Memory Loss

No one gets out of this life without loss.

A Three Dog Life, by Abigail Thomas, is packed with brutal observations, mostly about loss, made palatable by moments of pure comic relief. Thomas tells the story of her life before and after her husband, Rich, suffers from traumatic brain injury after being hit by a car.

I read A Three Dog Life after first reading “Everyone Has A Story To Tell,” a short article, also by Abigail Thomas. A good friend had left the article on my doorstep, and I couldn’t stop myself from reading it at once. In the article, Abigail Thomas tells how her husband, Rich, poignantly describes his life after the accident:

“In a moment of perfect clarity, he once described his loss like this: ‘Pretend you are walking up the street with your friend. You are looking in windows. But right behind you is a man with a huge paint roller filled with white paint and he is painting over everywhere you’ve been, erasing everything. He erases your friend. You don’t even remember his name.”

I liked the short article better than the memoir, partly because it was short, but mostly because it is packed with terrific writing exercises. Abigail Thomas is a true teacher.

Here are some of the best:

• Take any ten years of your life and reduce them to two pages. Every sentence has to be three words long — not two, not four, but three words long.
• Write two pages about the moment you knew something was over.
• Write two pages that end with “You can’t get away from it.
• Write two pages of something that makes you laugh every time
• Write two pages about something you wish you didn’t know.
• Write two pages about something you regret revealing.

You might also freewrite about all the things that you remember losing, big and small. Describe the loss as well as your emotions, when you discovered the loss. Did you do anything because of the loss? Did you make changes? This challenge will most likely take far more than two pages.