On Memories and Forgettings: Beginnings

My mother is losing her memory. She forgets many things. Oh, all the normal things: names, faces and places. They say it is irreversible dementia.

I note that my memory lacks some consistency as well. It is not dementia to which I attribute cause, but economy. That is, my thought processes work just fine thank you, and for the most part I can remember all of the characters in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. My sentences can still roll literarily on, and I can still follow the prose of Henry James, Roth’s Zuckerman novels of the 1990s, and the poetry of Shakespearean drama. I can listen equally attentive to the dialogue and silences of Harold Pinter’s plays. I can sing along with a good part of the corpus of Bob Dylan without having to look up the lyrics anywhere, and I know that Ty Cobb’s number was 29. And I don’t even know why I know that latter detail, but am very aware that there are a myriad more ‘things’ I remember and can call up in an instant anytime and anywhere.

But as I said, there are things I don’t remember, and I can’t remember some of the things I’ve forgotten. But I think that I’m not so much forgetting as conserving energies: there are things I need not recall to maintain the narrative of my life (I lied: Ty Cobb’s number figures in a book I read when I was twelve years old!). Eventually, I know how to recover what I think I’ve forgotten; I’m adept at research. I maintain the integrity of my narrative.

Perhaps it is a letting go: there are things that are no longer necessary to instant recall. Memory is not a quantity but a process of organizing what is available into narrative. One needn’t be suffering from dementia to lack narrative power, and loss of memory doesn’t necessarily mean dementia. It could be wisdom.