Nostalgia lingers like grief, until it doesn't. in anticlimatic

Been thinking a lot about my mother lately. For some reason I have a much harder time talking to and being around her now than I ever have in my life. Part of that is the new marriage, even though husband #2 is a great and wonderful man that I like very much, I find myself knocking on their door now instead of just walking in. With the new marriage came a new group of friends and a new social scene that her family- brothers, mother, kids- weren’t a part of, for the first time in a very long time. I am not criticizing her for any of this, on the contrary I think one silver lining of my dad’s premature demise was that my mother got a second chance at life again. She only married my dad because he was really handsome and really kind, but he was also too autistic and introverted and never took her anywhere.

At a recent get together she came and sat down next to me while I was alone for a minute, just to catch up as one does, and I found I had nothing to say. The only words that would come out of my mouth were civil banal pleasantries. Fortunately, she was interrupted by a grandkid and whisked away before it became problem. There is something unsaid between us, but I can’t quite figure it out. This is the longest we’ve gone without a major heart to heart conversation. We do communicate very well when we connect right, at the right time and place over the right subject matter, but it’s been so long now that I can’t even remember the last time we really “talked.”

Watching her with her grandkids that night, something dawned on me. Logan has the exact same personality as her father, my brother. Sebastian is a clone of his father, my brother. Esther, oldest (like me) has a very similar brain as me, and Bear just crawls around looking cute, much like my sister did at that age.

We’ve all been replaced with infinitely cuter and more fun versions of our best selves. Playing with grandkids is her all time favorite pastime, and watching her- the voices she uses, the things she suggests- they were all voices she used with us, the kind of things she’d suggest and do for us.

And so I felt whacked with an odd type of nostalgia tainted by two specific disturbing feelings I’ve been puzzling over until now.

First, it was her, the mom I remember from childhood- but old now, like an actual old woman. A grandmother, with long white hair. I remember how vibrant and beautiful she was when we were kids. The overlap with how identical she was acting and sounding, and the age misalignment, was discomforting.

It was like a low level kernel panic over trying to load an old image with the same name as a new image and getting confliction.

Second was this feeling of not really existing anymore, as though I were a kind of ‘evil’ doppelganger of my former childhood self, that I was seeing right in front of me in Esther.

In the same breath it felt like I was placed outside of my own, perhaps my old, life- while my mother became replaced with an old decrepit (I am being dramatic, she’s lovely) version of her former self.

And the odd thing was that it made me feel unsettled, but not nostalgic. Which made me realize something else: it seems to have taken me the entirety of my young adult life, but I no longer feel it. At all.

I never realized at the time that Nostalgia can actually just be anxiety over the coming grief of losing your own life, including everyone in it. A hyper fixation on the details, as though generating memory were a way to preserve something destined to pull away.

Foolish. Silly.

Because once the grief is allowed to hit, and allowed to be felt, what follows is something you would never expect- though you should. Something you wouldn’t expect you’d miss, though you will. What follows is that those feelings- the anxiety, the sadness, the loss- they get put away, where they belong, and they vanish. Just like any healthy emotional process.

And now most of the elements of my youth, including the people in it, don’t cross my mind hardly at all. People, role models, loved ones, that were themselves the bulk of my entire world- it’s like glancing back at a dusty bookshelf in a dark room.

Instead, it’s just the present. And, for the first time, the future. My thoughts move there, out of this dim morass- towards some kind of light up ahead.