Remembering things that haven't happened yet

How will I know what I need to hear in a future I can't anticipate? Who will I be, and what will she want?

Jake shows me a photograph from 2015: we’re smiling in the dim light of Back 40, an East Village restaurant. The weather is humid and my hair is explosively curly, a wild tendril dipping into the glass of green chartreuse Jake is raising towards the camera, while his other arm extends to take the selfie. We look like two happy people who aren’t good at holding their liquor (we’re not: it was only our second drink and we were tipsy); people who’re blissfully ignorant that their lives will be destroyed in 2022.

Jake’s the documentarian of our lives: he has hard drives with gigabytes of photographs spanning our 15 years together. I have a terrible memory yet rarely compensate by shooting the picture or pressing record or keeping a journal. Memory is my limitation, so I forget to adapt. Swaths of my own past are lit, if at all, by a perpetual twilight. Then Jake sends me a photo and reminds me of its origin—“this was the dinner when you refused to sit facing the stuffed boar’s head on the wall because it watched you while you ate his friend”—and the past is suddenly illuminated; I am suddenly illuminated, and the reminder feels like physical relief, like finding a word I’ve struggled to recall then it appears fully formed in my mind.

When Jake’s cancer recurred two months after the May 25 salvage surgery that was supposed to save his life, I became obsessed with making videos of us, which I’d be able to watch after he’s gone. Most days in early August, Jake sat on the left side of the living room couch, recovering from chemo, with “Liquid Hope™”[1] infusing into his PEG tube, while friends, family and I gathered around him. I’d lean my cell phone against the bookshelf opposite his seat and pressed record, letting it run for hours, hoping to document meaningful looks between us, comforting words, “I love yous” exchanged. I was anxious to achieve the impossible task of capturing the essence of our life together. The videos would be an insurance policy against future loneliness and grief, and an insurance policy against forgetting.

I’ve talked to friends who’ve lost a spouse, sometimes to death and sometimes to savage divorce, and they universally say that one of the unexpectedly hardest things is not being able to ask: Remember that one place? Or that time? Remember when I…? I’ve written that:

When Jake looks at me, he sees me at 25, showing up to our first date in a grey mini-dress, black boots and red lipstick. He sees me at 29 in a striped bra and panty set in our 35th story Seattle hotel room, pressing me against the cold glass. And he also sees me as I am now. I’m all these ages at once, as he is to me. Love isn’t just blind to ugliness, but to decay. Look at two 80-year-olds gazing at each other like teenagers and you’ll know what I mean.

When I lose Jake, I’ll lose someone ever seeing me throughout all my ages again. I’ve said that parts of me will die with him, and I don’t just mean parts of my heart and the parts of my personality that act in relation to his. I mean entire eras of my life, all the views he was privy to, and therefore, much of my youth, goes as well. No one—even if I find love again one day, as Jake has urged me to do—will ever look at me at see me at 32, skinny dipping on a trip to Gunnison nude beach in New Jersey with a group of friends, laughing at how cold the water is under the sun of a hot summer day.

 I forget so easily, and we’ve spent so long existing in relation to each one another that, just as we made the memories together, we need to remember them together to recall them fully. At least, I do. Jake’s memories of me are also proof of my continuity, like Bitcoin is proof of work. I’m reminded of the concept of “continuers” or “dividers,” which Joshua Rothman wrote about in the New Yorker:

Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character? If you have the former feelings, you’re probably a continuer; if the latter, you’re probably a divider.

Since Jake’s May 25 surgery and diagnosis of recurrence and metastases on July 21, there has been a distinct sense of division between the person I was before I had a dying husband and the person I am now. Before, I had a more fluid, tenuous sense of chronoception: I’d think something that happened 5 years ago happened 3 months ago, or that 20 minutes had passed when three hours had. Today, the life we lived before Jake’s terminal diagnoses feels distant and surreal, like it belongs to another time—like it was lived by other people.

I try to be gentle when I think about that past me who left all those years unrecorded, but it’s hard not to get upset with the losses, like the hundreds of hours Jake spent reading to me from Lord of the Rings and Elmore Leonard before bed, the way his hands look when he chops vegetables, the excited way he’d point out electric bicycles, the gentle lift to his old voice when he’s teasing me, that smirk. Rationally, I know it’s unreasonable to have expected that I’d document our entire lives in preparation for later review, in the event of Jake’s premature death. That kind of behavior earns you a visit to a mental healthcare professional and some high dose prescription anxiolytics, not a gold star for foresight. Still, that’s tens of thousands of hours of my life left to memory. Which, for me, means much of it has been left behind.

Knowing that I’ll at least get Jake’s digital photographic archive, I’ve tried to focus on remembering things that can’t be captured on video, things that might one day flood my sense of recall. When he wraps his arm around me at night, I’ll press my body against his and deeply inhale his scent, feeling the gentle kick of his heart beneath my ear, the way the curve of my body feels warmer along the edge where we touch. It reminds me of so many similar nights, and I try to impress the sensations into my brain. During the few times we’ve had to spend nights apart recently, like when he went to MD Anderson in Houston to establish care, I’ve tried curling up on Jake’s side of the bed and recalling the exact feeling of being beside him. I sleep where he sleeps. I slip on one of his nightshirts. The individual pieces meant to trigger a sense memory are there, but the actual feeling is out of reach, since Jake is out of reach; like any intoxicant or peak experience, you can’t fully inhabit it unless you’re actually under its direct influence, not the memory of the influence.

The only person who’ll be able to make me feel better, and tell me what I need to hear after Jake is gone, is Jake, which is a serious temporal problem. So I’ve asked him to make me a video library consisting of short, topical clips I can play in response to specific future feelings or situations. Like if I’m anxious before bed—I’m a terrible sleeper—Jake’s made a video titled  “for when you’re feeling anxious before bed and need me to help you relax” video. There’s another for when I’m stressed at work, and another for when I’m feeling bad about my writing. There’s a video for when I feel alone, or when I need to hear he loves me, or just be told that he believes I can make it through the day. We brainstormed a list, heavy on reassurance and comfort. We often make them together.

I’ve guessed at other future scenarios, too. I’ve requested a video for when I get really sick or injured, and others, like one where he  talks  me down when our future child or children are assaulting my last nerve. Now that Jake has completed the initial, more general list, figuring out  topics I want addressed in new videos is getting harder. I keep getting stuck, paralyzed by choice, because I’m trying to bring Jake—or at least videos of Jake—into a future that doesn’t exist yet, and to do that successfully means anticipating every conceivable future. Impossible, I know. “Do you want one in case aliens land in Phoenix and you’re trying to decide if you should or shouldn’t accept the probe?” Jake asks, only half joking. And I say “yes,” because no matter the future, I’ll want him to make me laugh. Also, I’m curious which way he thinks I should go.

The paralysis I feel isn’t unearned. Misprediction is common (that’s why prediction markets are useful). Most humans are terrible at prediction. I’m a perfect example. I know I’m going to get my future self wrong, because I’ve been getting her wrong my entire life. Consider:

• When I was 8, I wanted to be on Broadway. Broadway was my destiny. This was pre-internet, otherwise known as “the Dark Ages,” so I didn’t have a YouTube channel or an Instagram Reel to facilitate discovery and audience building. No, I did it the old-fashioned “weird kid” way: I stood on the fake boulders that decorated the inside of the “mall” housing the post office and thrift store in my rural Arizona town and belted my little heart out, anticipating that a New York City director would come by and pluck me out of obscurity and dash me off to the theater. I thought I’d sing forever. Instead, I quit choir my second year of high school.

• When I was 12, I spent hours a day practicing classical piano, certain that adult-me would want to be a concert pianist (I didn’t realize the Gini coefficient of the music world, or how few pianists can pay the rent). I was so enamored with sultry Rachmaninoff, with the way I was transformed while playing, that I never questioned if adult-me would want to teach lessons and struggle to find venues to perform, or, if I succeeded, what “success” would even look like. I hadn’t read Blair Tindall’s memoir Mozart in the Jungle, which didn’t yet exist. I couldn’t have anticipated that an injury to my arm would take me away from the keyboard, and that an interest in science meant that I’d only play for fun—and even then, less and less, as years pass.  

• At 22 I started an MFA program in fiction writing because I was going to pen the great American novel, then maybe get a PhD in creative writing, which would inevitably win me a tenured professorship (it was 2008 when you could almost plausibly still believe things like this). I’d wind up in a cute college town with four seasons and crunching fall leaves under my boots and live a cozy, creative life. A year later it dawned on me that academia was a crumbling tower, the people in my MFA program were curiously incurious about reading and writing, and how I imagined things might work was not how any of this was going to work. I fled.

• At 23, I started med school, an almost ridiculous act of hubris in anticipating the needs of my 30-something self, who’d be responsible for the debt and bear the brunt of the time lost to working 80 hour weeks in a hospital. I wish I’d been able to travel to the future ask myself, at 39, if the choices were worth it. I wish I could ask my 50-year-old self the same question now.

• Until 2020, I thought Jake and I would live in New York forever. New York is so fun! But, realistically, we stayed too long, our goals and priorities changed, and the cost and struggle of the city stopped outweighing the desire for a kid and to be close to family.

Now I’m a 39-year-old ER doctor living in Arizona who likes playing guitar and writing nonfiction about medicine. There’s some continuity in my personality from childhood or adolescence to now, in that I’ve always enjoyed reading and a good story. I’m sensitive and quick to cry. I like a lot of physical affection. I’m prone to neuroticism but high in openness. I’m conscientious and don’t like authoritarian personalities. But I’ve changed a lot of what I once thought were “core” desires and loves. The details of what I’d do, who I’d be with, where I’d live and what my life would look like are nothing like I anticipated, even though past-me laid the groundwork of that future stranger’s life, which I’m currently living.

So when Jake asks me to provide him with a list of more topics for videos, Jake isn’t really asking: “What future situation do you want me to address on camera?” Instead, he’s asking: “Who will you be at 42, 50, 60, 80? What will you want? What will you want to hear from me?” And I have no idea, except that I’ll want him and he’ll be dead.

Researchers Gilbert, Quiodbach and Wilson coined a term called the “end of history illusion,” which describes people’s tendency to look back on the last ten or twenty years of their life and concede that they’ve changed a great deal. Yet when they’re asked to project how much they’ll change in the next decade, they tend to believe they’ll change much less, if at all, as if all their life was leading up to this moment, in which they’ve achieved peak selfhood.

The illusion protects us…from realizing how transient our preferences and values are which might lead us to doubt every decision and generate anxiety.

Sounds like the researchers read Derek Parfit. I’m currently experiencing whatever the opposite of the “end of history illusion” is. Let’s call it: “The beginning of potentially infinite unknowable and yet inevitable futures reality.” Okay, that’s kind of a mouthful. I’m not good at pithy marketing slogans. Knowledge of Jake’s impending death brings with it the certainty that my life is about to undergo tremendous, nonconsensual upheaval, inevitably changing  my preferences and values, though I don’t know any details except that I’ll change in likely vast and unexpected ways. Without the comforting illusion of stasis, what can I do to assuage the anxiety caused by reality? That’s what the videos are for.

Put a person into an fMRI machine and ask them to think about their future selves, and their brains light up as if they' thinking about a stranger. The further out you ask someone to imagine, the more pronounced the effect becomes. Author Jane McGonal summarizes:

Typically, when you think about yourself, a region of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex, or MPFC, powers up. When you think about other people, it powers down. And if you feel like you don’t have anything in common with the people you’re thinking about? The MPFC activates even less…The further out in time you try to imagine your own life, the less activation you show in the MPFC. In other words, your brain acts as if your future self is someone you don’t know very well and, frankly, someone you don’t care about.

There are supposed to be ways to improve your connection to your future self. One is to imagine as many details as possible, as a way of improving future-self “recognition” There’s a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is thought to be the area where we do our most detailed simulations of long-range future. Unfortunately for me, Neuroscientist Daniel Schacter thinks the same neural machinery that’s used for remembering the past may also be crucial for predicting the future. For someone with my poor memory, that bodes ill.

If we employ the same neural machinery for remembering the past as we do for projecting into the future, then foresight is trying to remember something that hasn’t happened yet. Future projections rely on mental constructs based on past events, but what if the future is so outside our experience that we have no past experience on which to model it? What if the mothership lands and the being within demand that I take them to my leader? Or—more plausibly—what if Jake dies, and I’ve never before experienced the death of someone I’m close to? Training my brain to think of my future self as less of a stranger might succeed at improving my sense of empathy and kinship towards her, as well as feeling motivated to make choices to care for her, like, say, asking Jake to make her videos,but it doesn’t tell me what videos she’ll need to see. It doesn’t get me any closer to knowing her. All I do know is that there’ll come a moment when future me needs to hear Jake say the one thing that present me didn’t think to ask for. I’m sorry for that. But not as sorry as she’ll be.

I’m hoping Jake will know me better than I know myself. It maybe be that I lack adequate foresight and insight because I’m too close to thestory, like editing this essay: I’ve read it too many times,I need outside input. Jake remembers the past me more clearlyand is more objective about my current self, so I assume he’ll do a better job at anticipating the me I’ll become. I’ve said that:

Although there are some consistencies with my personality, I’m not the same person I was 15 years-ago, and neither is Jake. Love changes all the time because we change. We’ve chosen—we have practiced—loving each other through all the people we have been: I’ve loved Jake at 25, when he was uncomfortable with intimacy (a childhood hangover), and at 30, when his thirst for novelty blossomed, and at 39, when he is mature…. Jake and I have been together almost forty percent of our lives, and most of our adult lives. We’ve practiced the loss and rediscovery of each other so many times.

And since he both loves me and is a novelist,  I trust that he can make some good plot guesses; if anyone can anticipate what I’ll need to hear when I’m 70, it’s Jake. He’s started making  new videos whenever something comes  to mind, no matter how big or small: it might be him telling me his secret to seasoning beans from Rancho Gordo in the Instant Pot, or a memory of the first time we danced together, or just him saying hello. Some videos are set in futures he imagines for me, and maybe those will help me navigate my way forward into those futures.

Maybe, like all love letters (or love videos) we revisit years after receiving them, they momentarily bring us back to the self we were when they were created. They form a bridge between who we are now and who we were, and connect those pieces; seeing Jake on video will one day, finally, connect who I’ll become to who I am now. That’s the moment when those two selves will finally see each other clearly. That might be the thing future me will need most when things feel bleak: to remember that I was loved before, and I’m still loved, and Jake would tell me if only he were there. That he is telling me, because he recorded it. Maybe I’ll watch a video and think back on how lucky I was. How lucky we are right now. Perhaps I can worry less about asking Jake to record the right thing, because there is no right thing, no matter the future. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if he gets it “right,” because there is no way to get it wrong. Because it really won’t matter what I hear, as long as I hear it from him.

If you’ve gotten this far, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding my husband Jake’s ongoing cancer treatment.

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Are you a continuer or a divider? Do you think you’ll change more in the next ten years than you did the last? What can you do now for your future self? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

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[1] The Liquid Hope website says it is “the world’s first shelf-stable, organic, whole foods feeding tube formula and oral meal replacement.”

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