What If Some Memories Aren't Gifts?
A card sat on our kitchen table for weeks after a death in our family. It came from someone we love, and it was the kind of card a thoughtful person chooses on purpose, not the kind you grab in the checkout line. It landed in the spot directly across from where I sit. So I read it over coffee, and again while I answered emails, and again at dinner with my family. Part of it said that “memories are gifts our hearts receive to comfort us.”
It was the right thing to send, and it did what a card like that is meant to do. The person who chose it couldn't have known that one line would land differently for me than for almost anyone else at that table. After a few hundred readings it started steering me to think in a different direction, and I've ended up grateful for where it took me, just not in the way it was meant.
Some of my memories are not gifts. And some of what might actually be the gift is the part I don't have.
What happens when your brain takes a memory away from you?
It protects you, and it doesn't ask permission first. There are pieces of the night I was sexually assaulted that I don't have at all, not blurry or hard to reach but simply gone. And I will never get them back.
I know what happened because I lived it. I also have the permanent reminders, the reports and the exam and a record that exists whether I want it to or not. The knowing has never been the issue. What's missing are the stretches my brain closed a door on and has never opened since.
For a long time I understood that as pure loss, because from the outside an absence looks like nothing else. Something that should be there and isn't.
There's another way to read it. My brain looked at what was happening to my body and decided certain images were not survivable, and it kept them from me. If I had been asked in the moment whether I wanted to carry a complete, high-resolution record of that night for the rest of my life, I honestly don’t know what I would have said.
That's mercy. I can't call it anything else.
Then why am I still angry about the gaps?
Because the protection didn't stay where I needed it. It didn't wall off one night and leave the rest of my life alone. It ran out into the years that followed and took things that had nothing to do with keeping me alive.
My daughter was one year old. My memory of that stretch thins out and keeps thinning, through dissociation and grief and long periods when I couldn't function the way I wanted to. Chad recorded videos during those years, and I'm grateful for it in a way I have trouble explaining. There's proof those days happened. My daughter still asks to watch them.
But I can't get into those videos from the inside. I watch myself the way she does, like I'm looking at a stranger who has my voice. I look present in them, and I wasn't.
That part isn't mercy. Whatever my brain was doing to protect me, it kept doing long after the danger was over, and the cost got charged to ordinary days that had nothing to do with the assault.
Can it be mercy and damage at the same time?
Yes, and I've stopped trying to settle it. Which is really hard for a person who likes to keep things in neat little boxes. We want things to land on one side or the other, good or bad, taken or given, and the truth usually sits somewhere in the middle. That's been true of almost everything that came out of the assault. Bad things happened, and some good came out of them, and neither one makes the other smaller.
So I’m forced to hold both. My brain spared me something I don't believe I could have carried, and the same response ran on into years I wanted to be awake for. I don't get to keep the first part and send the second one back.
What does this change about how we comfort people?
It means the general truth is almost always the wrong tool. That card was thoughtful and specific and chosen with care, and the line still didn't fit me, because a printed sentence can't know that the person reading it has a complicated relationship with the word "memories."
That isn't a failure on the sender's part. Nobody can screen a sympathy card against everything the recipient is carrying. But it's worth noticing how often comfort arrives as a broad statement about how life works, and how rarely a broad statement is what a person actually needs.
The things that have helped me most were never true of everyone. They were true of me, on that day. Someone calling out the specific thing they knew I was dreading. Someone saying they'd been thinking about a particular week coming up. Someone asking a real question instead of offering a conclusion.
If you lead people, or you're the one your family looks to when something goes wrong, this is the part I'd want you to note.
“The comfort you reach for is probably a general one, because general is safer and it fits more situations. The person in front of you isn’t in a general situation. Say the smaller, more specific thing. It travels further.”
The card comforted us. It said what it needed to say about the person we lost, and I was glad it was there.
It also made me think differently about my own memories, and I'm grateful for that. I haven't figured it out. I don't know if I should be thankful for the gaps or angry about them. Most days I'm both.
Jessi Bixler is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the author of The Story We Share (Next Thing Press, 2025), a memoir about the ripple effects of sexual assault through a family and the systems that respond to harm. She speaks to leadership audiences and advocacy organizations on what people carry and how it shapes how we lead.
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