Selective memory

Saturday, December 1 came and went for me this year just like any other day. I had breakfast with my friend Lindsay, helped my housemates put on a baby shower for the couple we live with, and then tried to do a little work around the house. It was a good day – but I always wish it would feel like something much more than that.

December 1 is World AIDS Day. A day to remember the millions who have died, and to gather hope for the 40M people currently living with HIV as well as the more than 5 billion people in the world who are not infected. Yet this year, even though I work in an HIV-focused clinic, the day passed for me with nothing more than a music video on MTV acknowledging the significance the day holds.

On a more personal level, Sunday, December 1, 2002 is the day in which I was involved in a terrible accident on the way to a World AIDS Day event sponsored by World Relief Mozambique. Early that Sunday morning our double cab pick-up, filled with more than a dozen teenage volunteers in the bed of the truck, was hit head-on by a semi trailer on a road leading out of Maputo, Mozambique. Six people in our car died very gruesome deaths, including the driver who was seated next to me.

Every year, I try so hard to think of a way to remember that day in a way that seems adequate to the pain that the others in that car felt, a way that honors the family members who lost someone they dearly love, and in a way that acknowledges my own gratefulness to God for the fact that I walked away with little more than a sore back and a few small scars on my arm.

Yet somehow each year the day just seems to slip by. No one else ever reminds me of it. I sometimes try to tell other people the story, but each time I tell it, it sounds less and less like my own story and more like something I heard from someone else. Just as my physical scars are fading, the memories of the intense images and feelings I experienced on December 1, 2002 are also fading.

In post 9/11 USA, there was a sudden surge in bumper stickers, window placards, and t-shirts bearing the words "Never Forget" over a silhouette of the twin towers. I've always been disturbed by this. In the context of the Iraq war, widespread fear of terrorism and immigration battles, they invoke a need for revenge, a sense of prolonged bitterness and justified resentment. In such a context, we must begin to forget. Otherwise we will never move forward. We will never seek or find peace with those we labeled as enemies on that day. In the Christian faith, we talk about God’s forgiveness that is accompanied by totally forgetting our wrongdoing. Forgetting can be as powerful as remembering.

I’m beginning to accept the truth of this in my own story – it is good that I have begun to forget what happened on December 1, 2002. Otherwise I might spend the rest of my life in constant fear of the next truck coming down the road. I might, as some days I have wished I could, just plant myself in a rest stop and refuse to go on.

December 1 is World AIDS Day and it will be World AIDS Day for the rest of my lifetime and likely that of my children and grandchildren too. I am thankful that the day is marked in a way that will always remind me that it is part of my story and the story of millions of others affected by HIV/AIDS. However, I am also letting myself forget some things about that day too. There are, God-willing, too many roads still to be traveled and many more days to be both remembered and forgotten.