Remembering

I'm in Boston, at the meetings of the Gerontological Society of America...haven't been to these meetings for exactly 6 years.  About this time six years ago I was hearing the news that my mother was dying. Being here brings back many memories. 

I have a friend who is losing his memories, slowly and inexorably. The objective part of me is fascinated by the way in which his memory and our conversations have changed, and how his functioning varies from week to week. He is clearly increasingly confused about place and time. Within the course of a conversation his wife may be his mother, his sister becomes his daughter. His parents might be alive or not. He may be 69 or 79. We might be friends, or colleagues or strangers.

I suppose because we started together recording his life stories, and also because the way in which dementia works "backwards" on memories, his conversations with me are dominated by events from his childhood. I have heard the same stories virtually every week for well over a year. What seems interesting though, is how some of the detail has been lost over time, the stories are shorter, less coherent, more jumbled in time and place. Some stories seem to have disappeared. I'm fascinated, too, by the stories that were never there--never anything about meeting his wife, about their early life, their kids as children. But, also, there is less reflection in the stories now, less thought attached to them. Still, they seem to represent good things in his life, happy memories, warm feelings. Telling most of them makes him happy. It makes me think that with the passage of time all of these events are being boiled down to their bare essence, to the emotions linked to them. They aren't about events or people anymore, they are about recapturing a feeling, a state of being.

Can we boil our life down to a few simple memories, a few feelings?