View From a Prairie Home

by Hege Hernfindahl, Columnist

Who are you? What is your core? Your soul? These are questions often asked by young people as they enter adulthood and have to make so many decisions. Several of my grandchildren are now at that age and I so empathize.

But I am at the other end of life’s journey. Old age. And I wonder about remembering. Often, when I compare memories with my family, we will differ. What they remember doesn’t necessarily mesh with my memories of the same events. And I think about how people my age start to forget. If I were to lose my memory, would I still be me? If I can’t remember what has shaped me, who would I be? Often I cannot remember names even though I can remember faces. But the names just tickle the periphery of my mind and I might wake up from the fog of forgetfulness hours later and the names come to me clear as day.

Another thing that I often can’t remember is directions. Now we have GPS. But I have read that using the GPS will not help develop a person’s sense of direction. In fact, if we only use GPS, our sense of direction, found in the entorhinal cortex, will be lost. So I try to focus on the roads and intersections ahead and train my mind to remember where I am going.

To try to sharpen my mind further, and for pure entertainment, I read and read and read. I immerse myself in books and I might also learn something new. I just finished “The Last Heir to Blackwood Library” by Hester Fox. The main character, Ivy, is gradually losing her memory due to a curse emanating from an old manuscript in a castle she inherited. Every time she wakes up, her mind struggles to grasp what has happened and she starts questioning who she is without the ability to remember events in her life. The figures of her life only appear as shadows in her mind and she panics. I have read other books about memory loss, but none that deals with the question of identity combined with lack of remembering.

Another book, I just finished, “The River We Remember” by William Kent Krueger, is not about memory loss but about how memories unite and also maybe separate us. He writes “Our lives and the lives of those we love merge to create a river whose current carries us forward from our beginning to our end. Because we are only part of the whole, the river each of us remembers is different, and there are many versions of the stories we tell about our past. In all of them there is truth, and in all of them a good deal of innocent misremembering.”

Events in our life that we didn’t remember can pop up caused by a smell, a sound, a scene or just an incident we experience. Characters in Mr. Krueger’s novel sometimes freeze when memories from their time in combat during wars occur. We have all heard of PTSD, which haunts not only former soldiers, but also people who have experienced trauma, who are most of us.

Likewise, an event that has occurred is viewed and remembered differently by each of us, because of our lives’ experiences. I notice this often when I am in a group of Midwesterners and we talk about our childhoods.  My childhood in Norway, with parents who came of age during an occupation by an evil and vile regime, and also with a different school system and a state church, which few attended, is very different from that of my peers’. I sometimes keep my mouth closed when the discussion centers around what everyone else has in common. If I were to always open my mouth every time and espouse how it was growing up in Norway, it would contribute nothing to the discussion. But it does teach me a lesson in how mutual memories can both unite and alienate.

I wonder what you think about remembering and how memories and identity are connected.