Now that I think about it, it was not me listening to the radio in 1956 but rather my eighteen-year-old grandfather. It also was not me who picked up the newspaper out of the yard in 1977 but those were my father’s hands and his tears. Hirsh uses the term post memory, “to describe the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experience o

Although postmemory gives more time for the wound of Elvis’s death in all of our hearts to heal, “‘who says that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that times heals everything except wounds’” (Hirsh 419). With time the pain of separation loses its real limits, “‘with time the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desired body has already ceased to exist for the other then what remains is a wound, disembodied.’ If to remember is to provide the disembodied ‘wound’ with a psychic residence, then to remember other people’s memories is to be wounded by their wounds” (Hirsh 419). However, we as a culture have been doing this for the last half-century, trying to rebuild a world so massively hurt without denying the pain or its wounds (Hirsh 420). The image of Elvis’s copper casket sitting in the foyer of Graceland is something my parents and grandparents saw with their own eyes, but this image has been projected to me and I provide the disembodied wound of his death with a residence (Hirsh 420).

“Psychoanalytic research reveals that the vicarious sharing in past traumatic experiences is quite often a psychological reality for children who inherit the incomplete mourning of their parents and are left to come to terms with” their parents silenced past (Goertz). Postmemory is a way for children to carry on their parent’s lives and in some ways resolve or work through the trauma that happened during their lifetime. Hirsh believes that camera images such as still photographs “are precisely the medium connecting first- and second-generation remembrance” (Hirsh 408). She states that, “photographic images are stubborn survivors of death and inasmuch as they are instruments of memory then, they expose its resolute but multilayered presentness” (Hirsh 408).

The fact that my Elvis memories are heteropathic gives me the ability to experience yet criticize. Through child-hood stories I know Elvis as “The King” of rock and roll. He was a young, hip-thrusting white guy singing music that was essentially black. His style of music bridged the cultural gap of his era. His songs

Some topics in this essay:
Pictures Elvis, Public Fantasy”, Ronter Elvis, Goertz Postmemory, King Guralnick, Hospital Guralnick, Goertz People, Elvis Presley’s, Ronter Actually, Christian Church, hirsh 408, post memory, elvis’s death, hirsh 406, hirsh 407, hirsh 408 photographs, 407 post, hirsh 420, goertz people, heteropathic memory, 408 photographs, 407 post memory, hirsh 407 post,