People who know me and speak with me sometimes tell me that they wish they had my memory. I can recall conversations, movies, scents, languages, musical scores that I then play on instruments, facts, figures, scriptures, studies, articles, etc. They wish they had the ability to recall at whim whatever they needed as I seem able to. What they don’t know is that I don’t just recall the things I wish to recall. My mind remembers everything. There is usually another side to the coin with something we envy in other people, and the dark side of this one is that I can recollect things I wish to forget just as easily and often without wishing it so to be.
I was not ever thus, and I do not remember all of my life. At the age of six, I was involved in a serious vehicular collision in the UK and was resuscitated on the scene. I remember absolutely nothing from before that time, but if you ask my mother, she will tell you that I would ask probing questions evincing a change of mind after I returned from the dead. In her words, talking to me was like talking to a little old man. After that day, my brain soaked up everything. My mother dropped me at the library, and I would scroll through the stacks and the card catalogue looking for information, answers, and knowledge. Unfortunately, unchaperoned as I was, I also encountered things I wish I had not. It took years for the knowledge to matter, because eight year old kids are not involved in adult conversations and activities, but I knew without any practical knowledge things that no eight year old kid should know. And I remember those things too.
For most of my academic endeavors, the memory served me well. I attended class, took notes, did homework, studied for tests, and in some cases I could recall not only the questions on exams but also the other answers and the order in which they were on the page. I could describe a page in a book and where the answer was found on the page in that book. I can recite scripture and context, Shakespeare and Chaucer, play instruments, switch between multiple languages on the metro platform beneath Notre Dame, and tell you where I was and what I was doing on certain randomly chosen days of my life. I remember names of students from 12 years ago, of homeless men I met when I was at university, of the friends I had in high school, and of people I taught as a missionary in the European Alps. When I am in town, I remember exactly where my grandparents are buried because I was at their funerals, and I know which exits and roads to use because I remember landmarks and turns and other features of the cemetaries. I know it’s macabre, but maybe I remember them because they mattered to me. I had to study like everyone else to get here. Things don’t just spring into my head; I have to go read about them. I am not really as smart as people think I am; I just have an exceptionally good memory. And it’s random. I annoy people I’m sure by blurting out things that are relevant but not solicited when my brain randomly accesses something related and is glad of a chance to blurt it out. I mean, I like to stump people by asking if they know Donald Duck’s middle name. Do you know where I saw it? In a rerun of a WWII cartoon where Donald gets drafted and it’s printed on his draft notice. It flicked by on the screen in seconds and is now indelibly scribbled in the folds of my brain.
I also have an exceptionally bad memory. I don’t mean that I forget. I mean that my memory also recalls the bad as well in the same living colour, lurid detail, and vibrant resonance as the good parts. I remember the first time a bee stung me, the second time I died, the last words my grandparents said to me, the promises my ex wife made and broke, the empty rejection form letter that Homeland Security sent me when I applied to work there, and the rejection of women who spurned my affections. If you ask me any dark time, if I had it, whether I wish to or not, I can recollect those things too, often verbatim. And when I am lonely, sad, or bored, as I said in a previous post, those things return unbidden and unwanted.
Professionals are aware of this potential. While I don’t have total recall in a sense of being able to recite word for word, hour for hour, person by person, I can give you the Reader’s digest version of anything and the verbatim rehearsal of things that matter to me. Psychologists like Dr. Andrew Huberman know that intelligent people often have a greater ability to recollect and that this also makes them more miserable, both in life as well as possibly when you must deal with us. Back in 2015 after an incident at work, I had a brain MRI, and the neurologist noted that my brain activity is peculiar. Parts that are active in other people are inactive in my brain; parts that are usually inactive are active in mine. When people ask me how I’m “so smart” and “know so much” I now simply tell them “Brain Damage.” I have after all been dead before, and death damages your brain.
Maybe this is one reason I can’t just simply “let the past go”. I awake almost every morning around 4:45 and lie in bed while my brain catches up with where I am. Every day, my brain replays my life in order to figure out where I am since it circumscribes the past into one great whole. I have trouble telling how far it has been since things happened without doing the math, because everything, for better or worse, feels like I learned it, felt it, experienced it yesterday or maybe the day before that. Every day, my brain reminds me of the past. Sometimes it just glosses over it; it’s not like I relive every titular detail, but I do remind myself of everything that ever happened to me since I was six. It’s quite a strange way to start every day. I explain to people it’s kind of like in “Fifty First Dates” where she awakes every morning and watches a video of her life to catch her up since she lost her memory except that I have all of mine and just don’t know which yesterday was actually… well… yesterday. The past isn’t that long ago for me. It really does seem like only yesterday I fell in love for the first time, bought the house I’ve been in for almost 13 years, moved to Vegas, or had my fuel line rupture and spill all my gas enroute to work (that was actually this past Monday). Since it has now happened, my mind will remember it in perpetuity.
I know people mean well when they tell me to “forget about it” or “let the past die”. I can’t “kill it if I have to”. There is truth in the past. Those things actually happened. Most people tend to remember the past incorrectly or forget it with time, and most people don’t have all the details to explain the past, but I remember it. Last month, the Dean was in my office on a Friday morning and called me some, shall we say, more colourful metaphors. I brought it up with him last week; he doesn’t remember doing it. So, aside from mentioning it, I’m letting it go. Obviously he doesn’t really feel that way or he’d still feel that way about me today. That leads us to the present. In the present there is also truth. The things we are experiencing now are real, or at least they could be. The trouble is that, like Samuel Adams, I “Know no way of judging the future but by the past” and although your future is not their past, since I’ve experienced these things before, I use experience as a lamp unto my feet and a guide unto my path. I heard those dulcet tones before only to be disappointed. Your future is not their past, but it could be, and I’ve learned to be pessimistic about people.
There is a dark cloud to every silver lining. I once told my friend whom I visited this May in France that I wished I had his physique. He told me that the men in his line with that physique also have early onset dementia and that, but the age of 70, he would probably forget who I was. He’s 60 now. You can’t just look at a person and take, as if they were a buffet, only the rosy parts of them to yourself. Yes, I have a great memory, but I also have a great and TERRIBLE memory. And if you lie to me, hurt me, or betray me, I will remember that just as vividly as the last words my grandparents said to me before they died. Maybe it’s a blessing that your memory is not as good as mine, because it’s also not as bad.
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