If the mad Past, on which my foot is based,
Were firm, or might be blotted: but the whole
Of life is mixed: the mad Past will stay:
And if I drink oblivion of a day,
So shorten I the stature of my soul.

and one I just added yesterday, from psychologist Carl Jung:

The serious problems in life are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so, it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem not to lie in its solution but in our working at it incessantly.

On the wall above my bed are four little icons: a photo of my friends Kristin and Laurie; a black and white postcard of poet Anne Sexton; a photo of West Campus covered in an inch of snow, taken from the entrance to my dorm sophomore year; and a photo of the Appalachian Mountains' hazy blue and purple peaks, taken on a hike with Kristin. Scattered across the desk, the bookshelves, the bed, and the floor are other little images of my life—quotes I like, pages ripped from magazines, ticket stubs from art galleries and movie theaters, dirty coffee mugs, trinkets given by friends, shoes, textbooks, hats, notebooks. Looking at the entire, messy conglomeration, I have to ask myself: is this it? Is this the sum total of my life—memories I mark with old pictures and movie tickets? And don't I attribute more meaning to my icons than what they really have? Perhaps I overestimate their worth, falling again into my old habits of sentimentality, or, at the very least, grasping at the past for lack of a better way to explain the present. Now I wonder if I didn't add the meaning of each photo and postcard myself, in the very process of taping them to the wall and the door. What can this mess of images and words I have accumulated possibly mean? How do I organize it into something I can understand?

There are times when I think the mad Past might be growing firm beneath my feet, times when the edges meet to form neat circles of sense and meaning, but then they evaporate before my eyes again, like so many shadows and clouds. What had seemed saturated with meaning becomes meaningless again, and I, stunned, only rub my eyes and try to remember.

Over fall break, Kristin and I traveled south to my parents' home in Georgia. Digging through my old belongings, looking for more pictures of friends and other reminders of times passed, I found something I thought I had lost long ago: a tiny, blue and brown knit shoe that had belonged to my baby brother. How—and more importantly, why—I still had the reminder of the little foot after seventeen years is a mystery only the four year old child who originally stole it can fully understand.

My younger brother died before he even made it through his first year of life. I ask myself why images from his short life remain with me now, after so many years, and part of me steadfastly, angrily insists that I push the memories away, that I forget his short and painful existence, that I "put it behind me," "grow out of it," and "get over it" as a rational adult should. Yet there is the nagging realization that tells me I was not a rational adult at the time of the event, and therefore how is it possible to retroactively process the experience as an adult "should?"

It was a beautiful, fall morning—a lazy Saturday when there was no particular reason to be awake yet, despite the sun streaming in through the windows and the pale blue sky promising a day of bike rides and games and foot races—when my brother stopped breathing. I was the first member of the household to wake up that day; still wearing my Mighty Mouse, button-down pajamas, I wandered bleary-eyed downstairs in search of, from what I remember, an Oreo cookie and a glass of milk. I never did get my milk and cookies. I took a seat on the foot of the stairs while I watched the rest of the day's drama transpire, from the moment my mother called upstairs to my father in a voice hoarse with panic, bordering on tears, controlling a scream that Drew isn't—Drew isn't—Drew isn't breathing, isn't breathing. What can the four year old do but sit and wait as her house is invaded by nurses, firemen, siren sounds and uniformed men, watching them as they bend over the little body of her brother—the little body so small even she is bigger than it? Nothing to do but watch and wait, wait for Oreo cookies and milk or to be remembered, rediscovered sitting there on the foot of the stairs.

I still await final closure to my brother's death. According to my parents' wishes, he never had a funeral. I know it outraged my Granma that my Mom and Dad simply "gave his body to science," as if he were another taxonomical sample to be bottled in formaldehyde, stored, and studied. Granma wanted him to be buried at Eureka, with the rest of the family. But I guess we all have to do what makes things easiest for us, and so I think for Mom and Dad, easiest meant turning bad into hope, the hope that Drew's tiny dead body, stored and studied properly, might help some other family avoid the same tragedy.

Sometimes I find myself wondering about what happened to that body. I wonder whose hands cut into his skin, and whether they labeled him "Body A" or "Medlock baby" or just "Drew," and I wonder if they made jokes while they cut into him to ease the pulsing reminder that they were cutting into a family's son, a little girl's baby brother, or if they stayed silent, out of respect or fear or awe.

At four o'clock last Thursday morning, Kristin began urging me to get up. I only groaned and rolled over, pulling the electric blanket up closer to my chin.

"You only have to relocate yourself to the passenger seat of the car," she told me.

I groaned again but somehow managed to get up. Taking a quick shower, I threw a handful of clothes into my suitcase, dressed, and found myself in the passenger seat of Kristin's car despite my desire to remain in bed, and we were on our way to New York City.

When traveling with Kristin to any major city, the only thing I can be sure of is that we will seek out any and all art museums, galleries, special exhibitions, shows, films, and anything else even remotely related to art. From our entire whirlwind art tour of five museums, seeing thousands of artists and artwork, ranging from paintings to sculptures, abstract expressionism to the Hudson River School, from Roethke, Warhol, Dine, and O'Keefe to Rodin, Dali, Hopper, and Picasso, from New Guinean totems to Kenyan face masks, there is one painting above all that stands out in my mind. It is a painting from the middle ages, perhaps the thirteenth century, paint cracked with time. On the left hand side is a blue circle with several concentric rings. Above floats an angel, while to the right another angel is shuffling Adam and Eve out of Eden. I leaned in for a closer look, and read the title: "Creation of the World and Expulsion from Paradise." Looking at it, I remembered my Milton lesson from the week before. In "Paradise Lost," just before Adam and Eve leave Eden, the archangel Michael reassures them that when they find virtue inside themselves, they will come to a "paradise within" which will be "happier far." For some reason, that painting made all the rest of our insanely fast weekend worth it.

I was exhausted when we finally made it home from New York on Sunday night. I climbed our steps and collapsed onto the ratty old couch on our front porch. Looking over the porch, unwilling to move, I notice half of a restaurant check stub. Scribbled on it in pen, smudged with moisture and age, was the following quote:

The serious problems in life are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so, it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem not to lie in its solution but in our working at it incessantly.
-- C. G. Jung

My brother never had a funeral; looking back, I sometimes think it was for the best. Without a funeral, there was no final, ritualistic closure, and thus I keep coming back to him year after year despite myself. The little details, snippets of foggy memories and recollections, return to me, regardless of whether I will them to or not.

Children, asking their mothers in grocery stores for cookies and milk. Advertisements for pediatric and pre-natal care. My aunt's two year-old son, named in honor of my brother—his very name makes me nervous, makes me superstitiously worry for him. My mother telling me in the car one morning, on a Christmas Eve not two years ago, that ever since Drew had died, all her eggs were in one basket.

A forgotten blue shoe, tossed in with other icons of old memories.

Drew presents a problem for me, an incongruity in my life which I cannot explain away and cannot seem to escape from. He is a rough spot on an otherwise smooth canvas, his memory cracked with age and layered with years of paint trying to smooth him over. He is a problem I work at incessantly, which I have no solution for and perhaps never will. He was my expulsion from paradise, my initiation into the knowledge of Good and Evil, Life and Death—but also my chance at consciousness and understanding, my chance, as Wordsworth puts it in "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," for "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."