The obvious answer is just that, of course. I would save my wife and myself. Everything else is replaceable—well, almost everything. Read on.
Twenty years ago, before the launch of the iPhone and before social media ruled the world, two of the most important things in any traditional American family’s house were the family Bible and the family’s pictures. I will leave the Bible and commentary on it for another question on some other day. The pictures, though, ah, the pictures. They were preserved and enshrined in photo albums with black paper pages and secured with little white corners with glue on the back. Some of them were arranged in chronological order in boxes that resembled Rolodexes. Some were tossed into old shirt boxes and lay there for years in unperused piles, layer upon layer of forgotten July 4th picnics, beach weekends, and ski trips. The pictures that each family took were the visual timeline, no matter how organized or how haphazard, of entwined lives. The documentary of a family as it was born, grew old and eventually died. Then, as time went on, those boxes of photos and trays of slides and old negatives gradually became all that was left of Gramps and Aunt Susie and Uncle George and Cousin Fred. In the next hundred years, the details of their lives were known only to those relatives who received the pictures and looked at them, tried to understand them, and took the time to put stories with images and recreate the person that was in the photo. Photos and other images were priceless records. Priceless.
So, you might be thinking that my answer to the question above is the all the pictures in our house, yes? Well, you would be right, and you would be wrong. For you see, except for a few boxes of old pictures that I recently got from my own mother and have sent off to be digitized, there are very few actual pictures of anyone in our house! Yes, there are some framed ones on the table in the foyer, and of course, there are framed family photos and even a very nice painting or two that I would be sorely tempted to scurry after as the burning second floor caved in around me, but even most of those, as nice as they are, could be replaced. So if not those, what would I save if my house was on fire?
In my bedroom closet, up on the highest shelf where they are barely reachable, I have a series of colorful notebooks of various brands, sizes, shapes, and materials, a rainbow of notebooks that stretches about halfway across the closet opening now, with room for quite a few more. The first one, #1, is dated August 2012, and the last one, at least until I finish the one I am working on now, at the end of this month, is from just a few months back and is #37. Why August 2012? That is also another story for another day, but the first entry in that one reads: “How many times have I started a journal?” The last “entry” in #37 is a card which basically reminds me that every good day includes a bike ride.
You see, I started this project, writing in and printing up and collecting snippets for and illustrating and drawing in and dreaming in and obsessing in and planning in these notebooks twelve years ago, and I intend to keep doing it until I die. Why? I am doing this so that one day I can go back and revisit my own life, remember the things that were most important to me, the things that made me the angriest and the most joyful, the triumphs, the failures, and very poor decisions and the very best ones, the trips of a lifetime and the mundane afternoons when I did nothing but take a very nice nap. Am I doing this because I worry about dementia and not being able to remember those things? Of course not. If that happens, it happens, but I certainly don’t worry about it. The point is, these 37 (and counting) notebooks/journals/planners/photograph albums/receipt holders/diaries/experimental writing instruments are the documentation of my life. I would never in a million years be able to recreate to any sufficient degree all the emotions, travel, worry, ticket stubs, receipts, maps, cards, cartoons, and all the other things that are in them, the things that have made me cry out in anger, swear, cry, laugh out loud, and go silent. I could never recreate the love in those pages for my family. I could never go back to the places that left me feeling such a sense of awe that I knew, at that moment, how big God and the universe are and how very lucky I am to be a tiny speck, a tiny afterthought, no matter how unlikely and miraculous, in that overarching plan for the river of time.
I will go back and read these again one day and cry again, and laugh again, and remember, and mourn, and grieve, and celebrate. But then, of course, one day, fifty years, one hundred years from now, I will be long gone, and generations several years past, my own grandchildren and great-grandchildren may be curious about who this old man was. They may, instead of pulling the old taped and tattered box of sepia photographs out from under the bed as we did, look up at a shelf in the hall closet, a place where their mother kept this rainbow row, this colorful life of one Gregory Eschol Smith MD, one who lived and died and had a million emotions and experiences in the short time he was here. I hope they pull down #5 or #36 and find a ticket to the symphony, a hand-painted birthday card, or a simple entry musing about them and what they would be doing one hundred years after I was gone. I hope they know that whether or not I ever had to race from a burning house, those colorful notebooks that tell the story of my life were important enough to me to collect and important enough to share with them.
Greg Smith is a psychiatrist.
