I Am My Memory

Memory seems a topic very much on people’s minds of late. It has become one of the central issues shaping voters’ opinions about who they will vote for in the November Presidential election. Donald Trump, in one of his rambling rants reminded his fans about how he defeated Barack Obama in the 2016 election. (He ran against Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama.) Joe Biden, outraged by Special Prosecutor Hur’s description of him as an old man with a diminished memory, called an immediate press conference in which he took great offense to the description. Then as he stepped away from the podium opted to answer one more reporter’s question about immigration across the Mexican border. His answer referred to Mexican President Obrador as Sissi (who is President of Egypt). These faux-pas seem to delight people in much the same way that slipping on a banana peel satisfies our affection for other’s most embarrassing moments. Such momentary memory lapses, while significant as they are spun into tales of dementia by the opposition, in truth, are pretty insignificant and generally indicative of little more than our mouth moving a bit faster than our brain. I called my wife of over 25 years by my first wife’s name as she has called me by her first husband’s name. Of course, it’s a tad awkward and generous apologies are in order but it isn’t dementia. Listen, I’m no Neurologist, but there seems to me to be a real difference between memory loss and slips.

I think of memory as a fundamental ingredient that shapes identity. Memories can be brief and ill-defined like a smell, a song, a color that is evocative of something we know resides within us but can only vaguely grasp. But memories are also something like scenes from a movie trailer of our life. That is, they are parts of a larger narrative that are developmentally formative for us. These movie trailer memories often trigger a desire to recall what preceded and followed the recollected scene to more completely flesh out the story of who we are. Our re-telling of the scene together with recollections connecting these isolated events are often consciously or unconsciously embellished in order to weave it all into a coherent design that is consistent with the story or myth we have embraced that informs our self-understanding. It’s the business of connecting all these pieces together into a meaningful story where components of the narrative often get somewhat muddied. It is an unsettling experience to share one of our existentially defining stories in the presence of, for example, a relative whose memory of events is quite different.

“No, your finger wasn’t dangling by a thread, and you didn’t have two-hundred stitches and spend six months in a body cast to save it! You cut it playing with a cub scout knife and had three stitches and a gauze wrap for a week.” Hmmm. The term euphoric recall I first heard used by Vernon Johnson who authored a book called I’ll Quit Tomorrow. The term he used to describe how someone who had too much to drink might recall the events that occurred while inebriated quite differently than others. Johnson told the story of making some sort of speech at a wedding and recalling how clever it was while others winced at the memory of his slurring and nonsensical words. His recollection of the night before was colored by the euphoria of his intoxicated state.

I’m not sure if memories take on greater importance as one grows older, but experience seems to suggest this may indeed be true. As a priest I spent many hours with people who were near death. Slipping in and out of consciousness they might call out the names of people from their distant past or suddenly seem to pick up a dialogue with their long-dead mother in the middle of some never-before-mentioned, but now important, encounter. I recall being struck by s story conveyed by Eric Berne in his book on Transactional Analysis, I’m OK, You’re Ok.  He suggested memories dwelled in some poorly understood place in our brains that were often accidently accessed when electrically stimulated during brain surgery, for example. The patient might suddenly begin to sing a song, laugh, or cry as various parts of the brain were electrically stimulated. Seems reasonable enough. I had a dream several weeks ago about a man I knew over 30 years ago. In my dream he had started a new job dealing with alcohol intervention modalities for persons with what is now called Alcohol Use Disorder. In fact, I had helped organize an intervention with this man’s family to persuade him into accepting treatment for his real-life alcohol Use Disorder. In my dream I met the man’s new boss and started telling him about an intervention experience I employed and might be useful to his new hire. However, it turned out I was telling his new boss about my experience trying to get his new hire into treatment unaware that I was disclosing details of this very private and sensitive experience. Where in the world did this come from? Why was this man who I had not seen in well over 30 years (and has long since passed away) in my dream narrative. Memories, images, vague sensations, and indeed the stuff of dreams seem far too vast to be contained in the tiny brains that dwell inside our little skulls. Maybe they are stored in something akin to the cloud…and maybe this cloud is some variation of what Carl Jung had in mind when he spoke of the collective unconscious…. I guess the point is that memories become so dense, so weighty, so powerful, so consequential and vast, one can’t help but wonder what kind of vessel could possibly contain, never mind manage, massive amounts of data with such a relatively high degree of reliability. Like black holes, one wonders if they might collapse in on themselves given their density. Small wonder memories are not always perfect. Nevertheless, they exist, not quite, but almost independent from us as when I am seized by an event hinted at when I heard Doris Day singing, Que Sera, Sera on the radio. Suddenly, I am five years old lying in my bed in the children’s ward of St. Francis Hospital in Chicago wondering when I will be able to go home. I am aware of the sensation of intense sadness, but it is diffuse and ill-defined. And this ‘movie trailer experience’ tickles the synapse of yet another movie trailer- the one where my father sympathetically tells me that his plans to bring me home were scrubbed by the doctor who feels I should stay. It’s a long story.

I have not written much over the past many months. A prolific writer friend of mine some years back told me he wasn’t writing anymore. When I asked why, he explained, “I have nothing more to say.” That may be true for many of us as we all tell variations on the same story over and over again. Just as it was said that all philosophy was a footnote to Plato, the effort to make sense of our existence has not diminished.

Over the upcoming months, I hope to pluck from my consciousness a selection of memories to share with you. I have several in mind, but experience has taught me that as one makes an effort to recollect personal historical events, it opens the way for unexpected others to make surprise appearances. Like most everything I write, I share these stories with the hope that you will discover something of yourself in them. They are recollections of historical events in the course of my life that have been weathered by time and perhaps mildly corrupted by unconscious bias, but I hope not irreparably. What I do hope is that you might be entertained, moved, or inspired to explore your own memories as the gateway to better understanding the person you are.