It is an inevitable consequence of growing older that we increasingly know more people who have died!

We dutifully attend funerals and endure endless eulogies.

To begin with we are often introduced to the deceased by a religious person officiating at the funeral of someone who barely entered a church in their lives. This well-meaning person in an appropriately muffled voice and earnest demeanour will assure us of the virtue and moral worth of someone they had never even heard of a mere couple of weeks beforehand.

Then others will be called upon to eulogise the deceased. And we will learn how even those we knew to be scoundrels really had hearts of gold!

Death is certainly a great transformation where not just the living flesh is transformed to ashes or dust but the hearts of the impure are reimagined as forces of goodness and light!

Perhaps it is not just our reluctance to impugn the dead but our poor memories that are at fault here?

Yet our memories are notoriously unreliable.

Most of us believe that what we have experienced in our lives is indelibly stored in memory.

But this is of course not the case and when we choose to refer to our memory it is reconstructed,

Like many other important concepts, memory is truly an enigma. But it is an important component of who we are.

American playwright, Tennessee Williams wrote:

Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quickly you can hardly catch it going.

It is not so surprising then that the qualitative nature of memory renders it capable of manipulation.

A man well-known to me had a very hum-drum life but he often embellished his memories when recounting them so that many of his very ordinary experiences became fabulous adventures. I had shared some of these experiences with him but I allowed him to indulge in these fantasies without demur as it was a rather harmless exercise in self-indulgence. And in the end I believe that he had repeated these fantasies so many times he actually thought they were true!

We have seen other instances where the manipulation of memory has had far sadder impacts.

Sigmund Freud first raised the issue of repressed memory in his 1896 essay The Aetiology of Hysteria. Drawing on some of his own case studies he proposed some mental illness might be related to the fact that people who have experienced trauma are so distressed by such trauma that their subconscious mind would suppress such memories from being relived. Such memories were managed to be effectively erased. He proposed that in some cases people might benefit from having these memories restored so that they might be effectively dealt with by psycho-analysis. He believed that hypnosis might be useful in facilitating this process.

This concept seemed to fade from psychology until it was revived in the 1970’s. It was raised again in the context of child abuse and incest. In the 1980’s and 1990’s unscrupulous psychologists virtually recreated memories for children of sexual molestation that never happened. As a result people were jailed and their reputations ruined for crimes they did not commit. The use of DNA technology saw many such cases overturned. Consequently repressed memory has been largely discounted by the courts.

So in some cases recreating memories might be a harmless self-serving indulgence but in other circumstances it can produce tragic outcomes.

But overall the mind is self-indulgent and self-serving when it comes to memory. This is best demonstrated for most of us in how we remember our childhoods. Most of us, with few exceptions, remember our childhoods fondly. In some ways we seem to take on some of the characteristics of repressed memories insofar as our recollection of memories tends to highlight our pleasant experiences and minimise reflection on the more distressing experiences.

This is of course all coloured by the novelty and wonder of childhood.

In my young years watermelon was a favourite treat. In those days it was seasonal and only available for a month or two around Christmas. So I have some fond memories as a child of eating watermelon. Nowadays watermelon is available pretty well all year round and because we are generally more affluent children have access to many other treats. So eating watermelon remains a pleasant memory for me because it was only an occasional treat but I doubt it would have such an impact on the children of today.

Any first time experience must have an impact on the mind of a child beginning to know themselves and the world around them. But as we get older and are more experienced we become harder to impress.

When I was a child it was a great treat to go to the movies (well the pictures as we called them tnen!).

To begin with, when I was young, we had no car and going to the movies meant a thirty to forty minutes’ walk to the movie theatre. And, like eating watermelon, it was an infrequent event which added to its specialness. Today with the advent of digital technology we can sit comfortably at home and choose from a plethora of movies without any effort, whenever we want. But I think I will never be as captivated by anything more than taking the trouble to walk to the movie theatre to see Errol Flynn as Robin Hood win the heart of Maid Marion or Gary Cooper defeat the villains in High Noon with the help of his new bride, Grace Kelly.

So the memories we lay down in our youth are in many ways unique and therefore more impactful. As our experience grows we become harder to impress. Things that once were special, soon become commonplace.

My father-in-law in his later years lost much of his cognitive capacity and became quite difficult to communicate with. But I found I could have a good conversation with him if I asked him about his childhood. Whilst he could not remember what he had for breakfast he could relate to me in some detail about his first day at school!

So, I believe Tennessee William’s metaphor has a lot of validity.

Just as the sages have always told us we only live in the present – the “eternal now”. So this is the light of consciousness that provides us with a “theatre of mind”. But trailing in its wake is a body of memory, unreliable and self-constructed to be sure, that tries to account for the accumulation of that experience of the “eternal now”. As that body of experience inevitably increases as we grow older what is happening in the moment naturally has reduced impact on it.

The Persian poet and polymath Omar Khayyam, (as translated by Edward Fitzgerald) wrote:

“The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

The poet seemed to be telling us that whilst fate may intervene to change our futures, our pasts are set in stone and may not be altered. Now ostensibly this is true. But how we interpret our past can indeed vary. As a result we see many disputes about history and not so much what occurred but what it meant for society.

Similarly we are wont to reinterpret our own personal histories to suit our purposes (and sometimes quite unconsciously). Just like everyone else I have some very fond memories which have coloured my life. As I grow older I don’t care greatly how valid they are. I am just grateful for the joy they have brought me.

American comedian, Bob Hope, on his hundredth birthday said (referencing a song he had sung many years before) “Thanks for the Memory!”

It’s hard to disagree with that!