Or is it Memorex?

I read an interesting article the other day that reminded me of something I already knew, but about which I hadn’t thought for awhile.

The article discussed the necessity of, and the value of, forgetfulness. In our culture, we often think that a shaky memory is a problem, especially when one happens to be running for high political office. But for most of us, most of the time, it is not only normal, but adaptive. We’d be far worse off if we couldn’t forget things.

From 2011 through 2016, Australian-American actress Poppy Montgomery played the lead role in the television program Unforgettable, about a woman who suffered from hypermnesia, the inability to forget. (It does exist, though it is vanishingly rare.) Her quality of life was nothing short of miserable, since she couldn’t stop remembering every tiny, sharp-edged detail of every bad experience she had ever had in life. She couldn’t blunt the recall of what had happened, what she was thinking and feeling then, and so on. She resorted to various addictive behaviors, mostly of a salacious variety, to cope, and finally found employment as a police consultant since she was the perfect observer. But her partner, who had a normal memory (“Now, where did I put my car keys?”), thought she was a wreck, and she was.

In the normal brain, sleep (which is one of my favorite activities now) serves many essential purposes, but one of them is to balance remembering with forgetting. During one half of the sleep cycle, the brain tags important memories for consolidation so they will be retained and remembered. During the other half, it tags the remaining memories for partial or even total deletion. In this way, the brain’s capacity, which is finite (that’s finite with me, really), is never exceeded, and priority is given to memories that fit within the ever-evolving internal master narrative that defines our identity and our story, that anchors us in a sense of coherent selfhood. When Baz Luhrmann said, “In the end, all you really have is your story”, he wasn’t just kidding around, you know. He wasn’t completely right (since my little story is imbedded within the divine superstory), but he was half right, also being Australian.

As a result, it’s impossible to stop the ongoing editing of memory. Things become fuzzy, and recall isn’t a static process at all. For instance, when I stop to ask myself, “What was life like for me in 1994?”, I begin by seeking a marker of some important event or transition point that occurred then. In this particular instance it’s fairly easy, since I changed jobs then, and so can remember a number of events associated with becoming frustrated and disillusioned with my old job, interviewing for a new one, preparing to leave the old one, adjusting to the new one, and so forth. But except for that, my memories are rather blurry — I suspect that cats were somehow involved — because many days were likely not that memorable. So the narrative isn’t continuous, but rather like a chain of islands surrounded by murky water; and this is how it is for all of us. We retain key scenes from our lives, pictures at an exhibition.

And, for most of us, it becomes easier over time to remember happy times, because the brain doesn’t want to remember the yucky stuff that (usually) gains us nothing useful when we try to recall it. I can, if I force myself to do so, remember details of Diane’s last months, which were terrible in many ways. But why should I torture myself to no purpose? I’d rather remember how happy we were (though our marriage wasn’t perfect, of course) over the decades, and I do so in a sort of fuzzy amalgam that doesn’t focus on specifics, but just lets a feeling flood my soul accompanied with a slightly out of focus slide show in the background. This is how nostalgia works, and it becomes like a picture frame through which we can look with gratitude and appreciation at the present moment or, when the present is bleak, can console ourselves with thoughts of happier days.

Early in my grief journey, I desperately feared that I would somehow forget Diane, and spent endless hours poring over photographs of her, organizing and collating them as I wept over each, seeking to fix her memory in my mind. But time has brought wisdom, along with an unwanted extra twenty pounds, and I now realize that I am in no danger of forgetting or dishonoring her in any way. She is now (literally) in Heaven, but (figuratively) is part of the gathering of ghosts in my mind, along with my parents, my grandparents, my favorite brother (out of a total of one brother), friends from throughout the decades, and various cats who have crossed Rainbow Bridge. All of them have made me the person I am today; and she of course holds a place of prominence among them, but I don’t have to worry that I will ever “lose” her, because she is always in the background, like an app that is processing off-screen on my Chromebook.

So I can move forward with optimism and hope (and a moderately arthritic knee) into the future that God has for me, which is holding unexpected delights now — I feel a bit like C. S. Lewis, who wrote his autobiography and titled it Surprised by Joy, then afterwards met a woman named Joy (who indeed surprised him) and married her. Carl Jung called this “synchronicity”, but of course I see in it the superintending providence of a gracious God, who knows better than we do what we need. And the narrative thread of my life no longer feels severed; the past, the present, and the unanticipated future are again blending together into a seamless whole, and I am content. Well, I would be if the house were clean and organized. But one can’t have everything; and I am getting better and better at forgetting to vacuum, which is a soothing place in which to be.