What Do We Do With the Past?

Dr. Craig Yorke describes Steep as a memoir about “the price of success balanced against the power of memory.” I think that gets very close to what made our conversation stay with me.

Craig’s parents had lived with exclusion and racism, and they were determined that their son would have another life. He did. Boston Latin. Harvard. Medical school. Neurosurgery. A family and a long life in Topeka.

But success doesn’t erase what formed us.

Craig and I talk about the pressure his parents placed on him, the violin he was made to master, race and colorism, the patients who became ghosts in his memory, becoming a husband and father, and eventually discovering that he belonged to a community.

This is really a conversation about memory. Not forgetting the past and not allowing it to own us either.