Memory Creates Us
Memory is a fluid and unpredictable thing. It changes as we age. Not only do our stories evolve, but we may think about them more or less often, depending on our stage in life. When I was young, I hardly thought about past experiences, except when I rehashed them during therapy, transforming them into something soft that would not keep me up at night.
Now my past looms, filling a larger proportion of my possible lifespan, so my history has become more important. In the morning before I rise or during the dark hours of the night, I sometimes think back to childhood and trace the strands of relationship, surprise, commitment, holiness that run through my days. I seek patterns. I wonder how I know the things I know if not because of what I’ve seen, even though I can’t attach a story to every shred of wisdom in my brain. By revisiting my history, I begin to come to terms with who I am and what I’m done.
Those of us fortunate enough to live this long, or who choose to take that conscious journey into our hidden depths no matter our age, have the opportunity to make peace with the life we have led, or at least with the story of that life. For that’s the thing. Our stories aren’t necessarily true, at least not in the sense of being factual. However, we live as if they were. Regardless of how accurate our memories, they are ours, and from them, we create identities.
A Story about Elizabeth
It doesn’t take many memories to do this. I have never recalled much about my childhood, and even my adulthood seems hazy. Yet I still have a secure sense of self. I know who I am.
That doesn’t mean my sense of self can’t change. Over the years, a forgotten memory has surfaced, helping to explain an irrational fear or idiosyncrasy. At other times, I’ve learned something that forced me to reinterpret my past.
Take the story I told myself about my nanny. Elizabeth was my favorite. She taught me much about love and fairness. Sometimes she would eat dinner with us, and every once in a while, my grandfather drove me to her house so we could visit. She seemed like part of the family.
Then one day, she told me she had to stop working for us. Her mother was sick, and she had to move far away to take care of her. I was sad, and I’m sure I cried, but I understood. I would never see my nanny again, but that seemed reasonable. She might feel like a part of my family, but I wasn’t really a part of hers. I understood.
Forty years later, I happened to mention this to my mother. She said, “Elizabeth was old. Her mother had already died. She had to stop working because she was sick.”
Weaving a Tapestry
Hearing that, I burst into tears, as if I had lost her all over again. This news forced me to revise my story about our relationship, giving it new meaning. Had Elizabeth been trying to protect me from the pain of death, or had she told me the truth back then? Was I the one who fabricated a story I could live with?
There was something in this new information of betrayal and loneliness; something of forgiveness. To some degree, it changed my understanding of who I was, especially in relationship to my nanny and my mother. Even so, I am still myself. One memory lost, and one memory gained, did not substantially disrupt my identity. I believe in who I am, even if I have to revise that belief when new insights arise.
We all do that. From the raw material of our days, we form beliefs, derive wisdom, develop idiosyncrasies, gather pride, nurture insecurities. Our inner self seems to make sense against the backdrop of our experiences. That’s the point of novels and memoir, to help us understand how the pieces fit together. Or maybe those art forms exist so we can weave a tapestry out of the disconnected threads, fit them together in a new way, creating sense out of nonsense.
Trauma Memories
Take trauma memories, for instance. When they feel fresh, still humming on the surface of our nerves, no matter how long ago the trauma occurred, the memories can seem like the most important things in our lives. They define us. We cannot understand who we are without them. Our triggers, our identification with the trauma, cause us to do and say and think things we wouldn’t otherwise.
Yet when we heal some of those memories, taking the sting from them, we can begin to see how our traumas are only a piece of our life. So much else has happened to us. We are bigger than our disappointments, our agonies, our betrayals. When we realize this, our lives change significantly.
Sometimes this happens even when we don’t have a clear recollection of an event. For instance, maybe there’s such a thing as body memory. I’m not talking about the knowledge of how to play an instrument or ride a bike that seems to live in our hands or our legs or whatever relevant part of the body it is. I’m talking about memories of things that happened to us and just might be lodged, not in our conscious mind, but in our gut, or bones, or flesh. If real, and there is debate about this, such body memories wouldn’t be consciously recalled, yet they could make us cringe or laugh or cry. Could some memory in our chest or fingers precipitate fear, anger, sadness?
Memories and Loss
One evening, my grown son held his two-year-old daughter on his lap while he played “Twinkle, Twinkle” on the piano. She sang along and pounded the keys between his hands, and as she lifted her head and looked over at me with a face radiant and trusting and filled with love for the man in her life who mattered more to her than any other, my heart melted. I thought of love and how it evolves and changes and becomes more and less of what it was, and how lives bloom and grow and fade, and I cried.
But all that thinking, and the feeling that welled up within me, occurred only because I have a past, on that I can recall. Indeed, our past is what gives current events their meaning. Out of our personal story, we make sense, not only of ourselves, but of the world.
Of course, it is said, in some circles, that we should live in the present moment, because that is the only time in which we can truly be alive. If we fill our heads with thoughts of things that have been or dreams of things that have not, we will lose the now. We will waste this day by obscuring it with something that never existed and never will, for the future is not yet, so anything we can imagine about it is as insubstantial as mist.
Are our memories any more concrete? It seems they are porous and imprecise. Whatever we think we know about our history is likely skewed or downright wrong. Our feelings in the present arise out of our experiences in the past, even if we don’t consciously recall them.
Emotions and Memories We Can’t Recall
The tears I spilled that day may have had something to do with playing Beethoven while my son squirmed in my belly, or the hours I sang lullabies to him, or even the memory of sitting in my own father’s lap listening to him read Hitty: Her First Hundred Years. Perhaps recalling past relationships made the sight of this new one bright and melancholy at the same time.
On the other hand, my tears might have had more to do with experiences I can’t consciously recall. Implicit memories are those not so much known as felt, and there are two kinds of implicit memories. The first is that body memory we talked about. People with amnesia, for instance, don’t remember their past, but they can still tie their shoes and drive a car. Some skills are second nature and do not require conscious memory.
Another kind of implicit memory is priming. A particular fragrance or image can bring up emotions because they are tied to a memory we don’t consciously recall. In their article about emotion and implicit memories, the researchers Tobias, Kihlstrom, and Schacter give the example of a woman who was afraid of running water. She had no idea where this phobia came from until an aunt visited. When she saw her aunt, a memory was triggered of a time she’d been trapped beneath a waterfall. Her aunt corroborated that this really happened. [1]
Identity and Dementia
But what if our memories are not just implicit, but completely gone? Does someone with advanced dementia remember who they are on some visceral level? Does our body still know who we were? Will emotions surface regardless of conscious recall, emotions that give us a sense of identity?
Marie A. Mills, in her study of emotions and narrative in dementia patients, showed how, as minds degenerate, individuals lose pieces of their past, though their emotional response and sense of self continues until barely a shred of story or thought remains. In spite of this, all the study participants continued to process and revise their stories over time, and the act of sharing them with Mills helped them grow more content. As long as we can speak and interact, we retain the ability to grow. [2]
In dementia, this is possible because the illness doesn’t wipe our past out all at once. Depending on how far the disease advances before we die, we might never lose our sense of self. That was true for my mother, for instance, who, in spite of her dementia, made good use of the last months of her life. She finally forgave her father for being who he was, reinterpreted a relationship she’d had with a distant cousin, and relieved herself of a guilt she’d carried for fifty years.
Dementia does not necessarily take everything from us. Indeed, during this time of loss, our memories loom larger than ever. We forget who we are now and remember who we’ve been. Our past becomes our present.
Losing Our Sense of Self
When my son gave his toddler daughter a memory of joy she will store inside herself, he didn’t give her a conscious memory. She’s too young for that. Still, he gave to her a piece of a self. It will stay with her and form her, even if she forgets it.
My wistfulness at seeing them together probably arose out of some event I cannot recall, one buried in my bones or limbs or throat or heart. I have forgotten much. Does that mean I am not fully who I am? Who am I, anyway? Am I made of my past, or my stories of the past? If we have nothing but the present, are we any less human?
What if I have amnesia and can’t remember my name or relationships? How do we form identity then? When we have to relearn who we are, sometimes revisiting the facts we know every morning when we arise, do we have a self?
For that matter, if we are lying in a coma, supported by a ventilator, our mind distant, our senses dulled, do we have an identity? If so, who can tell? Loved ones see us, but do they see what lies before them or what they imagine us to be? Where does consciousness reside, and what happens when it slips away?
What Makes Us Human?
This gets to the question of what it means to be human. Does our selfhood depend on our consciousness, or is it found in our emotions, our sensations, the contentment we find when we live in the moment with nothing to distract us? Does dementia actually make us better off? In that place without history, might we find our essential nature? Maybe, rather than suffering, the person with advanced dementia is floating in the eternal now, already a part of the whole we can’t access when we are stuck in our thoughts.
Not everyone’s experience with dementia is peaceful. Some get trapped in frightening memories that will not let them go. Others become angry or abusive, losing their gentleness and kindness, their sense of humor, along with their frontal lobe. Dementia can be devastating.
Yet if our conscious mind can no longer dredge up a past, then we are simply our present. In the present, we can be one with eternity, with the divine consciousness, with the source of life. Along with the loss of self that comes with a loss of memory may also come freedom. Instead of being who we know ourselves to be, we are something vast, something grander and wider, more spacious and whole.
One with the Wider Consciousness
I might not retain as much memory of my history as some people do, but I still have a narrative that defines me. Thus, I cannot know what it’s like to let go of that and simply exist.
At the same time, I do know that our fear of loss tends to worsen our experience of loss. When we can release our stories about ourselves, we might discover an essential nature that is more real than the identity we create out of our memories.
There are many ways to be human, including children who will never have the consciousness or story-building power that most of us take for granted. Does that mean they have no self? Or is their self simply different? Just because we can’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
We are our stories. When our stories fade, we fade, too. Even so, we do not go away completely. Do we become like the wave that has returned to the ocean? Do we merge with the whole, with that essence that is waiting for our bodies to let go so we might soar to the heavens? Or, as we lie in our beds, unseeing and unknowing, are we already there?
In faith and fondness,
Barbara
Credits
- came from until an aunt visited, triggering a memory, that the aunt corroborated, of a time she’d been trapped beneath a waterfall. [Tobia, Betsy A., John F. Kihlstrom, and Daniel L. Schacter, “Emotion and Implicit Memory,” The Handbook of Emotion and Memory: Research and Theory, ed. Sven-Åke Christianson, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992, 69-70, https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jfkihlstrom/PDFs/1990s/1992/TobiasKihlSchac_EmotImpMem_1992.pdf, accessed March 2, 2022.
- Mills, Marie A., “Narrative Identity and Dementia: A Study of Emotion and Narrative in Older People with Dementia,” Aging and Society, 17, 1997, 673-698, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1997, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marie-Mills-2/publication/231874292_Narrative_Identity_and_Dementia_a_Study_of_Emotion_and_Narrative_in_Older_People_with_Dementia/links/595a1baa0f7e9ba95e148ead/Narrative-Identity-and-Dementia-a-Study-of-Emotion-and-Narrative-in-Older-People-with-Dementia.pdf, accessed March 2, 2022.
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Copyright © 2022 Barbara E. Stevens. All Rights Reserved.
