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Home and Away: "Remembrance is Sufficient"

Murray State University

During a crisis in my life in 2010, we relied on our faith to see us through.  During a two-week hospital stay, we leaned on our faith, and we also leaned on family and friends. 

At the hospital, my family gathered around me.  I remember waking up from the anesthesia in the recovery room after my heart surgery, still on a ventilator, to see Evelyn smiling down at me and encouraging me that all was well. 

My brother, Steve, as always solid as a rock, was with me in the recovery room too, lending his strength.  Other members of my family and friends stayed in the waiting room. 

Evelyn and Steve knew they were not alone.

In the hospital, amidst the heart monitors and IVs, I found myself yearning for the familiar.  Still today, I find myself drawn to the old, familiar memories of better, or at least easier, times. 

My family and friends help me remember.  When my grade school buddies, Steve Duncan and Mark Russell, came to my home one day, we re-visited some of the old stories, and we remembered the cast of characters that populated our childhood and teenage years. 

Another old Webster County friend, Alan Vaughn, a master storyteller, visited with me in the hospital.

Old, familiar books also help me remember.  Even in the days immediately after my surgery, I was able to read.  And what a blessing!  Thomas Jefferson said, “I cannot live without books.”  I know what he meant.

   In a collection of E. B. White’s  New Yorker pieces, the editor included an essay in which the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little told of a visit with his 92-year-old Aunt Caroline.  White wrote that his aunt was “in good health and excellent spirits,” and that “being so old, she goes back to a more leisurely period, and when she speaks, she speaks with a precision and a refinement rare in this undisciplined century.”  “There is nothing stiff-backed about the furnishings of her mind,” he said, “but it is her nature to sit erect, to stand erect, and to speak an upright kind of English that is always graceful and exact.”

   White explained that one day in Maine “we were sitting with her at lunch in the country, and we apologized for not having taken her for a motor ride that morning to see once again the bright colors in the changing woods.”  “Why, my dear,” Aunt Caroline said without hesitating, “remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.”

   “Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.”

   “The sentence startled us,” White wrote, “as though a bird had flown into the room. . . . At any rate, it suggests the beauty that surrounds the day, the sufficiency of remembrance, the nostalgia that is the source of tears.”  White said that “to any for whom by some mischance the magical moment fails in reenactment, we give Aunt Caroline’s resolute words:  Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.”

   Although I may not be able to do some things that I once did, at least for a time, precious memories are for now enough.  We agree with Aunt Caroline:  “Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.”

Duane Bolin is a history professor at Murray State and presents his commentary series "Home and Away" on WKMS and the Murray Ledger and Times. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent the views of WKMS or its staff.

Dr. Duane Bolin teaches in the Department of History at Murray State University.
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