What Remains

On Page 104 of “The Handmaid’s Tale”, the narrator ponders where her former husband Luke is now. She describes what remains of him in her mind: “his hair, the bones, the plaid wool shirt, green and black, the leather belt, the work boots. I know exactly what he was wearing…though not his face, not so well. His face is beginning to fade, possibly because it wasn’t always the same: his face had different expressions, his clothes did not.” The inanimate objects are easier to remember for her, because they are simple, and they remain the same. It is harder to capture someone’s whole essence in memory, because they are always changing like we are, and the face starts to fade because we cannot decide on an expression to save.

I know this feeling firsthand, as I have had to say goodbye to many people in my life. I’ve moved a fair amount, living in 3 main houses and 4 main schools. The moves used to affect me more. I used to cry over my friends being gone. And then my friends started to change. Once I didn’t see them anymore, it became harder and harder to keep an updated version of their faces in my mind. Like the narrator, my friends’ faces began to fade, frozen in time.

What I remember very clearly are the things I have kept in my memory box. What remains is this: the bubbles in a small white container, leftover from “Paint The Town Red”, a choir assembly in Chicago. The tape dispenser covered in scraps of paper from a friendly feud that say “Reese was right, Guz was wrong” and “Gus was right, Reese was wrong”. I can still remember the bubbles floating in the sea of red uniforms. I can remember the blue water bottle I stole and covered in my little notes. Though not their faces, not so well. They seem to fade in my mind, becoming people from a different story, becoming distanced. All I have left are these objects, and my own feelings. As the people I share the memories with fade, the memories themselves feel less real.

It feels like I’m in a void with relics from a different life, which is very similar to the experience of the narrator of “The Handmaid’s Tale”. She actually is living a different life, removed from almost everything and everyone she once knew. And she doesn’t even have anything physical to hold on to. Her thoughts are all she has to keep her sane and I think that is why she clings to the details like the clothes as much as I cling to my memory box. She needs to ground her story in something, needs to cling to whatever there is left. She needs some kind of proof that what she had before was real.

As the narrator speculates what has happened to Luke, she keeps using the phrase “I believe”. (Pages 104-105). At the end of the chapter she talks about how she believes her husband is alive and will come for her. “It’s this message, which may never arrive, that keeps me alive”. In addition to the clothes she remembers and can hold on to, she has invented a hope. She has invented a message that she can picture, telling her that a savior is coming. The other beliefs she has, that Luke is dead or that he has been caught, are not as strong as the hope. Because it is the one thing that will prove Luke is real and that this nightmare will come to an end. In a world where the narrator is surrounded by an entirely new reality, she needs a hope that the old one will return. If she loses him, if she loses her last hope, she will have nothing to hold on to. By losing faith, by losing hope, she will lose herself. And there will be nothing left to keep her alive.

I did not feel this on the same level of course, but I did still feel it. I reached out to my friends more often than they did, and eventually I stopped getting responses. I stopped trying to reach out. I would wait, crying in my room, for someone to send a message. I’d go through my memory box, looking at old letters, inventing a new one in my mind. Moving on was the hardest part, accepting that some friends would go. The narrator hasn’t reached this stage yet. Because moving on is not an option she can accept yet. So she stays in limbo, going with the flow of her new life, waiting for a message to tell her what to do.

I think something that this whole topic illustrates is how much we rely on other people to define ourselves. We need human contact to survive- that is how we are wired. Without real connections to real people, we start to lose our sense of self and our sense of purpose. When we lose connections to people, we focus on the objects we associate with them because we need a connection. We need to hold on to something, in times of joy or struggle. Our past is something we carry with us, and if we leave it behind we are left wondering how we got here and where we should go now.