This section of the story still seems odd to me, even after I’ve written it. It feels like a dream a lot of the time, partly because Jasmine and Thomas are so cut off from where they were before. I know it probably seems as if it came out of no where and it’s probably not everyone’s favourite because Bernard isn’t there – but that’s the entire point of this section. Bernard isn’t there at all, and yet, he permeates everything.

I know some people are probably worried about Bernard’s fate as a character in this, after the Alzheimer’s diagnosis and especially now after the strokes. But the thing that I want to articulate, and what Thomas realizes while he is at The Bear, is that Bernard will never really die, per se. He will always be alive because he is always being remembered, in one way or another. Even though Thomas went to the community to forget, there has to be something there to forget. Bernard was there by virtue of not being there, he was forgotten but still was there because he had to be present to actually be forgotten. Anytime someone makes an effort at forgetting, it’s really a futile act. It’s not an actual erasure of memory because you are aware of what you’re doing and you deliberately go into it. You can’t forget something and know you have forgotten something at the same time. It just doesn’t work.

It’s this fact that makes a disease like Alzheimer’s so scary in the first place. At its worse point, you don’t even know if you have forgotten something. Bernard is not at that stage yet, thankfully, and with the rate that Alzheimer progresses, he won’t be there anytime soon. By his symptoms, he’s maybe three or four years into something. He’s missing present, every-day facts like days of the week, where he put stuff, but a lot of his long-term memories are all right. There is some disorientation, but a lot of that comes from the initial confusion of what day it is permeating his demeanor and then he becomes overwhelmed. It’s like when you have something shitty happen, and then everything that day ends up becoming negative. This is a little more drastic, but once something small proves to be disorienting, the rest of the day can become that way very fast. His language skills are also going, so though he may know what he wants to say or convey, he cannot express it. These are still very basic symptoms of Alzheimer and he won’t progress from this to something drastic (like wandering, rage/violence, and losing control of bodily functions) int the time span of this book. It’s just not possible. He’s not at the oblivious stage yet. His forgetting  is only visible to others (like Jasmine and Thomas) who remember – Bernard still knows something is missing, and by that virtue, something is still there.

In this sense, Thomas forgetting Bernard becomes an act of remembering. It becomes creative story-telling and his own basic myth-making with Daniel and his runs in the woods. He is not forgetting Bernard, he’s actually so deep inside Bernard that he’s slowly working through his own identity so that he can eventually step away.

It’s the same for the location. You need to leave where you are now in order to know where you come from, and in the case of Thomas, where his home is. I know that Thomas left in the first book as well, and in a way, this is me sort of amending that part. He had to leave then to realize how important Bernard was to him, but that was not by choice. He could never really take responsibility for that because it had been forced on him and the same goes for when Bernard leaves for Paris. He mentions this in the section, but this is the only time he has ever chosen to leave Bernard. That is huge for his own development. He needs to do this, if only for a while, in order to realize where and who he wants to be with and also who he is as a person. He has a lot to deal with – every single character in this does. Distance helps, if only to pull you back again.

Jasmine is also separating and then reattaching parts of herself that she didn’t even know were there. I was stuck by this especially while I was writing. I wrote the rough draft of this section in two days while reading the same Faulkner novel the title is taken from (probably why it feels like a dream) and it just happened very quickly. These characters, though I had not really worked with them before, had come to me years ago.

I used to go for hikes when I was in my third year of university, in this huge wooded area that was ran along the back of the residence where I stayed.  I had a friend like Daniel and had conversations with people like Paul and Tonya and Kristen and everyone in that place. But Jasmine’s development was something that threw me for a loop a bit. Although I knew that this had to be her idea and her sort of creative baby, I had no idea how much her character would just loosen up here. I realize now looking back at a lot of her dialogue in the first sections of the story, she is so rigid. She has to be; she’s been carrying around this facade of how she thinks life needs to be, she is strict and precisely ordered, and essentially, she is trapped. I always knew this about her, and to some degree I exacerbated it to make a point about some rhetoric she espouses (vegan and some feminist) but I also knew that this was part of her own hurdle. The barriers she puts up start to come down around Bernard, but they really fall completely away when in The Bear. She was participating in her own act of remembering while forgetting, like Thomas, as she was there, and most of that will be revealed in the next section.

This section was a lot of fun to write. Even thinking about it now, the words come very quickly to me. It seems so counter-intuitive and illogical, but it is every writer or artist or thinker’s dream to just check out of the world for a bit and not deal with anything. No responsibilities beyond feeding and cleaning yourself, in addition to hanging out with people. I’ve stressed the importance of people in your life, and I think the community and the structure of the Bear becomes one manifestation of that outside of family. But ultimately, they do not stay. What I wanted to achieve with this was a lesson for Thomas to live out in the real world again and know he could survive it. But in order to do that, he needed to leave and to choose to leave. And then, to choose to come back. It’s always the coming back that’s the hardest part.