The Perils of Memory

I was recently on a trip with a friend who wanted to show me his favorite places in his home state, some of which he hadn’t visited for 20-30 years. But when we arrived at these treasured places, they didn’t quite match his memory. One place that he remembered as having several trails had none. A car route he remembered as particularly picturesque proved to be nothing special. A river he remembered crossing easily was now impassable.

I’ve had these experiences myself, especially as I get older, and it makes me not trust my memory. I have to wonder if we selectively remember certain things about a place we visit and forget other attributes, so when we revisit it years later we have to combine our faulty memories with the reality in front of us. Putting together these disparate views can be disorienting.

Or maybe our brain combines different places into one, taking the best of each place and creating someplace that, over time, becomes burnished in our memory as the perfect place. It’s that place we want to return to over and over again, the one we mentally escape to when life gets tough and we’re looking for a refuge.

Of course, we can never find that perfect place because it doesn’t exist the way we remember it. When we arrive at the park or old neighborhood, favorite restaurant or mountain trail, it won’t be the same. We’ll be in a different mood, the weather will be different or it’s a different season; the elk we saw in the meadow won’t be there; the friends we were with are long gone; the restaurant with the perfect tamales is now a whiskey bar.

We create narratives out of our lives, even if they are not perfectly accurate. When my mother was dying, it was a powerful time for me, and I often recount that story to myself and others. But when I recently reread my journal entry about the days surrounding her death, I found that I had wrongly remembered the sequence of events. I was invested in a certain narrative, but what difference does it make whether she died a different day than I remembered?

I have many stories from my childhood, memories that seem hard-wired into my brain, that seem not just indelible but important to my development as a human being. But then I discover that my six siblings and I all have different stories of growing up; we remember different incidents and remember them differently. So maybe there is no one truth, and we remember only what affected us, stories that we can embellish over time and that we can convince ourselves is true.

Recently a friend brought up a trip we had taken together many years ago. I had no recollection of it. As I get older and lose some of my memory, maybe it’s a comfort that those memories weren’t that accurate to begin with. I struggle with what memory means; if we lose it, are we still who we are?  I have a friend in her late 80s who has lost most of her memory and can hardly remember friends’ names let alone her own past. Yet she’s the same person I’ve known for almost 30 years: smart, funny and generous.  

Maybe it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember everything. There are spiritual teachers who say we are composed of every being and place we’ve come into contact with: not just parents and spouses/partners but coworkers, teachers, roommates and neighbors. We’ve been to places—from mountain vistas to crowded cities—that enlarged our view of the world.  These people and places touched us in some way, changed how we saw life and moved us for whatever reason. All those beings and places are what constitute me, made me who I am. What does it matter if I can’t remember all the details?