The Woman Who Can't Forget by Jill Price

up, I had to come running. That was the first time I was given so much freedom, and I played happily in the dirt beside the privet hedges, with a blue pail and yellow shovel that I loved. The trouble came after she came and got me. The key jammed in our front door lock, and as my mother fiddled with it, I panicked, running up and down the hallway yelling, “We have to get to Michael!” My mother finally got the door open, and I ran straight to Michael’s bedroom, terrified that he might be hurt, but of course, he was perfectly fine, holding on to the side of his crib and jumping up and down smiling.
    When I remember this incident, I am jolted by that utterly irrational fear that I felt about Michael, and the clarity with which I still feel my earliest memories has given me great sympathy for what children that age go through. When I see a small child crying uncontrollably or having a temper tantrum, I am sent right back to those intense days myself.
    The scientists who studied me do not know exactly how the nature of my memory has affected my emotional makeup. Because my memory syndrome is so little understood and because the science of the ways in which our earliest memories influence our lives is still developing, it’s impossible to know in a truly scientific way how the lingering emotions of those earliest childhood experiences have changed my psychological development. I have no doubt, though, that the way that I’ve retained so many of these intense childhood fears has had a profound effect on my life. In particular, I cannot remember a time when I haven’t had a terrible dread of death, and I’ve also had a compulsion about order. I believe both stem from a particular memory, from when I was two, when I overheard a conversation between my mother and her friend Diana.
    My mom recently mentioned Diana, and how her father had died a long time ago and I said, “Oh, I remember that.” She balked, saying I couldn’t possibly remember that, and so I told her the story of my memory. “It happened when I was two years old. You and Diana were talking in the living room…” My mom and Diana and a third friend of theirs, Patty, were talking about Diana’s father having gone into the hospital for surgery and died. What stuck most in my mind was that they kept saying he had “wrapped things up” and “got things in order,” which evoked an image in my mind of him sitting at some old desk and locking things up as he put them away. I wasn’t sure why he would do that, but it seemed the only thing alleviating how upset they were that Diana’s father was never coming back: he got his things in order. As I try to trace the arc of my life, it seems to me that along with that image of Diana’s father putting his affairs in order, I developed an enduring fear of death and also of disorder. To my child’s mind, the associations were simple: someone is dying—bad. Putting things in order—good. That simple child logic still holds sway over me.
    Though I would never want to lose my wonderful memories of my earliest years in New York, I wish the intense feelings of fear and confusion, anger and dread, that my mind still conjures up so vividly from those days had dissipated as they normally do. I’d absolutely love to be able to remember the good and forget the bad.
    As I’ve reflected on how the fact that my mind has stored so many memories starting so early has affected my life, I’ve come to realize that one of the most profound ways is that I have not really wanted to leave the past. For whatever reason, and somewhat ironically, from early on, I came to hate the idea of change. I never really felt excitement about new stages of my life as I know so many people do at junctures in their lives, such as when graduating from college. I never wanted to move on to new things, at least not until I met my husband.
    I think I would have liked to