When I was 9 years old, my oldest brother died in an accidental drowning. That was a long time ago, but I still remember tiptoeing around a house that was sodden in grief, wondering when things would get back to normal even as I knew that they never would.
Richard Beard's story is worse. He was 11 in 1978, swimming off a Cornish beach with his 9-year-old brother Nicky, when they were both pulled under by a huge wave. Nicky "was out of his depth. He wasn't and then he was," Beard writes in the harrowing opening chapter of his memoir, "The Day That Went Missing."
Richard was two years older than Nicky, and stronger, and he was able to make it back to the beach. Nicky did not, and he died.
Unlike my family, Beard's family got back to normal almost immediately. "At the time, there was a pervasive attitude," Beard's mother told him years later. "It happened. Get on with it."
And so they got on with it — went home, buried Nicky, and then returned to the seaside cottage to finish their summer holiday.
They were so good at getting on with it that Beard forgot everything about that day and its aftermath — forgot it, or repressed it. For most of his life, he remembered the moments in the water with devastating clarity but had almost no recollection of anything before, or after. He couldn't even remember the date it had happened.
When, as an adult, his own life began falling apart, he went on the hunt for these lost memories.
"The Day That Went Missing" is an excruciating read as Beard stoically marches toward the past, seeking out documents and artifacts — the coroner's report, newspaper clippings, report cards and old photographs, as well as Nicky's schoolwork, toys and jerseys. It's all in a red trunk in the attic, his mother tells him, but she is wrong. There is no red trunk. Memory, Beard notes, is so often wrong.
