Gerotranscendence

I’ve been mining the box of loose photos that my husband Arthur and I accumulated over the course of our relationship. I found one from thirty years ago that was taken in Arthur’s grandmother’s house. In this photo Arthur is showing his cousin the book a friend of his wrote called White Trash Cooking. Arthur is dead, his grandmother is dead, the cookbook’s author is dead, that house doesn’t exist anymore…Looking at that photo made me think how as you age you start living with ghosts—not in the literal sense, but in the sense that people and places no longer exist on the physical plane but only in your mind.

Maybe this is one of the reasons older people start losing their grip on reality, it suddenly occurred to me. Most of the things and people that matter to them now exist only in their memories, and they prefer the reality of their memories to ‘actual’ reality in which they are alone.

This brought up for me another difficult aspect of grief, which is that you become the keeper-of-the-memories. Our point-of-view, our subjective reality, is shaped by our memories, and as long as we have at least one other person who was there when a particular memory was formed we can confirm that we are anchored to reality. We can confirm that memory is ‘real.’ But losing our partner-in-memory unmoors us. Was it real or did I just imagine it…who knows?

I Remember

Last summer I read a book about writing called Wild Mind, by Natalie Goldberg. She offered a number of exercises for the reader to try, and one was called “I Remember.”

At the time I was struggling with how to write about Arthur and my relationship. The topic was so big and the amount of material so huge I didn’t know where to start.

Ms. Goldberg suggests that you start a sentence with “I remember” and just let your mind flow. I was amazed at what came out. The first day I wrote for three hours without stopping. I spent days doing this, and now have pages and pages of precious memories to enjoy over the years. You can also try ‘I don’t remember’; that will spur another sort of memory.

Here are a few of my memories; you’ll see I wrote them as if it was in a letter to Arthur:

I remember our first date. I almost didn’t go. I was really uncertain whether I wanted to start dating—I had just moved to San Francisco, I was ending another relationship, you were older—but I had promised you and I hate breaking my word. By the time I showed up for the movie, Airplane!, we barely had enough time to get to our seats before it started. I don’t remember watching the movie, but I remember you always saying you were afraid you were scaring me off because you laughed so hard during the film. We went to a sidewalk café afterwards. I had a glass of wine, making me feel so grown-up and sophisticated in a San Francisco café. We talked. And it was the talking that hooked me. I can’t remember now what we talked about, but there was something there that was new, that made me say, I want to see this man again.

I remember watching you shave. This was in the first years of our relationship. I remember sitting on the sink, feeling like I had all the time in the world, loving that feeling, loving watching how you moved your hands to follow all the curves and hollows of your face.

I remember playing in the waves with you when we lived in Florida. We would spend hours in the ocean. You showed me how to dive under a wave at just the right moment, or how to bob over the wave like a roller coaster. Then we’d swim out past the waves and lie on our backs and float.

I remember sitting on the rock wall at a random pulloff overlooking the Grand Canyon, watching dusk fall, waiting for the full moon to rise. Car after car rushed into the lot behind us, people hurried forward and snapped photos then dashed away again, frantically looking for the perfect spot, the iconic experience. We were content with our spot, and we inhaled the canyon over the course of two or three hours, just sitting. The full moon rose right in front of us. Phenomenal.

 Note: Another interesting exercise from Wild Mind: “I am, I am not.” This can be an excellent tool for self-inquiry.

Edit: a friend commented on Facebook that she had done this for her mother in a letter a couple of weeks before she died. What a beautiful gift to give someone.

I found another photo from that day at the Grand Canyon, one of Arthur that I took as the sun was setting. I love the expression in his eyes.

What Does it Mean if Many of our Memories are False?

The vagaries of human memory are notorious. A friend insists you were at your 15th class reunion when you know it was your 10th. You distinctly remember that another friend was at your wedding, until she reminds you that you didn’t invite her. Or, more seriously, an eyewitness misidentifies the perpetrator of a terrible crime. Not only are false, or mistaken, memories common in normal life, researchers have found it relatively easy to generate false memories of words and images in human subjects.

This passage is from a New York Times article about research just published in the journal Science: false memories were successfully implanted in mice. 

What does it mean that it is common for our memories to be false?

When I was fourteen my parents divorced (the event was so traumatic I’ll admit to being a little fuzzy about my age). This was totally unexpected; my four siblings and I had no inkling that anything was amiss in our parent’s marriage. One night the whole family was called into the living room, and my father told us he’d decided to separate from my mother and was moving out that night. We talked for some time and then he left. I have a very strong memory that all my brothers and sisters cried, but I didn’t.

Years later at a family gathering we discussed that night. All my brothers and sisters were there, along with our mother. Everyone shared their memories and how this had affected their lives at the time. One thing was stunning: each one of us had the same false memory. Each one of us thought everyone else cried but he or she didn’t. Our mother told us that we all cried.

The fact that all of us believed we didn’t cry says reams about our family psychology. But the point here is that all of us had operated for years from a false memory that slanted our perception of a pivotal event in our lives.

The premise of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity is that everyone is deluded about reality; we are all confused about what is true. Optical illusions are wonderful illustrations of how we don’t perceive sensory information accurately (see blog post). False memory research shows we don’t accurately remember what happens to us.

Our mind-generated reality is largely constructed from sensory input and memories; if both of these are faulty how can our reality be anything but false?

“Delusion” means a “fixed, false belief resistant to confrontation with actual facts.” Even after my mother had told me I cried that night, I was resistant to believing her because my false belief was so strong. It had been reinforced by years of remembering.