal or unprescribed use of drugs or alcohol involved in this situation.

It was a long week, and I went over to their apartment and stayed with the boys for that entire week, and Cindy would come by after work and help as well until Stephen would get home.

It was hard and confusing for the boys, but she returned healthy, yet another crisis (apparently) averted.

The final event that she survived was of course the one from February of 2024, where she suffered cardiac arrest and where it took the EMTs almost 15 minutes to get a heartbeat back and stable enough to transport, followed by 12 hours in the emergency room and then another five or so days in ICU. I’ve written about this in detail already and probably anyone still reading my posts in general or this far into this one in particular know the details already, but if not you can find it if you look on my Facebook page.

This was the worst to date. I had to wait, again, for a return call while the EMTs were working on her to find out if she was alive or not. This was a shorter wait which also resulted in a positive outcome, but the ICU nurses let me know that she definitely was not out of the woods. I learned later that that was actually an overly-optimistic understatement. I stayed with her that week and she survived, and gained a new heart doctor as well that we were going to see this time on a regular basis.

Crisis (for now) averted.

Really, though, it was just postponed.

So those were the Big Seven. Events that didn’t make it easy for me to not worry about her, to stop letting my brain and imagination conjure up worst-possible scenarios. I was being classically conditioned like some Pavlovian dog to expect or at least be aware of the possible worst.

These Seven, furthermore, did not occur in a vacuum.  Through it all there were other issues as well, and while not necessarily acute and of an immediate emergency, they none the less added to my worry and fear of her survival: bulimia, ADHD, possible multiple competing affective disorders, normal teenage rebellious behavior, and just run-of-the-mill issues encountered and experienced by every child of divorce.

And again, the only frame of reference that I’m intimately aware of is my own, and I realize that my fears and worries were probably par for the course of parenthood. But they were my own.

And through every averted or diverted crisis I’d sigh with relief and chastise myself for any apparent complacency I had let myself experience since the last one, while fearing and dreading when and what the next one would be, fearing and dreading that the next would not be averted. Part of me “knowing” that we had been pressing our luck, that the winning streak would end at some point.

And it did.

 

Someone To Watch Over Them

Adri always worried about her boys and what would happen to them if she was gone. She asked me, begged me, to watch over them and make sure they were okay if anything ever happened to her.

I told her that I'd have a lot less sway and say if she was no longer around, that whatever value she found in me as a role model and someone to lean on or as an anchor point in her boys' lives would be gone if she wasn't there.

There were times that she wanted to know if she could specify that I would be the one to bring them up if something happened to her, and I told her it didn't work that way, and for good reason, usually.

I told her that if something had ever happened to her mom when she was little I would hope that no one, no extended family, would have tried to take her away from me.

I told her she had to make such decisions and changes if that's what she truly wanted now while she was here and had some control if she was that worried about their lives in a future world that didn't include her. That she had to fix the now and not hope that I could somehow make sure the boys lived their best lives. Whatever worried her about her boys' lives without her would not magically go away because she made her intentions known prior.

So I told her to please stick around, please help yourself and let me and others help you as well. If you're worried about them then don't let them fall to a lesser fate if you're no longer here, because trust me, I will be powerless without her. I'll only be able to do so much, that there will be a gatekeeper to my relationship with the boys.

And I was right.

Eleven Months

Not a single day, and if being honest usually not a single hour, goes by without me thinking to myself fleetingly, “maybe I can get her back somehow.”

Not a single day, and usually not a single hour, passes without me wishing that I could have been the one-in-a-million person that could have prevented all of this, somehow. At the same time, however, I remind myself and Cindy reminds me that no one could have and that I did all I could and then some.

Not a single day, and rarely a single hour, elapses without me not wondering how I can possibly live the rest of my life out without her. It seems a gargantuan task, and I feel lost and afraid and devastated and angry and despondent when I think about the possible years that stretch out ahead of me, a future that with each day becomes the now, the present, in this new reality without Adrianna.

And still tomorrow remains, a point in the future that continually moves me further away from her and into that uncharted timeframe where she’s still not there.

But I move forward, anyway, because I don’t really have a choice. I move forward in time, at least, but for now that seems to be the only forward progress that I’m experiencing.

And I know that as I struggle to move forward and take up residence in a future without her, others are struggling this way as well. That doesn’t give me solace, of course, but makes it worse.

I wonder how the boys’ psyches are handling all of this. I try to talk to them occasionally about it, about her, about their mother, but I don’t think they really want to. They definitely never come to me on their own about any of this. I don’t want to upset them, but I also don’t want them to bury and ignore any feelings of loss they may have. I want them to process all of this in the manner that’s the easiest for them and best fits their personality, but I also don’t want them to think they can’t talk to me about any of it. It’s a catch-22: do I talk to them about her and risk upsetting them, or do I not talk to them about her and risk making them feel all alone?

Not a single day or hour goes by without me worrying about the boys’ present and future without their mother in their lives.

Not a single day, not a single hour, not a single moment passes without it taking all the willpower and self-restraint I have not to scream out loud.

But also, not a single day goes by without me being thankful for all the support I’ve received from friends and family, but most of all Cindy.

It’s been eleven months today.

Past Lives and Pre Lives

There's a bunch of examples in the literature of unexplained phenomena, if you believe or are interested in reading that sort of thing, where young children talk about past lives or whatever.

Obviously, much of this can be explained away by the mental explorations and creativity that can arise from young children who are extremely imaginative and have an above-average inquisitive brain.

These "memories," false or otherwise, dissipate and are forgotten usually by the time they reach school age, but when they're present they can be interesting if not a tad disconcerting if you think too much about the possible ramifications of such thought.

When I was teaching I had a five-year-old who one day nonchalantly told me one day about the time before he was born when he lived on an estate in southern Australia and had a chauffeur named Roger who drove a Bentley. It was a real specific story, with meals that were eaten and activities undertaken “during the war.” It was odd, and out of character for this boy who had previously acted and talked like an average five-year-old boy. When I asked him later in the year more questions about his Australian life he didn’t know what I was talking about.

Evidently Wes exhibited something similar to Adri, though he never said anything about it to me, and when I asked him several weeks later he also no longer had any memory of what he had said.

Here’s the text from Adri:

12/13/2020 8:09:49 PM

Wes said, “Mom, remember when you were three years old and me and Bryce came to visit, and we found the correct house and knocked, and your mom said no, they are strangers, and I told her no because it was us?”

I’m tired and want them asleep, but the night time talks are the best.

And it reminds me of your talks about how you wondered where I was before I was born while you were a kid.

Ask Wesley about that story. It hasn’t changed. He told me, then he told Stephen, then I asked him tell me again.

I believe him. Those are his exact words.

...

Which provides the segue to the notion of “pre lives” for lack of a better phrase that Adri mentions in that text, that I used to miss Adri retroactively when I’d think about the time before she was born. Which I realize sounds absolutely bonkers, but have you met me?

I have a pretty good memory of my childhood, going back to when I was still in a crib to about college time, at which point my memories all get clouded and jumbled together. But my early life: clear as day.

However, when I think back to, say, first grade, when I was building a "King Kong" plastic Aurora model, or when I remember when I was four or so learning to ride a two-wheeler for the first time (begging my mom for what seemed weeks to take the training wheels off the purple Schwinn I had), or the time I hit my only home run in little league... I suddenly realize that my daughter's not there.

Where the hell is she? Here I was, living my life, as happy as a clam, yet my daughter wasn't alive. How could I have been happy without her? Why didn't I "miss" her? I certainly "miss" her in my memories. This is what I mean about "retroactively" missing someone.

I go through an old family photo album and find a group picture of our family. Everyone's there... with the exception of my daughter. Yet we're all smiling, totally oblivious to the fact that someone is missing.

I know, intellectually, that this is normal. Of course my daughter isn't there; she hasn't been born yet. There was no one to miss back then. But what the hell does that mean? Where are we before we're born? It doesn't bother me so much wondering where I was before I was born, for I take it as a given that I simply wasn't (though, to be fair, it did bother me a great deal when I was younger.)  But my daughter? That's another story.

People miss people when they die, of course, and some wonder where they are, if indeed consciousness can survive death. What I experienced was the exact reverse of this: missing someone before they were born, and wondering where they were before their birthdate.

Naturally, this was something Adri and I talked about when we had our long talks, whether on a road trip to Chicago, while brushing her hair before bed, or lounging at the pool in the summer. She at first had brought up similar thoughts and notions about the nature of existence, so I shared some of mine.

It’s indicative of our relationship and bond, that while, sure, we talked about bunnies and Barbies, we also talked about the nature of the universe. We talked about everything, she shared everything, she held nothing back. And I realized when she sent me that text that these conversations must have been important and impactful to her as well, that they stuck with her.

And now, of course, I’m living in the worst possible moment, where I have to miss her in the past, the present, and have a future ahead of me stretching out where I’ll miss her as well.  I missed her before she was born and after she died, and got so little time with her during the insanely short slice of the timeline that she inhabited with me.

If time is a river, the rushing waters are much too swift and unrelenting, its source obscured and unknowable and its endpoint unreachable.

The Moon

 

The moon through the lens of my camera in 2012

The moon is in the news currently thanks to the Artemis II launch yesterday, and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. This is nothing new, really, since the moon has always been a bit of an obsession with me, starting even before the Apollo 11 moon landing that occurred when I was five, but it was certainly amplified and intensified by that event.

That moment from the summer of ’69 has always been seared in my memory like it was yesterday, Bryan Adams notwithstanding. We were up at Talahi at Lake Geneva with friends to witness this huge milestone in human history, and when the 19-inch black and white TV in the living room showed the fuzzy, snowy, slightly out-of-focus images when Armstrong finally placed his boot upon the lunar surface I raced outside to look up at the moon with my own eyes. A five-year-old’s futile attempt to leave the screen behind and witness it all in real life.

I still remember the portion of the sky that the moon occupied that evening, a large, bright sphere hanging peacefully in the night like some sort of phantasmagorical fruit ready to be harvested. And while I was unable to see the LEM or Armstrong 240,000 miles away from my distant vantagepoint from the side of the cottage that July evening, I was nonetheless filled with hope and accomplishment and awe and optimism for what the future held. And I was not alone.

My daughter Adrianna shared the same fascination with the moon, and we’d talk about it all the time during her lifetime. I’d sometimes joke when she was five or six that one day she might be living on the moon.

“No, daddy! I want to be on Earth!”

Apparently, her fascination with the moon was more akin to how one might observe a python swallowing whole a small goat: interesting, captivating, full of wonder, but best experienced at a distance.

But here’s the thing: the moon connected us when we weren’t together. During much of the year when she was with her mother in Louisville, I’d be without her in Dallas. But I could go outside and look up at the moon and tell myself that this very same moon was in Louisville. Together we could look at that bright ball of hope and feel connected and optimistic about the future under that comforting moonlight.

There may have been hundreds of miles between us, but looking up at the moon helped us forget about that physical distance. A unifying triangle would be formed, with the moon providing one vertex and the two of us comprising the remaining two vertices. A golden triangle for a golden girl. It was a bit comforting.

Things are different now, of course. As a society we slowly let the hope and optimism that the moon represented fade away. Hopefully the renewed interest will usher in some renewed optimism and hope as a species.

But for me it will never be the same. I look up at the moon now and while I’m still filled with wonder and awe, it also brings me a bit of emptiness and sadness as I realize that it is now a forever broken triangle. I think of how the hope and optimism and awe and wonder that the moon ushered in that that summer of 1969 eventually became the hope and optimism and awe and wonder I had for my Adrianna that morning in June, 1988 when she was born.

But when I look at the moon now I try to fight those thoughts, to push them out of my mind, and instead try to remember and feel the great things that both creations represent, the moon and her, and I try to allow the sadness to morph into something more akin to contentment of how glorious life can be, no matter how short it may last.

The Guestbook

We had a guest book at the lake house that was rarely signed by guests, but there are three entries from Adrianna in it. It's fun to see her handwriting again, and how it changed a bit over the time frame represented (about 5 years).

The first one from 7/5/1996 is short and sweet, "I had a fun time! I love you! bye and her first name printed and in cursive.

The second one from 7/4/1998 is longer and her handwriting had evolved into what it would remain. It's addressed to her great gram and mentions that she enjoys her cooking and that "the lake is pretty and I wish I could see it every day!"

She finishes with "I look forward to coming here in the following years. But I know that I will have as much fun as I always had. Love Always, Adri Now in 5th grade"

The last entry is from 6/30/2001. She mentions that there were a few problems at the start but that "it all got worked out so that my 1st day here was a success" and finishes with "hopefully 2nite or tomorrow we will get you 2 da lake" because she couldn't be bothered spelling out entire words, evidently.

Teenagers.

She and I and later Cindy would go up there every summer around the Fourth of July during the entirety of Adri's life until my grandfather died and my gram sold the place in 2009, much to the chagrin of many, but we had a good 40+ run in any event.

I plan to go up there sometime after the one-year mark and scatter some of her ashes at what she often called her happiest place on earth.

Consciousness

Always writing something

 

This sort of image and memory is the type that always triggers my lifetime confusion about the nature of consciousness, which has nagged at me and confused me my entire life along with other epistemological questions that for some reason bothered me even before I had turned five.
What is consciousness, what does it mean "to be," what separates us from a flower or a rock or a piece of wood?

I came to believe through thousands of hours of contemplation which was affirmed in most philosophy, psychology, and biology classes that what we call consciousness is simply the biproduct of a bunch of synaptic interactions and connections, enhanced and developed by the various neurotransmitters and neuropathways created by their symbiotic dance.

But it has to be more than that, right? I want it to be more than that.

Here's a picture of Adrianna furtively recording on a piece of paper thoughts and ideas and concepts and notions that had arisen in her consciousness. They got written on a page and were thus frozen in time and place. Somehow these synaptic interactions are able to be translated and encoded by that same brain, the thoughts and ideas now sharable.

But then one day it ends. That brain stops. Why? How? How can the consciousness be there one moment and gone forever the next? Perhaps parts and snippets and portions of that consciousness are not gone if it they were recorded in some manner as illustrated in this photo, but still.

Unfortunately, I don't have this notebook, or her diary. At some point she took them with her to her new apartment.

I want to believe that this consciousness survives what we call death, but my synaptic interactions and connections won't allow me to believe this.

But maybe.

Back to School

Adrianna was always trying to go back to school. She got an EKG tech certification as a stopgap, but then finally was able to enroll in some classes at a community college in 2018 and she was excited.

It sort of breaks me a bit, then and now, to see her excitement, realizing that in a different world she'd be so happy, because even in the harsh world that she found herself in she was able to capture moments that allowed herself to be lifted up. She really didn't ask for much.

She enrolled in these classes, but then covid made them online only.

Then funding was lost and she had to go peruse and apply for educational grants. She did so with a lot of effort and red tape, even though I had college money saved over her lifetime still available. She wanted independence. I was proud of her.

But as the Pandemic ravaged throughout the country the boys' school (and everyone's at that point) became remote only, and she couldn't do both, though she tried mightily.

And then it just became another seemingly unobtainable dream for another lifetime, perhaps, as everything fell apart.

But on this day, witness her excitement and glimpse a reality where Adrianna was happy and content.

4/13/2018 8:50:46 AM

[she was finally at her continuing education orientation through vocational rehab and was so happy]:

I'm euphoric!

Haven't felt like this since seeing Bryce or Wes born.

So freaking excited.

Dad, they have early childhood. I should do that.

They have teacher assistant.

They have community healthcare like advocate

Dad, I want all those.

I'm so excited, I just want them all. When the boys are in school, I'll work three days and go school two days.

And I get to show the boys, they’re excited, too. Just FaceTimed them to make me happy. So cute.