I read a Facebook post from an acquaintance who was recovering from quadruple bypass surgery. Like me twelve years ago he was full of awe and amazement at getting another chance at life, and full of admiration and gratitude for the brilliance of his surgeon and the system that allowed him to pass through the crucible of death with his heart stopped and his chest cracked wide open, and come out of it enlivened with another chance, and a sense of powerful victory over the death that nearly claimed him but did not.
His words were like those of a lover in the first flush of a hot romance. I recognized the feelings, recalled them in my own post-operative journey, and mused on how time had muted them and the intervening years had seen the sense of great fortune and victory dwindle as life went on.
We never forget. But the heat of passion fades, the intensity of grief dwindles, time mutes the sharp sense that the moment inflates. We never forget, but we move on, and the accumulation of time dilutes the singularity of epiphany, be it of passion, grief, discovery or any other sudden awareness that seems so massive that we imagine the magnitude of such moments will inevitably be eternal within our consciousness.
But they're not. They fade away like the morning dew.
They're still there. And sometimes the tale of another's similar experience brings them back and they appear to us again through the haze of the time, fuzzy and indistinct but as real as the smell of smoke and we remember again that moment when we realized that things would never be the same and that moment, old now, when everything was new.
