Why memories matter even when they can’t be trusted …

"... perhaps part of grief
is mourning the space 
left behind ..."

I’ve been thinking about how precious memories can be and yet, at the same time, how they cannot be trusted.  I’ve written a journal all my adult life and I sometimes revisit old volumes and read entries from past years.  Mostly, I write about feelings, but details of my life are present too.  That said, it’s the feelings I want to explore.  When life feels difficult and I feel I have a mountain to climb, it does me good to go back and read about how I’ve faced obstacles before.  They often felt insurmountable, and yet they never were.  It reminds me that I’ll get through the latest crisis, because I always do. 

Our memories are precisely that.  They are ours.  Of course, they interact constantly with the memories of others who might have shared an experience with us, but they are unique.  I’m sure you will have talked about events with others only to find that their memory of it will differ from yours.  It might be little details that differ, or it may be something significant.  It doesn’t make your memory, or theirs, any less real.  I think that we remember what we need to remember.  Memories somehow feed a need in us.  They help us navigate our way through life, making sense of what we’ve experienced and what we’ve learnt from it.  At least, that’s how it seems to me.  

I had a vivid dream just the other day, in which I returned to my childhood home.  I walked through it all in a trance, remembering where each room was located, observing them in turn.  It felt so real and, yet, I have no doubt that much of it will be mis-remembered.  Does it matter?  I’m not sure it does. I suppose it depends on the purpose a memory must serve.  If you need the detail to be accurate, well, you could be on dodgy ground.  But if you’re looking to make sense of your world, then I think you’re on safer territory.  Suffice it to say, memories should come with a health warning: this may be true but, on the other hand, may not.  Better then to say, this is my truth. 

I know for a fact that if you put me and my siblings in a room and asked us to tell you about my father, we would all have some shared memories and some that were widely disparate and, inevitably, contradictory.  That’s perfectly normal, isn’t it?  It would be impossible for it to be otherwise, because we’re all very different people and so was my dad.  He was not the same father to any of us.  I think that’s pretty standard too.  That’s the joy of relationships: we interact with each other in unique ways, responding to the different personalities we’re faced with. 

In this week’s poem, I reflect on my memories of my father, who died in 2020.   His ashes were split following his cremation, and I was given a small container, about the size of a can of Pepsi.  We all chose to do very different things with the ashes we were given.  I decided I would scatter my dad’s ashes, in a place where he’d loved to walk.  Hiking was something we had both enjoyed and, over the years, I walked with him often.  I know he loved Stoodley Pike, but I honestly don’t recall if we ever walked it together.  I willed myself to remember as I took his ashes up there,  but I couldn’t.  Deep down, I knew it wasn’t important.  

There are so many poems about loss and how loved ones stay with us beyond death, kept alive through our memories of them.  That’s hardly surprising, given how universal an experience bereavement is.  It’s a good reminder, if ever one was needed, that even if we can’t always trust our memories, we can invariably take comfort in them and know they speak our truths.  Most life events are pretty universal, but it’s our memories that make us who we are.