MEMORY AND MEANING
by Forrest Church
June 6, 2004
Twenty years from now, we won't be asking one another, "What where you doing when Ronald Reagan died." Due to the cruel attrition of Altzheimers, he began dying so long ago that the news could hardly be surprising. Yet it was somehow. And curiously affecting as well. For ten years he slowly slipped from consciousness, his own as well as ours, only to return triumphant for one last farewell on the eve of the 60th anniversary of D-Day. With his death and this anniversary, our common history—the past we shared distilled by time and thereby invested with iconic power—has preempted the yet unsorted chaos of current events, placing our lives and times in more vivid perspective.
I was on an airplane when I heard of President Reagan's death. Carolyn and I were flying back from an 18-hour trip to Orlando, Florida, the sole purpose of which was to have dinner at the California Grill in Disney World, a fine restaurant in which my eldest son, Frank, is training to become a chef. Every once and a while we do something that we know, even as we experience it, will prove memorable. Something freighted with emotional significance, an end or a beginning, often both at once. Life is filled with so many little births and deaths, so many rites of passage that both clarify and complicate our stories.
Fortunately, we were flying home on Jet Blue. Fortunate, because we wouldn't miss Smarty Jones' victory in the Belmont Stakes. Having read and seen Seabiscuit, we welcomed the sequel: an unlikely horse (whose owner and jockey rise from their own ashes, including the hopelessness of alcoholism, to entrance a public desperate for the moral clarity of unambiguous victory) unites a divided people. No, this is not the Great Depression, but a tonic to relieve the symptoms of at least some of the things that ailed us was welcome nonetheless, and Smarty Jones came out of nowhere to provide it. We knew how the story would end, of course, but it would still do our souls a world of good to witness the final chapter. Cheering along with millions of other Americans, when he crossed the finish line would lift our flagging spirits.
So it was, flying high above the Atlantic, that we heard the news. Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States, was dead. I looked down the aisle in front of me and one TV monitor after another flicked over to CNBC, the only cable news network available. When I've flown Jet Blue before, I've noticed when walking down the aisle that the tiny screens make up a patchwork quilt, twenty or so different images' flickering reflections of the passengers varied tastes in entertainment. But now every eye was rivited on Tom Brokaw, on assignment at the American Cemetery in Normandy to continue his trademark coverage of the greatest generation. It was midnight in France, with Brokaw recalling one of Ronald Reagan's finest hours, twenty years ago today, on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.
"From a terrible war we learned that unity made us invincible; now, in peace, that same unity makes us secure. We sought to bring all freedom-loving nations together in a community dedicated to the defense and preservation of our sacred values. Our alliance, forged in the crucible of war, tempered and shaped by the realities of the post-war world, has succeeded. In Europe, the threat has been contained, the peace has been kept. This land is secure. We are free. These things are worth fighting and dying for."
As I watched that solemn moment, the wind tousling President Reagan's hair, the camera then panning hundreds of veterans and thousands of simple grave markers, how long ago it seemed, not only D-Day, but the 40th anniversary of D-Day just twenty years ago. Some of you remember D-Day itself. How hope flung its gauntlet in the teeth of despair. How we united, endured and finally prevailed. In the Second World War, some who grace this congregation yet (the Holocaust survivor, the honored bomber pilot) placed your lives on history's line. A child in Auchwitz, you, Marietta, suffered the very evil we were bound by all that is decent and just to bring to an end. And you, Schuyler, an ace who flew more than seventy missions, helped pen the vivid signature of our nation and her people in the Book of Life.
Throughout the flight and long into the evening, I watched the news reports. I expect that many of you did the same. And I watched myself watch, fascinated and somewhat conflicted by my own range of emotions. I was not a Reagan supporter, far from it. I can remember going door to door canvassing for Governor Pat Brown, Jerry's father, in Palo Alto in 1966, and then watching the election returns in stunned silence as it became clear that an actor had been chosen by the people of California to be their governor. Imagine that! From that day forward all the way until the day he left the presidency twenty-two years later, if you wanted to know how I felt about most any political issue, all you had to do was take one of Ronald Reagan's speeches and make a negative print of it.
So why was I so affected, even nostalgic, as I watched the moibus loop of images that today compose our memory of this man's life and presidency? Why did my heart thrill to hear President Reagan say time and again, "Mr. Gorbechav, tear down this wall?" Or be so touched and beguiled by his responses to the 1981 near-fatal assassination attempt, when he says to Nancy, "I forgot to duck," and to his doctors, "I hope you're all Republicans?"
I've often said that Jimmy Carter proved to all of us that the presidency is an impossible job and Ronald Reagan proved that anyone could do it. Yet, as with all the presidents whom history records as great or near-great leaders, Ronald Reagan was a remarkable man. His optimism was galvanizing. He was able to marshal the nation's spirit, to tap into our psychic energy somehow, viewing America as a shining city on a hill. "I've spoken of the Shining City all my political life," he said in his farewell address to the nation. "In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.'"
Was he fooling both himself and us? Yes and no. He failed to recognize that the city he was building was, as often as not, a tale of two cities. Yet his heart was good and his dream for our nation sincere. Last night Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry put it as well as anyone: "Ronald Reagan's love of country was infectious. Even when he was breaking Democrats hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open debate. Despite the disagreements, he lived by that noble ideal that at 5pm we weren't Democrats or Republicans, we were Americans and friends."
My favorite line in all theology comes from an orthodox Christian, G. K. Chesterton: "Angels can fly, because they take themselves lightly." Reagan's humor also was infectious and almost always self-deprecating. He was especially amusing about his age. Do you remember his speech to the Republican Convention in 1992. "Bill Clinton tells us that he's a lot like Thomas Jefferson," he said. The delegates anwered with hisses and catcalls. "It's not true," Reagan continued. "I knew Thomas Jefferson."
Returning from Orlando—where I had gone on a personal mission in the service of future memory—in watching the clips of Reagan's life and times, I began thinking about the relationship of memory to meaning. The meaning of our lives does not spring from the accumulation of everything we have experienced. Who we have become is determined less by who we once were than by the memories we have kept and how we keep them. We choose the dots we connect. For instance, depending on what they remember and how, identical twins can shape very different outcomes from similar experiences. The memories they select compose their life stories. And how they arrange them constructs their life's meaning. Within every life, there is enough material for us to construct thousands of alternative life stories. This is why one twin's book of memories may end in reconciliation and triumph, while another's ends in suicide.
Think about the way you arrange your own memories, distill them, rework them, perfect them even—and not always by making them more faithful to the facts. Who we are today is in large measure determined by what we choose to remember and how we choose to remember it. We endow our past with significance by selectively keeping certain memories and stories alive, refreshing them, commemorating them, passing them down to our children. Our failures and disappointments as well. We condense them into lessons, learning more from them over time than they originally had to teach. We tend to think of our parents differently when we ourselves become parents, for instance. We may then choose to replace tattered memories of them formulated when we were younger with new, happier memories from just as long ago. Meaning comes from fashioning and refashioning our memories into a coherent pattern. Not all coherent patterns are equally conducive to our happiness, of course. We can choose to keep alive only memories that darken the present with their shadows. The most healthy among us—by which I mean most whole, most fully reconciled with ourselves, with others, and with the ground of our being—neither repress bad memories or dismiss good ones, but rather organize our past in ways that prove most conducive to balance, reconciliation, and hope.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the dean of American historians, once said, "History is to a nation, what memory is to an individual." We are equally likely to go astray by refusing to celebrate the inspirational chapters of our past as we are by repressing the sordid ones. As a conscious act of memory, the 60th anniversary of D-Day is a significant event, not only of memory but of hope as well. The American president, German chancellor, and French president share a common platform, something that was no more true 60 years ago than it is today, yet which heals both old and recent wounds by placing each in broader perspective. Even as personal memory serves us best when we reconcile ourselves with the past, so collective memory serves the commonweal best when it unites as many participants as possible in consecration of our shared memories.
President Reagan's death offers a like opportunity. We can pause for a moment from our conflicts with one another to be one people. We remember a man who led this nation through the perilous final decade of the Cold War to the triumph of freedom. This triumph was not his alone to be sure, but it took place, without bloodshed, on his watch, affirming the faith of the founders and the essence of our nation's hope.
To me, President Reagan's finest hour was during the brief, eloquent address he gave following the Challenger tragedy. To the family of the seven astronauts who perished, he said, "Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy.' They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us."
"The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted," he said. "It belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
. . . .Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue."
And then, in conclusion, these exquisite words: "The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'
Ronald Reagan himself took a great challenge and met it with joy. He wished to serve and he did. And then, a decade ago, in another healing act for all those who suffer the tragedy of a loved one fading away into the wilderness of Altzheimers, he bid us a conscious, poignant farewell. "I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life," he wrote. "I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead."
A decade later, with the muddle of contemporary events yet to be clarified by history, it's hard to see the light breaking down the road ahead. Yet, in the midst of these strangely undistinguished, yet clearly troubled times, an anniversary, a horse race, and a death have conspired to shed a ray of hope, itself a fitting valediction for our nation's 40th president. After all, our greatest leaders—and Ronald Reagan, I believe, will turn out to be one of them—always somehow manage to inspire their people's faith in a brighter dawn.
Smarty Jones, by the way (as surely you all know) failed to win the race, beaten by a horse whose name I've already forgotten. It's still a good story. Almost worthy of Seabiscuit. I think I'll remember it.
Amen. I love you. May God bless us all.