Forget Me - Not!
We all thought mom was on her way out after she lost her balance and fell in the bathroom, breaking the radial bone in her right arm and compressing her lower spine. She returned from the ER with a splint and an elastic bandage wrapped from just below her elbow to her thumb. It was hardly a life- threatening injury, but over the next few days she declined rapidly and was soon languishing in bed. Her breathing became ragged, and a liquid diet supplemented with a few spoonsful of yogurt was all she could manage. Mom was intermittently conscious and barely able to express herself. Hospice was engaged to provide end-of-life care. All of this played out just a month after her 100th birthday on September 3rd.
As of this writing, however, my mother has rebounded. She is awake, voluble, can eat a normal diet, and feed herself using her non-dominant, left hand. It appears that the injured arm is healing, and although she is still too weak to stand unassisted and is confined to a wheelchair, she seems determined to assert her independence – which puts her at high risk for another fall. What has not improved, however, is her memory. She is chronically confused and disoriented, and can recall neither the meal she ate nor the company she kept two hours after the fact. She does remember, though, how impeccably her father trimmed and filed his nails.
Ah, memory! We tend to think its loss as largely a function of aging, and it isn’t uncommon for elders to complain about their difficulty recalling names or coming up with the right word to complete a sentence. But while it is true that aging does compound forgetting, memory plays games with all of us, young or old. We forget 50% of what we have experienced or learned within an hour, and after 24 hours 70% of those impressions are hidden in a mental fog. Apparently, this is just the way the human mind works. As one researcher put it: “Most things we remember are of short-term importance. Consequently, the brain needs to make room for memories of more immediate value.”
In a recent issue of Harper’s, Sallie Tisdale writes perceptively about memoirs, those personal histories that purport to be ‘factual.” Who better than me is in a position to rehearse the details of my own, or my parents’ lives? But “memory is like wet sand,” Tisdale remarks. “I have always been bothered by memoir writers who are obviously making stuff up, but I am now also bothered by the possibility that we are all making stuff up, all the time.” Truth be told, much of what we tell others about ourselves appears to be confabulation.
Most forgetting, though bothersome, is relatively benign. But it can also be alarmingly consequential. Indeed, the fate of a nation may depend on how much of history the collective retains. The novelist Milan Kundera once observed that, “The struggle of man (sic) against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” I sometimes fear that in that struggle memory isn’t faring too well. In one recent opinion poll only one in three Republicans agreed that less than three years ago an attempt was made to overturn the 2020 election, or that Donald Trump spearheaded the effort. One of those who seems to have “forgotten” what transpired on January 6 is the new Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson.
Forgetting can be an institutional, as well as an individual failing. And sometimes those institutions use their power to cleanse the public’s consciousness of disturbing historical realities like insurrection, Native American genocide, and Jim Crow inspired atrocities. But attempts to induce amnesia are made at every level of society, as was brought home to me during a recent visit to the First Unitarian Society of Madison.
Trina and I had attended a memorial service for a woman (a former parishioner) we both admired deeply, and whose life’s work was lifted up through an inspiring series of tributes. After all the tears and laughter, we left with a renewed appreciation for this remarkable individual. But as we exited the Landmark Auditorium and moved through the lobby, I happened to glance to my right at the shelves of wooden mailboxes that covered the north wall and couldn’t help but notice that one space was empty – the place where, in years past, the box reserved for the minister emeritus had rested.
In this age of electronic communication, the box itself is of little practical value. Symbolically, its absence speaks volumes, for it attests to the fact that whatever I may have contributed to the success of that beloved community is now a lacuna – a thirty-year gap in the First Unitarian Society’s illustrious history, as empty as that shelf space in the lobby. Kundera had it right.
It can feel like tragedy when a person outlives their memories, but the same is true when institutions decide that memory doesn’t matter.
