by Nancy Barnes

The man on the PBS News Hour calls his project the Museum of Lost Memories. He says it is a digital museum, yet he is creating the museum in his home. His apartment is crammed with stuff: clocks and candle sticks, silver samovars and souvenir teacups from London. Shopping bags line the floor, each one overflowing with postcards and drawings and photographs. Thousands of photographs. The man, and the volunteers who work with him, scour thrift shops and yard sales and dead people’s attics to replenish the trove.

Many of us keep junk — I know I do. The astonishing thing, to me, is not that this fellow collects these treasures but that he searches for the person to whom each piece belongs. Remarkably, he seems confident that each of the valuables can find its way home. He believes that his life will be meaningful if he can reunite the high school yearbooks and the gold pocket watches with the people who lost them.

But what if those very same people were trying to get rid of that stuff? Or what if the owners are dead, and their grown children emphatically do not want those memories?

The very notion of collecting lost memories bothers me. It seems somehow contradictory – if a memory is lost how can it be collected? Besides, the museum is filled with objects: an oil painting of sunflowers, a snapshot of a red Schwinn bicycle. Is each item a memory?  The man at the museum believes that he can find the one individual who will rejoice, and be grateful, to be reunited with that photo of the red bike. But whose memory is it? The boy who got the bike for his birthday? His Uncle Frank who took the snapshot? Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but it is confusing. I have to admit that I don’t plan to visit that museum.

There’s a weird little buzz that I get when something is zipping around my neuropathways; perhaps the Museum of Lost Memories has opened some vault in my mind. If so, my vault is filled with lost sorrows: a blurry photo from that sad vacation in the Dominican, black plastic garbage bags spilling out spoiled fruit by the side of the road. Or the packet of yellowing envelopes I can’t find, letters from the first man I ever slept with.

But wait, lost sorrows? Sadness is not something to be tracked down or scavenged, it’s not a memento. Sorrow is intimate, and private. Not lost, but maybe hidden.

What could that mean, hidden sorrows?

It might suggest how I feel now that I can no longer communicate with my beloved oldest sister, who is in a nursing home in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has become, as they say, profoundly deaf. I asked her, on her birthday, how it felt to be 90. She texted back: Ancient. For a long time texting was better than nothing. But now she can’t use her smart phone so we don’t even have texting. I can’t talk with her at all. I have lost her voice, and the loss is 1400 miles away. The years of our text threads definitely belong in my museum, they hold my hidden sorrow.

Not long ago, an acupuncturist was working to unblock and rebalance my qi as we talked about the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, how the human mind cannot comprehend such devastation and loss. I asked him how traditional Chinese medicine views loss, whether from a disaster in the world or a private grief. “Loss?” He laughed, dismissing the question. They refer to “excessive perspiration,” he said – a descriptor they attach to fully one third of the 361 acupuncture points. Feelings are never named. So what happens to sadness,? All he would say was that the pulses do speak.

Since the pulses are not visible, my museum will need one of those outlines of the human body, the sorrows marked with black circles and dots, arrows and meridian lines. Heartache and lament float like currents of qi; the chart will help to balance the anguish and weeping in the museum.

I am also reminded of the old artesian well at the house where I spent my childhood summers; sometimes hidden sorrows rest at the bottom of a deep well. The water in that well was so delicious I wanted to see it, yet so far down in the stone cavern that when I leaned over the edge to look, my father holding tight to my ankles, I couldn’t even glimpse its shine.

The days and months that I’ve had to live apart from my sweetheart are buried, way down, in a well of sorrow. Soon, before summer goes into full swing, we will be together in one home. This is wonderful, of course. But what about all those mornings of not waking up next to her warm body? Or the times when the early spring sun slanted in, stealthy and promising, so I had to rush outside to catch it — and she wasn’t there.

I hope I can find a photograph of an old fieldstone well, its gray stones glowing with flecks of mica. I’ll hang it on the wall in the Museum of Hidden Sorrows, alongside the chart of acupuncture points and the text messages from my sister. I realize it’s an unlikely collection, but I’ll know why they’re there.