My mother has been fainting. Without warning, for no apparent reason, she falls and briefly disconnects. It might be a few minutes or only a few seconds, but when she comes to she can’t remember what’s happened. The moment is tucked away in some hidden corner of her brain. When her eyes open, she generally finds herself under the gaze of a series of strangers trying to help by fanning her or offering her water and tissues. These strangers tend to try to help her piece together the time lost from her memory. You leaned against the wall, you held your head, you vomited, you sat down on the ground, you closed your eyes, you collapsed. A chorus of voices offering up details of the blackout, enough for her to partially recover the scrap of life hidden in a parenthesis in her brain. It upsets my mother not to be able to remember what happened in these spatio-temporal lapses. Falling down in the middle of the street, collapsing in her seat on the bus or in line at the supermarket – these things are less troubling than the lost minutes of lucidity. The black holes that lurk in her everyday memories bother her more than the bruises she collects each time she faints.
I understand my mother. I have a theory that we’re made up of these everyday memories. It’s not an original idea, but I believe it. The way we wake up, what we have for breakfast, a walk down the street, an unexpected downpour, some annoyance, a surprise in the middle of the day, a story in the paper, a phone call, a song on the radio, the preparation of a meal, the smell from the pot, a complaint filed, a scream heard. Each day and each night lived, year after year, with its full complement of activity and inactivity, upheavals and routines – continuous storing of all this is what translates into personal history. Our archive of memories is the closest thing we have t
