Thanks for the Memories

My family lost a wonderful lady last week when Aunt Eleanor passed away.

Eleanor was my husband’s great aunt, the wife of my husband’s great Uncle George.

She was a sweet woman, a caring mother, a loving wife and community volunteer, a wonderful cook and a very active member of her faith and church.

She and her friends were known for the thousands of cookies they would make for the infamous “cookie table” that is a staple at weddings in Southwestern Pennsylvania. She will be missed by many. I have warm memories of Aunt Eleanor and the extended family on my husband’s side – people for whom I am related only by marriage but who I have known for more than half my life.

Memories. The human capacity for looking back over our lives and recalling the experiences, the people and the feelings of the past.

After we left the funeral home, we drove around Altoona and I showed my daughter where my parents grew up, where they went to school and the house where we lived before we moved to State College in 1965. I shared that going to Altoona’s big public library was a treat each summer when we spent our weeks with Grandma. As we drove by my grandmother’s old house, my 22-year-old daughter said “I remember that! I remember her kitchen and the tablecloth on the table and that she always had M&Ms.” My grandmother passed away in 1997 when my daughter was just 5 years old.

Memories. The standard joke is that I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday but can remember the smell of my mother’s perfume and the pleated shirt she wore when I was four and scared about living in a new house.

How the human brain takes in and stores various types of information and how long that information is available for our retrieval is a complicated process. Our ability to remember that a utensil with tines is a fork uses different processes than remembering what we had for lunch yesterday and even different processes than remembering the taste of grandma’s famous fudge. Memory and our capacity to learn are tied closely together but use the emotional centers of our brain in different ways.

Remembering the day-to-day activities of what we did and what I learned in second grade is quite different than the fond memories I have of Mrs. Verity and the way I felt as a student in her classroom. Each year at Christmas, when I hang the red ornament that has my name spelled out in glitter, I am reminded of that year and of those wonderful memories.

Contemporary author Barbara Kingsolver said “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”

Early in my career, I was assigned to do an intake assessment on a patient who had been admitted to the treatment facility where I was working. The patient was an elderly woman who had been admitted because she had tried to take her own life. As I entered the room, I found a sweet, grandmotherly type woman who seemed incredibly sad.

“Tell me about what happened,” I said after some time getting to know her. “You all think I’m crazy,” she said in a thick German accent. “I can’t get the smells out of my nose.”

In talking with her, I found out that she had been a young mother in Germany during the war and she and her husband and children were put on the trains and sent to the concentration camps. When they got there, she and her daughter were sent to the left or right and her husband and son were sent in the opposite direction.

You can probably guess the outcome of her story. The woman and her daughter eventually made it out of the camps and somehow ended up in Pittsburgh. After 45+ years, her memories from the past and the trauma she experienced were interrupting her ability to function in the present. Over the years, I learned a lot about post-traumatic stress and how we remember threat or danger or loss can be much more than just bad memories.

Our life experiences – and the related memories – are often what define us if not determine the direction of our lives. Our memories of experiences from our past sometimes encourage us to try to replicate those memories or avoid them for our own children. Vacations. Shared family times. Fun times with the people we care about. Life’s mistakes. Those bad decisions that become unpleasant memories.

As I get older, I’m finding that it is the fond and happy memories that I treasure and those not-so-great moments in my history become less of a focus. Dr. Suess said “Sometimes you never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.”

Today is a day for memories. Memorial Day is a day in which we stop the craziness of our daily activities and pause to remember those who have passed, particularly those who have given their lives in the service of our country. For others, it is about remembering the people who have left us but who made a difference in our lives before they moved on.

Happy Memorial Day. Cherish the memories.