Making Memories

From Frankie Laine to Keith Urban the phrase, “Making Memories,” has become indigenous to both our hearts and lives. It titles photo albums, scrapbooks, videos, blogs, even retail stores. Making memories is almost synonymous with “making life.” Have you ever stopped to think that the victim of dementia or Alzheimer’s can no longer make a memory? In David Shenk’s wonderful book, The Forgetting, he makes this thought-provoking statement, “It takes memory to make memory.”

My mother adamantly denies that she has lost her memory. She prefers to say that something has confused her. Without memory, she becomes a creature without a name, a place, a destiny. She thus holds on to what scraps of thoughts or feelings that remain in what I call her “core.” This probably agrees or disagrees with Jung or James or Hebb or one of those other memory theorists guys, but today I get to say what I am thinking.

Mom’s survival within an extremely large country family centered around her having a sweet demeanor and always being an appropriate minister‘s daughter. To anyone who visits her today, she will smile sweetly, ask how they are doing and if she can get them anything. Visitors would never believe that it took both my brother and me to get her back into the house last night because she insisted that she was going home. She was tenacious, combative, without memory, and sadly, or perhaps, fortunately in this instance, unable to make a memory.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson descended into the ruins of his dementia, he declared himself to be “a man who has lost his wits.” As I saw my Mom fighting to stay outside in the frigid cold, determined to find her Mother and her home, she remained in her own thoughts, and to her core, as the “woman who NEVER lost her wits.” I will hold this memory of my mother until I have no more memories of my own.

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