I can’t quite remember the day I was born and no doubt I will soon forget the day that I die. Meantime there will be indelible memories that according to the Webster dictionary definition can’t be washed away or erased. At the end of the day we carry our life event memories around with us, archived good and bad in a personal capacity while some are eventful corporate days.
November is one such month that always pops up from the archive, that 22nd day in 1963 when JFK was assassinated in Dallas. Forty years or so later ( I can’t remember) I actually visited that grassy knoll and entered the Book Depository where Oswald laid in the corner with his rifle, though we still don’t know if he was alone. I was in London watching a Friday night quiz programme on television when suddenly this grainy picture of breaking news appeared as Cronkite delivered the disastrous day in Dallas.
When Deng Xiao Ping died in February 1997 I telephoned a friend in China who had no idea and in August 1997 he called me to tell me of the death in Paris of Princess Dianna. The fact is our super computer brains can house these memories and bring one back to the time and the day in a second. 9/11 is indelible of course and the Cenotaph brings back memories to many each year. One old boy Soldier at a Remembrance ceremony told me that he remembered ‘ seeing me on the beach that morning’ in Normandy that day which surprised me ( did I really look that old ? ).
We have three memory types, sensory , long and short term. My mother in law who died this year suffered dementia and truly it was in the end a great release as she recognised no one in her last days. She once told me to go back to my wife forgetting that I was married to her daughter. Some people want to forget horrible times , annus horriblis as HM Queen famously put it and revisiting horrible times can be traumatic though I believe recovery can only come through confronting the nasty rather that let it dominate.
Brain programming goes on in the night as we sleep when apparently our brain is 38 times more active than during the day. Recharging and replenishing vital to our well being through the passage of sleep. Proverbs 16 tells us that God instructs us through the night. The Angels meantime do the filing and allocate the angst and the ecstasy of our lives , the joyous and the dubious. Music can for some trigger memories or for one man who lost his wife this year is triggered by seeing certain goods on supermarket shelves that his wife liked. Whatever the trigger enjoy it embrace the moment for life ultimately is all those moments piled high and wide woven in tapestry with everyone we meet. My good old Headmistress friend told me that everyone we meet makes us the person that we are.
There are many memories waiting to happen for all of us and I’m looking forward to all of these good and bad, ugly and beautiful for they will make me and you in all that we are. Memories can never be taken away from you they are indelible , invaluable and inevitable. Don’t forget that.
qbitblogger 
About remembering!
There are things I remember very well and others I don’t! I wonder why.
Sometimes I have a hard time remembering the day my parents passed away; however, I remember very well the moment when my mother struggled to remember my name, when, in the last years of her life, the disease had made her progressively absent from reality. I remember it because in that moment I thought I had lost her. Physically she was there, in front of me, but she could no longer be in contact with me. In the same way, sometimes, I have to concentrate to recall the day my father died, but I cannot forget the last night spent by his side, nor what he told me one day at the hospital. I had just arrived for the time of visiting. He had gone almost blind. I greeted him and he asked me to come close to him and hug him. I did. Meanwhile he said to me “If you hug me, I will see you better”. Through this sentence, by a man who was not very inclined to displays of affection, I was able to consider that only through the eyes of God’s love can we see and understand what is in front of us.
There are many things that we believe we cannot and must not forget, because they are “fundamental”. The password of the bank account, or of your mobile phone etc… and yet our memory, at times, does not seem to work for these very important things.
I don’t know why, yet I have always vivid in my visual memory the image of me walking back and forth in the hall of the delivery room where our two children were born, but I don’t remember how I was dressed that day. I can’t erase from my memory the image of me and my wife dressed as Mickey and Minnie, on our wedding banquet.
There are things I remember very well and others I don’t! I ask myself why.
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Don’t forget the memory banks erase that which is not priority in our lives. The exceptional like your Fathers hug ( out of character ) is that physical event out of the ordinary. Your mother sounds like my mother in law. The question is not just why ? But the other side of that coin why not ?
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