Writing Memory: How the Past Refuses to Stay Silent
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Gentle note to readers:
This reflection includes discussion of childhood trauma, abuse, grief, illness, and memory. These themes are explored with care and hope, but please read at your own pace and step away if needed.
Memory is like an old photograph that never fully fades. Even as the colors soften and details blur, the image keeps returning, asking to be seen again. Memories surface at unexpected moments, carrying joy or sorrow, reminding us of who we were and who we have become. They do not remain in the past. They speak into the present.
Some of my memories are tender: fishing in the middle of a lake with my father and older brother, working beside my dad in the vegetable garden, racing bicycles with my friend Tammy long after the streetlights flickered on. Others are painful and persistent: childhood abuse, watching my father’s body weaken under the weight of cancer, kissing his cold cheek at his funeral, and the slow loss of friendships over time and distance. The psalmist captures this ache when he writes, “These things I remember as I pour out my soul” (Psalm 42:4). Memory is not passive recollection. It is active presence.
Our memories form the foundation of who we are. They shape our attachments, fears, instincts, and beliefs. They influence how we move through the world and how we interpret risk, safety, and trust. Some memories protect us. Others, when left unprocessed, distort our self-understanding and quietly undermine our sense of stability.
For years, memories of my father’s illness and early death shaped my relationship with my own health. I lived with a persistent fear that time was borrowed, that something could be taken at any moment. That fear sometimes kept me from taking risks that might have brought growth or joy. Yet memory also holds truth. When I remember how God sustained us after my father’s death, how provision came in unexpected ways, and how strength was given when none seemed available, fear loosens its grip. I cannot control the future, but I trust a God who holds it. With the help of a skilled therapist, I continue to work through traumatic memories, learning again how to trust myself and God.
Storytelling becomes a way to integrate what has been into what is still possible.
Through journaling and fiction, I have processed many difficult memories. While my stories are fictional and written with care not to expose real people or events, they are shaped by lived experience. Writing allows me to face what might otherwise remain buried. It also creates space for readers to recognize themselves in characters who struggle, endure, and heal. Ecclesiastes reminds us, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Scripture models remembrance not as repression, but as testimony. Covenants, psalms, and witness all depend on honest remembering.
Repression does not heal. It isolates. It allows pain to fester in silence. Healthy remembering, however, brings what haunts us into the light of grace. Sometimes that process requires prayer. Sometimes it requires professional help. Often, it requires both.
In my fiction, I create characters who are flawed, wounded, and searching—people who resemble the world we actually inhabit. Their journeys do not bypass darkness; they move through it. I avoid being preachy, but I am intentional about pointing toward the same source of light that has sustained me: the grace of God revealed in Christ. Remembering becomes an act of faith—trusting that no fragment of our lives is wasted in God’s redemptive work.
We are often tempted to rewrite the past, to soften it or skip over what is painful. Writers do this in fiction, too, rushing toward light without reckoning with darkness. But that is not how healing works. God does not ask us to deny what hurt us. He invites us to bring it to Him. “You keep track of all my sorrows,” the psalmist writes. “You have collected all my tears in Your bottle” (Psalm 56:8).
Writing about memory is not about spectacle or sensationalism. It is about humanizing pain and making room for empathy. When characters remember, they become real. When readers recognize themselves in those memories, isolation breaks. Healing often begins in recognition. Scripture calls us to “rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15), to “carry each other’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2). We are not meant to bear memory alone.
Redeemed memory does not erase pain. It reframes it. What once haunted us can become testimony, compassion, and wisdom. God promises, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). The past may still whisper into the present, but grace gives that whisper purpose.
This is the heart of Redemptive Realism. Memory is holy ground, where truth and mercy meet. To write memory is to allow wounds to speak and to trust that God’s love has been listening all along.
If memory continues to shape your life, know that you are not alone in that work. What you remember, what you carry, and what you are still learning to name matters. God meets us not only in healing, but in the slow, faithful process of remembering with honesty and hope.
You are welcome here if these reflections resonate with you. This space exists for stories that honor truth, carry compassion, and trust that even painful memory can become sacred ground.
Stories of Consequence
Fiction that faces the dark, but ends in light.
May God bless you richly,
Pauline J. Grabia
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Memory is like an old photograph that never fully fades. Even as the colors soften and details blur, the image keeps returning, asking to be seen again. Memories surface at unexpected moments, carrying joy or sorrow, reminding us of who we were and who we have become. They do not remain in the past. They speak into the present.