Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember my mother getting a telegram one summer morning in Bellagio which said: JUST DIED YESTERDAY OF A CEREBRAL HEMORRHAGE. I knew enough about telegrams, partly because of that one to me signed "Mummy and Daddy" which I wrote about November 26, 2002 here (scroll down), to know their postcard abbreviation convention. I was amused by the idea of someone saying of himself that he'd just died. I knew that the telegram was serious -- after all it was a telegram -- but seriousness wasn't serious enough for me at the time not to laugh when I presented my mother with my interpretation. (The telegram was delivered open on a polished tray, and I remember reading it on the counter of a table or bureau on my parents' room.) Of course Just turned out to be the last name of the woman who had died (my mother was either or lawyer or the executor of her will or both) -- died suddenly: this was the first I heard of cerebral hemorrhages. I think perhaps I wasn't disturbed by the idea of them immediately, but I was now well-enough informed to understand the story about FDR's death presented a year or two later in the reading textbook I remember using either in fourth or fifth grade. I remember Roosevelt's last words were, "I have the damndest headache," though this wasn't how the textbook quoted them. There he might have been reported as simply saying "I have a terrible headache," though I'm not sure. After that, every headache I had would always be slightly scary.

posted by william 2:41 PM
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