Surviving Memory
Sunday, July 25th, 2010In Ahab’s Wife, a few shipwrecked characters find themselves adrift at sea in a life boat eating their dead to live, but blocking out the memory of the trauma. Victims of exposure to sun and salty air, their minds become blurred, and after rescue, they never spoke of what they had to do to survive, perhaps forgetting altogether as part of that survival.
I have a certain fascination with the idea of repressed memory. One of my best friends insists that psychologists who go digging around trying to uncover repressed memories are pure sadists. These things are repressed for a reason, and digging them up will cause a whole lot of damage. Better to leave these things alone and let nature do its job.
My mother has the worst memory of anyone I know, and I used wonder if her childhood was so bad that she’s simply repressed most of it. But then I started watching some of my siblings who seem to have inherited her lack of memory, and I realize it must be something genetic that I didn’t inherit. After all, we had the same upbringing, and nothing very traumatic happened to me.
Or did it?