The Memory Wall

At my parents’ house in Massachusetts, where I spent the majority of my adolescence, there’s a memory wall. Many of you have them, too: that old beige expanse in the living room or hallway, pockmarked with misplaced nails and hammer swings gone awry, checkered with sun-faded outlines of picture frames whose contents have been exiled to attics and basements.

Ours lives beside the stairs. Maybe that gave it some special power, an escalating physical representation of our changing faces and growing bodies. At the bottom, near the landing by the front door, it’s all about me. I’m the oldest child, born a redhead (eventually a dirty blonde, much to my chagrin). Baby me is pictured on my father’s knee, grinning brightly and peeking out of a pile of leaves, or perched on my mother’s shoulders under a pregnant sky in the hurricane belt somewhere. (There’s this toddler picture I especially love of myself in a filmy white dress, mouth agape with joy on a swing in the woods. Whenever I see her, it’s like I get to live in that moment again. I look so weightless and so free.) Go up a few steps, and you’ve got my little brother, too: baby teeth budding as he grabs for a tiny guitar, dancing with me through the early morning light in his famous pink shorts. A few more steps up and our baby sister’s bubbly infant cheeks put my six-year-old, already cautious face to shame. All three of us peek out of the stark New England leaf piles now.

By the upstairs landing, we’re in middle school, pimply and camera-shy, knee-deep in high school and college, smiling big despite the cacophony of protests we made prior to each shot. And that’s pretty much where it stops. When was the last time we developed a roll of film? Made the pharmacy trek, accepted the brutal wait time of two entire weeks to see the results of our perfectly choreographed “cheeeeese”? For twenty years, between five humans and a trusty digital camera, every stage of our lives was documented and presented to any and all visitors who ascended the stairs. When the digital camera finally died and the last of us succumbed to smartphone ownership, the memory wall ended. 

For the first time in years, I’ve found myself again among narratives of entire lives told through photographs. In the fall of ‘23 I began work as a client relations specialist in home care, and I had no idea at the time of the ways in which it would expand my world. (I am lucky, as well, to work with a director who never viewed the agency as solely a business: she gave me free reign to be creative, interview and get to know our clients–with their consent, of course–and to forge a deep and layered understanding of the community we serve and our place within it.)

In the homes of my clients, I attend black-and-white weddings in 1942 (a big year for weddings, I’ve discovered). I watch decorated soldiers come home from war and meet their babies for the first time. Young great-grandmothers smile softly at me, hair curled like a Van Gogh cloud. Stoic grandfathers circle a glass chess set. Children laugh in the yard, stuffed into itchy wool peacoats, too fresh in the world to be bothered by any textures at all. But the photographs aren’t all so aged; the real collectors, the storytellers, the nostalgics, find new space for every shot: every grandkid’s awkward eighth-grade graduation, every eleventh-grade school picture grimace, the oldest cousin’s rustic destination wedding, all stacked on top of former decades like tree rings. And they’re proud of it, too. Look at my Jerry. Look at my niece, Beth, look, there she is, Harvard graduation, I don’t know where all those brains came from. Look at little Nicky, they always said he had my eyes. The pictures aren’t three inches wide, flat on a phone screen; they’re worn, loved, the oils of an index finger left on the face of an ancestor, a frame rubbed shiny where it’s been picked up over and over again. They’re flawed, and frayed at the edges, and real.

What does this epidemic divergence towards the smartphone camera mean for the longevity of our snapshots? What happens when the computer dies, the password is forgotten, or the Cloud crashes like the 2008 stock market? The sheer quantity of memories kept online feels like a fragile bubble, just biding its time. Even if our computers never become obsolete and the Cloud goes on forever: I miss the memory wall, I miss flipping through the scrapbooked tomes of my mother’s youth, being able to hold her innocent, freckled baby face in my hands in some semblance of the way she held mine. I miss the way my face looked before you could zoom in on it. I miss the act of selecting the best picture, the very best one, the one that lives on. One material picture used to mean so much, passed down for generations, heralded and prized; now we have so many pictures, taken with such ease, that each individual shot means less and less. There’s always a slightly different angle waiting in the wings to replace it.

Maybe that all sounds a little jaded—I’ll accept that, but the best part is that I’ve gotten excited again. The collections in the homes I visit reinvigorate me for the future. Everything comes around again—flared jeans, tie-dye—maybe this practice will, too. The creativity and openness of my generation is boundless. And if not, I know it’s not entirely lost. All it takes is a visit home, and I can be the girl in the swing again, even just for a moment.

By Rio Calais Client Relations Specialist

Whether your loved one needs assistance only a few hours a week or around-the-clock, our team is happy to help! Call (347) 462-9001 to learn more about the transition care services offered through ComForCare Home Care (Brooklyn South, NY).