Sydney in Oysterville, 1940

I’ve been thinking a lot about memory lately – all kinds of memory. And there are many. There are our personal memories – the sort that are the subject of glib quips like “You’ll always have your memories.” But, those of us who have dealt with the dementia of friends and loved ones know better. Memories fade and, according to some, as memories diminish so does our sense of self.

I think that must be true. I think my perception of myself changes every time one of my contemporaries dies. Or, even, every time middle-aged Jeopardy contestants don’t recognize a familiar face (last night it was Gregory Peck!) Along those lines, I love this quote in The Fault in Our Stars by John Green:

               Charlie in Venice, 1958

“The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.”

Even more disturbing is the failure of our collective memory and of “institutional memory.” I thought of that recently when our school district once again changed the configuration of who goes to which schools. Hilltop School, once again, is dealing with age mixtures that long ago were deemed an unsuitable combination. The powers-that-be forgot or didn’t know and certainly didn’t research what we had “learned” in the past and what they had vowed to do in the future. Perhaps Comedian Steven Wright’s comment is appropriate:

                     Sydney and Paul, 1969

“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”

I can’t think of an easy solution to any of it. Maybe there is one and I’ve just forgotten. The only thing I can see to do is document, document, document! Write journals and memoirs and minutes of meetings. Label the photographs and narrate the videos.  And then, for heaven’s sake, try to remember to look back at them now and then. The history isn’t worth squat if we can’t remember (or at least research) what it was.