Fallible Memory

For most of my life I’ve kept a journal. Starting at age 12, when I had a “Dear Diary,” book, I started writing what seemed important in my life. I think they were meant for girls to write about their crushes on boys, but, being a serious child, I recorded my fears about the Cuban missile crisis.

I kept writing into my college years and after, although not regularly because I was busy with classes and then work. But now when I go back and read more than (sometime sporadic) 60 years of journal-keeping, I have to question my memory. Either I’ve forgotten much or I’ve gotten it wrong. What if I didn’t have this journal to remind me of what really happened, so that my memories would be selective, and I would remember only the good and not the bad—or vice versa?

Even my brothers and sisters (seven of us, total) have different recollections of events we experienced together—Christmas day, visiting grandparents, trips to the family cottage, where I only remember sunny days when clearly the summer weather in Wisconsin includes a lot of rainy days. But does it matter? Maybe being happy is more important.

My friend, Evelyn, 92, remembers very little, including her age, imagining that she’s sometime in her 60s. What she doesn’t remember she unknowingly makes up. When I visited her recently at her memory care place, she was sitting in front of an iPad that endlessly cycled through family photos. When I asked about the people in the photos, she told me stories that I know to be wrong. She told me her granddaughter’s name, which was close but not quite right.  She thought her son had two daughters when he only has one, and that those two daughters produced grandchildren who were lovely and smart. Do we make up stories that make us proud of our family?

She told me that the food in her nursing home was delicious and that she and her fellow residents just “gobbled it up,” and yet at our previous meeting she said she never went down for dinner, and that staff brought the food up. But how much more fun to imagine enjoying a tasty dinner with your fellow residents.

Her son, who lives a thousand miles away, calls her every day, she said. I have no doubt that he cares for her, but I doubt that Mark, who has a busy working life, calls every day. But isn’t it better to make up these loving stories than to complain that you never hear from your son and that your granddaughter is failing in school. I remember my mother made her life miserable because her children didn’t visit or call enough to satisfy her need for attention.

Maybe our memories reflect our personalities: is the glass half empty or half full? Maybe it’s better to make up memories when we’re not sure.

But Evelyn seems happy, lost in her world of successful granddaughters and a loving son. My father, too, didn’t seem bothered by his loss of memory. Starting in his 80s, he couldn’t remember the names of friends, relatives or the orders doled out by my mother: “Paul, I told you an hour ago to take out the garbage.”

Yet he maintained his joy in life. He loved gardening, but it wasn’t until his 90s that he stopped planting, because he realized he was forgetting to water the tomatoes and basil. Even with a bad memory, he could sing, play the piano and take part in an all-harmonica band until he had a stroke at 94. When he forgot that my mother told him that their granddaughter would be visiting later, he was delighted and surprised an hour later when she knocked on the door.

My dad, who loved ice cream, also loved talking to strangers we met on our walks, even if he couldn’t remember the conversation hours later. Can we still enjoy having ice cream if we can’t remember what we did the day before?

Is it necessary to remember correctly every aspect of our lives? What if we’re just happy, no matter what we remember? Are our delusions wrong? I don’t know, but I think about memory a lot, especially since mine seems to be gradually slipping. I remember a dentist telling me once he had “photographic” memory, but it didn’t make him happy because he could never erase incidents he would rather forget.

When Evelyn and I met, we talked for half hour, my old friend telling her own version of stories, while I listened and told her my own stories. Who knows what was accurate? We were just happy being with each other, old friends who worked together decades ago, remembering our favorite versions of our lives.