Memories Are Important

I read a newspaper story today that was one of the typical retrospective columns that appear at the end of a calendar year, a kid of year in review. It was about which celebrities died during the course of the year. Most of the names I would not have remembered had the story not reminded me. Those kinds of remembrances are interesting because they remind us of what happened, of how important those stories once were to us, and about how trivial they seem now that we are removed by the calendar from the time when they happened and were reported on.

It reminds us of how transient life is. If we hold on to information too long it seems to damage our ability to function in the present. Memories are important, but I think they are only selectively important. I remember (this is an example of a good memory for it is useful here) that an author once wrote that "We must always have old memories, and young hopes." Strange, because once we are older (like me) the young accuse us of having too many old memories, while we accuse the young of having had too few to understand much of what happens each day.  Our experiences remembered become a substitute of our inability to do in the present.

There is an advantage to having the bad memory that inevitably comes with aging. If our memory is bad we can enjoy the same good things for the first time. Too, we can use our bad memory as an excuse. "Oh, I forgot", almost always works better for the old than the young. We are expected to forget when we are old, while the young are vilified as inattentive because they have too few memories to retrieve. But then, our memories give us roses in December and the feeling that things were better in "the good old days" when we most need it.

When we lose the ability to retain and categorize our memories we have Alzheimer disease or some other from of dementia associated with dying brain cells. We become too confused to remember the essential, but ironically, our long term memory of even the most ordinary and irrelevant memories is enhanced. Old memories linger while new ones die. But that just shows us how each of us remembers different things for different reasons, and for no reason we can understand.  How frightening must be memory confusion and loss to the ones afflicted with those brain/memory diseases.

As the Irish say, "May you never forget what is worth remembering, nor ever remember what is best forgotten."