SELECTIVE MEMORY

My mother-in-law, who is 92, has a very selective memory. As with each one of us as we grow older, there are times, which frustratingly get more frequent the older we get, when we have great difficulty remembering something or someone we think we would or should never forget. But we do. The memory is somewhere back there in our brain; but at the moment we want to recall that piece of information, it takes too long to come front and center. That’s not selective memory. It is simply a momentary loss of memory.

Selective memory is when we choose to remember what we choose to remember and forget what we choose to forget. My mother-in-law’s selective memory is fascinating. She has been married twice and buried both spouses. To be honest, neither was a marriage made in heaven. At times it seemed like a marriage, well, let’s not go there. On second thought, let’s, because it makes my point.

Both husbands were WWII sailors in the South Pacific and both came home, although she did not know it at the time, with what we now know as PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Both were shell-shocked by what they experienced and that shock stayed with them the rest of their lives and, in the process, made my mother-in-law’s life at times a pure hell. The fact that it was only in their deaths and her reflection back on their lives together does she now understand what was going on all those years.

Nevertheless, today, when she reflects back on those years, and talks about both spouses with Arlena and me, all we hear are the good times. The pain, the suffering, the hurt that was so much a part of the after effects of the War seem to have faded from her memory and, I believe, selectively so. But that is not easy to do so because it must be a choice. She has made that choice. For her and for us, that is a blessing.

One of the perverse joys Arlena and I have is when we talk with our daughters who are now raising their own children. Our grandchildren are now doing to our daughters what they did to us. The very same actions that drove us up the wall are now driving them crazy. They don’t remember their misdeeds, of course. Selective memory. But then we selectively choose to remember our daughters’ misdeeds and misadventures only when history is repeating itself in and through our grandchildren. That is also called “Parents’ revenge” and it is, again, perversely pleasurable.

We all have those painful memories stored somewhere in our brain. We can keep them up front and personal, allowing them to control our lives and our relationships or we can push them to the back and remember the good, as my mother-in-law has done with her husbands and as we are doing with our daughters. That is not to downplay the pain. It is simply to say that we have a choice with what we do with that remembered pain: we can continue to dwell on it and make the present even more painful or we can selectively remember the good so to enjoy life in the present. The choice is ours.