On Memory

Our house is full of family and personal artifacts. The bed in our guest room is covered with a quilt sewn by my mother.  Framed wedding photos of my parents and grandparents hang in our upstairs hallway. A set of antique patterned glass that was a wedding gift to my grandparents is on display in our curio cabinet.  A sales achievement award given to Judy’s father in 1977 sits on the bookshelf near the desk where I am writing this blog.

Artifacts trigger memories. When I look at the antique glassware I remember my grandmother, who for many years lived in a separate unit at the rear of my childhood home.  I remember where she kept it in a cabinet above the refrigerator in her kitchen. She never used it but on very rare occasions after she passed away my mother would use the two-handled vase (on the left of the photo above) to exhibit gladioli or other long-stemmed flowers at the Providence Bay Fall Fair or the annual flower show hosted by the Campbell Township Horticultural Society.  One artifact—but it triggered memories of my mother, my grandmother, the local fall fair and the local horticultural society.

We can readily curate our personal or family narrative by choosing which artifacts to keep and which stories to tell.

Storytelling is another way to keep memories alive.  Our entire family spent Thanksgiving together for the first time in ten years—although the family has changed and grown a lot in those ten years.  Inevitably, we found ourselves retelling some of our favorite stories, such as the answer two and a half year-old Naomi gave when her grandmother asked her if she enjoyed a family holiday in England in 1990.  “Swings and slides”, she said, because as we toured the countryside of Gloucestershire, Somerset and Devon, we stopped frequently at the adventure playgrounds we found adjacent to local pubs to relieve her frustration at being restrained in her car seat.  There are other stories from that same trip we could tell, but don’t, because they would cause memories to resurface that we may prefer to leave buried.  We can readily curate our personal or family narrative by choosing which artifacts to keep and which stories to tell.

As the distressing events surrounding the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh recently demonstrated, memory is personal, flawed and incomplete. It’s a frustrating limitation of the human experience, one that has led to false convictions, false acquittals, and (too frequently) the adversarial pitting of one person’s memory against another’s. Decades of scientific research into memory as well as our own lived experience confirm that memory is, “by definition, fallible at best and unreliable at worst“. Memory experts Mark Howe and Lauren Knott wrote, “What gets encoded into memory is determined by what a person attends to, what they already have stored in memory, their expectations, needs and emotional state”—and “what we remember is constructed from whatever remains in memory following any forgetting or interference from new experiences that may have occurred across the interval between storing and retrieving a particular experience.” But from time to time, as I recently experienced, something will cause the box in which a particular memory has been locked away to open, and a fragment of the past will emerge to cause pain or joy in the remembering (or a mixture of both).

“Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey ahead.”

In spite of its frustrating limitations, memory is a gift.  Even if science advances to the point where erasure of memories is possible (think of Endless Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), I won’t be embracing the technology. I’d rather curate my memories to create a narrative that illustrates the triumph over time of good over evil, life over death, hope over despair. To achieve that objective may require some help from above (and/or a good psychotherapist!), but such an outlook is consistent with my faith in the God of the universe who makes all things beautiful in time. The combination of time plus memory enables us to think, feel and imagine our way back through our personal history and reclaim experiences that we had written off as dark and destructive by seeing how they fit into the long trajectory of our lives.  As we do this, the past loses its power to hurt us and to stunt our growth as human beings. In this way, as Frederick Buechner says, “even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey ahead.”

I have experienced this healing power of memory I am talking about.  In 1970—when I was 16—I had a traumatic experience (which I am not prepared to describe in this space) enroute to a student conference at Big Chief Lodge near Orillia, Ontario. I had been selected to attend the event as the representative of my high school.  I don’t recall who organized the conference or what topics were discussed, but I remember some of the guest speakers: René Lévesque, leader of the Parti Québecois; Andreas Papandreou, leader of the Panhellenic Liberation Movement during the period of military rule of Greece (and future Prime Minister of Greece); James Laxer, one of the leaders of “The Waffle” (the radical wing of the New Democratic Party during the late 60s and early 70s); and Dimitri Roussopoulos, a leading Canadian spokesperson for the New Left political movement of the late 60s and early 70s.  I remember feeling very disoriented: I had come from an isolated rural community and a family that didn’t own a TV or subscribe to a daily newspaper.  What I knew about the world I had learned from my teachers at high school, the Time magazines I read in the school library, and the stamps I collected from around the world. I also remember that there was a radical left-wing fervor to the gathering: these people were talking about revolution, about resisting the established order and about social change.  I mostly had no idea what they were talking about but I knew I desperately wanted to be a part of it.

The memory that shines most brightly in my mind today is the memory of what I encountered at Big Chief Lodge.

Decades later, when I finally took the step of meeting with a therapist to unpack the box of memories associated with that trip, the first memory that came to the surface was a recollection of the mysterious, galvanic atmosphere of the conference.  Later on, we explored the painful event that took place on the road to the conference, but first I took time to recognize the significance of my attendance at that gathering to my personal development.  It allowed me to step through a door into an expansive forum that gave me the first taste of what was to become a life-long passion for grass-roots activism leading to social change. It’s where the arc of personal history began that later found expression in efforts to transform communities through the local church, involvement in building low-cost housing, and (for the last 12 years) leadership of an organization that helps protect millions of the world’s poorest from violence. I wish the other thing had never happened; it still hurts to remember it; but the memory that shines most brightly in my mind today is the memory of what I encountered at Big Chief Lodge.

All text and photos © 2018 Edwin G. Wilson