And today I have done the thing. The first story is about colonoscopy. In its early days, colonoscopy was an intrusive, excruciatingly painful minute procedure, climaxing in its final minutes. For long after, patients felt traumatized by the last 30 seconds of this procedure no anaesthetic was used , with the previous 29 minutes and 30 seconds a mere blur.
This speaks to me about the final stages of my marriage which, while not excruciatingly painful, had an intensity that has had the effect of putting into shadow everything that went before it. When my memory feels clouded in this way, I feel cut off from the marriage I once had and am left holding a burst balloon. I struggle to leap-frog over the memories of my separation to roam freely over decades in which I had no reason to think that my marriage would one day end.
The other story, also by Daniel Kahneman, is about holidays. In this study, participants were offered the holiday of their dreams in which everything would be paid for with no strings attached.
Except for one thing. On their return home, their memory would be wiped clean and they would have no recall of having been away. The participants were then asked if they were still keen to go on holiday. What Kahneman realised is that we are, as humans, story-making animals; a large part of the value of what happens to us reflects the way our mind uses our memories to build up a sense of ourselves going forward out of what happened to us in the past.
All these stories touch on my tussles with memory. Of course I have philosophical moments too, in which I can see that my relationship to James is a part of me that would be impossible to lose. There are also plenty of occasions, often when gardening or driving, when my memory gives me plenty of footage of happy times. We spend so much of our life knowing โ in theory โ that everything must end.
