Have you ever seen a full-grown woman speak of her father in a way that belies the grandmother she is now as she reveals the Daddy’s girl that she has always been? Or the man who talks of his mother as though she might appear from the next room when she has been resting in her grave for decades? Emily Dickinson wrote, “Unable are the Loved to die for Love is Immortality.” William Faulkner said something similar, but coming from the reverse of the coin. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
We can muse about the heady aroma of magnolias in our grandmother’s yard and the tangy flavor of a favored aunt’s lemon pound cake. Those memories can be triggered by a passing stranger’s perfume or the recitation of what is on offer for dessert in a restaurant miles and years away from the more humble kitchen that produced those pound cakes. The past indeed is not dead or even past.
There are other memories, the ones Faulkner is more likely to be referring to, that are not all magnolia and lemon extract. These are the ones sparked by something like a look, a harsh tone of voice, or words spoken that resurrect feelings of being diminished, dismissed, or neglected. “What’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget” as the song goes, but we since we can’t choose to forget, we simply choose to bury. Sometimes with denial, sometimes with pretense, and sometimes with abuse of all manner of things, from food and alcohol to drugs and plastic surgery. The past lives on.
Collectively, we have shared memories of the past. Those old enough to remember can recall where they were and who they were when the word of John Kennedy’s assassination reached them. What happened and who did it has resulted in a cottage industry for decades, and what anyone may think about how it all came about is perhaps less important than the distrust of those in official power that has flourished ever since.
Those of us old enough to remember the Iran hostage crisis are likely to filter any contemporary dealings with that country at least partially through that lens. In a similar fashion, those who ducked and covered throughout childhood during the Cold War will likely side-eye Russia today, years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
More familiar to a larger portion of Americans are the events surrounding what has been short-handed as 9/11. No doubt there will be much discussion of that fateful day as we approach the 25th anniversary of the attacks, triggering emotions from that national trauma. Faulkner will be proven right once again.
But here in 2026, we are living in the present whether we like it or not. It is challenging, to be sure, and those challenges may be similar in some regards to those visited on other people—and not just Americans—in other points in time. But this manifestation is ours to face or to ignore, to confront or to avoid. What we do and what we don’t do is, at least in part, influenced by what has come before. The distrust of government, the distrust of certain other countries, and the distrust of certain other ethnicities and religions will play some part in our collectively response to our current situation. Or should I say, situations.
I could go on ad infinitum about domestic issues in this same vein. What is happening to civil rights across the boards of race, gender, sexual orientation and the rest of it also show that the past is not dead there either.
Some folks talk endlessly about that future being created for the younger generations, particularly the parents and grandparents among us. AI may be the wave of the future, as we are told almost every time we turn on the television or scroll through social media. As hard as it may be to accept, those of us here today are likely to have far less influence on what will be in the future and more collective influence on what will be in the past.
What is current will be entering the future as the past, which is imperfect. What is perfect is that it will do so at that future point, whether or not we like the current that we have created. (Sorry, the English major in me had to get that in.) Perhaps we should lose the hubris of thinking we can control the future and focus on what we have some degree of at least influencing, which is the present. And by the present, I mean the future past.
Imperfect as I am sure it will be.
