Memories 1: I Was, I know, And So, I Am.
“Memories are precious; they are what we have left after we have lived through life. We must cherish them. How else can we be sure and explain without them that we had been living before this moment?”
Angus Adenyuma
“Michael is coming over” Beverly said to her husband on the day he would be suddenly yanked out of his life in a way that neither he nor his wife or family will ever recover. “Who’s Michael?” Eugene replied. “Your child”, Beverly answered. Continuing she said, “You know; the one we raised?” “Who’s that?”
Eugene Pauly (known to many in the medical field by the initials E. P.) was an American who suffered a serious brain damage resulting from an infection. The above was the conversation that took place between him and his wife on the day that revealed his plight, a day that would mark the beginning of events that changed the course of his life until his death years later.
Shortly after this, he was discovered to have viral encephalitis which had made its way into his brain chewing through folds of tissue where his thoughts and memory occupied and causing irreversible damage, a condition he succumbed to swiftly.
Eugene would spend the rest of his life unable to know or remember anything as a result of the damage done to his brain. It became impossible for him to remember anything beyond his immediate moment. He would ask family members, friends, as well as neighbours to introduce themselves on every occasion he met with them, no matter how short the interval of time. He would watch the same TV show every day because they were always new to him. In addition he couldn’t keep up with doctor’s prescriptions as he never remembered them. His life onward would consist of being moved in and out of hospitals, living through them but never remembering anything about them.
The absence of memory made it impossible for him to feature and participate in his world. Till he passed on in 2008, he spent his life living in just the moment, his present present, if you may. He understood nothing, he knew no one. He had no before, he had no after. He only had a now, and he was caught up in it for the rest of his life.
MEMORY: I WAS…
It’s significant and wonderful what role memories play in our lives though we may not have given significant thought to it. It is an indispensable part of our life without which we would never be able to go on with our life or even go through life.
Memory, what is it?
Memory refers to the minds ability to retain (and also recall) information and events that have occurred. It is capacity to be aware of the passage of time as well as the events within this time. Memories (plural) refers to the content of memory. The information, events and substance of time-continuum that constitutes our memory or that our memory contains. Reason why by extension it is called, “memories”—contents of memory.
I was,…
Our lives−days, years, moments, seasons, hours, events−are left only in our memories after they have passed. Our lives are contained in our memories. As we see in the case of Eugene, when he lost his memory, he lost his life—the life he had lived up until that time—, when he lost his memory, he was lost.
To make this clearer, think of memory as a vessel or a container that holds every part and bit your life that has passed (memories). Their availability (memory and of course memories) makes it possible for you to comprehend the now because you have the understanding and recognition of things as to how, and as to why they are the way they are.
Of course we will all agree that to live life meaningfully we must be able to comprehend the now, because we live in the now—the present. Being humans we are designed to live in the present, but to have a meaningful participation and involvement in the present, we must be able to comprehend the present, how it is, why it is and where it is which where memory comes in.
The present must make sense to us if we are to live our lives freely and smoothly, and that’s what our memory does for us, it supplies us information about the present, about why it is, the way it is, and if available, how it managed to be the way it is. Our memories gives us sort of like, the metadata of our present lives which like in a computer program helps us to make sense of the data itself (which is the present) to walk in it and make sense of it as we go. This is necessary if we are going to be functional and or effective in life and in our world.
The present will be utterly meaningless if we have no information or detail concerning it. Just like Eugene, his present—presentforever—didn’t make any sense to him because he had no underlying information—a metadata—to be able to make sense of anything that was going on around him or his life.
I know?…
A deeper understanding can be gleaned from Michael Sucsy’s 2012 movie, The Vow. In the movie the lead character (Rachael McAdams) is involved in an auto accident with her husband (Channing Tatum). At the hospital the doctors put her into an induced coma in attempt to save her life. On regaining consciousness it is discovered she has lost memories of past few years of her life. As a result she is unable to remember her husband or her friends. She returns to her previous life—which is how far she remembers—trying to trace her way back in a bid to remember and recover her lost life back. She also returns to her previous fiancé (the last person she remembers she was in a relationship with) whom she left for her husband before they got married. She returns to law school (she had dropped out of to study art) unable to understand her reasons for leaving in the first place.
The loss of the memory of past few years equaled the loss of her life in those years and all that came with it. She left her marriage (wondering why she got married to man who didn’t even know her parents), left art (she had dropped out of law school for), the friends she had made in those years and the life she had. She would spend the rest of the movie going through successive paths in a bid to recover her memory and her life. Though she never succeeds in the movie, she chooses to relive the path she found that would assist in recovering the life she had lost. She returns to her husband not because her memories were restored but because evidences (an audio recording and a document she had written her marriage vow on) she found suggested to her that she had a happy and fulfilled life before the accident. Perhaps she recovered her life.
Your “memories” is your life (?!)
What we see is that when bits and pieces of our memories are lost, portions of our life can be lost. And when whole portions are lost, an entire life’s investment could be lost and in some cases never to be regained or recovered. As was Eugene’s case.
Angus Adenyuma