Remember to Win

You know that sadness that takes over your whole body and makes your back ache and your throat sore? You know that sadness that makes you want to curl up under your bed covers and ugly cry for the rest of time?

Take all that sadness, ball it up and give it a name.

For me, at one time, it was Daisy Biskind. At another time, it was Sarah Shaw and at another it was Neilda Sussman.

But let me tell you what my grandmother, Daisy, said. She said, “If you can only remember me with tears, then don’t remember me.”

Sometimes that’s a hard thing to do, and she died when I was about six or eight years old. It reminds me of a silly game that my niece and nephew used to play with their friends when they were in high school or college.

There was no board, no score keeping, and no pieces to move or strategy to this game and there was one rule. The rule was that you had to forget the game. The first person to remember that everyone was playing this game lost the game. The honor system meant that they had to just tell the other players, “Oh no! I remembered the game!”

What does death have to do with this game?

Nothing.

The only thing that could possibly tie the two things together is the element of forgetfulness. The game that I described to you can’t really be won. You just survive it by forgetting until another player remembers. Conversely, if you forget the people in your life that are important to you, then you lose…