More than a year after my mother died, I stumbled on an old Toni Morrison interview, something I found after rereading Beloved. In the interview, Morrison dissects the word remember, breaks the word in two—re-member, the opposite of dismember. She speaks about remembering in this way, as an active reconstruction, memories the result of a piecing together, a re-membering of the past. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a more beautiful reflection on a single word. I would come to think this way when Tim and I shared memories, both of us re-membering, our past something that needed reconstruction.
