Deciding to Remember: Why We Shouldn’t Leave Memories To Happenstance

By Gabrielle Sills

If you reflect back on your life, you may get the sense that your memories are quite… random.

Or at least that was the case for me. The things I often remember most, like lyrics to songs and the names of the streets near my house growing up, are not the most “important” things. While more meaningful times in my life, in contrast, are much hazier. The newborn days with my oldest daughter are quite fuzzy and I couldn’t tell you what I spoke about with my husband on our first date.

Worse yet is there are things I hardly remember at all. Maybe it’s too much phone use or having young kids or being spread too thin, but my memory is not great. I can often remember that I loved a certain book or movie but not any specific parts. My husband and I were obsessed with Mare of Easttown when it was on, but I couldn’t tell you the first thing about it now besides that Kate Winslet was in it. I’ll remember loving trips I’ve taken but no real moments will stand out besides what I’ve captured in a photo.

How did this happen, that my most important life moments are gone with the wind? From a family perspective, this was not ideal for me. There is nothing more important to me than my family, and yet it all kind of blurs together. How about you — what are your most poignant family memories? How much do you remember?

The Memory Game

In Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, she writes:

“Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?”

Reading that passage in that book was a lightbulb moment for me. The best books, as George Orwell wrote in 1984, are those that tell you what you already know, and this idea from Zevin around purposeful memory making perfectly expressed what I’d been failing to articulate on my own.

I was remembering random things because I was leaving the job of remembering to chance.

*I* was not deciding what to remember, and so randomness was deciding it for me.

Choosing to remember

So how do you take control and not leave your memories to chance? How do you make sure you’re remembering what you deem most important, in addition to the riff raff that our brains find amusing?

You write things down, which is exactly what I started doing.

July 27, 2021 was my first journal entry. I have a single Google word doc and I always write the date at the top and jot down whatever it is I’m choosing to remember.

Sometimes it’s takeaways from a book; other times it’s funny things my daughters say or favorite moments from a trip — I’ll also paste in pictures. And it’s not always “happy” things: I write the upsetting things down as well so that I can work out my feelings and remember the low moments too.

There is certainly catharsis in the act of writing — but it also works.

I’ve gone from being the receptacle for random bits and bobs to playing a deliberate role in the memories of my lifetime.

People are surprised sometimes at the things I’ll remember now. The quotes above from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and 1984 are both lines I wrote down. I’m quite certain that I wouldn’t have remembered them if I hadn’t.

But more than books, and why this is relevant for Graddha, what’s amazing is that I get to remember my favorite and most meaningful family moments, including the “good” and the “bad.” Insights from my daughters. Moments in which I realize I need to course correct on parenting. Words from a loved one that have deeply affected me.

The act of writing helps cement these moments in my mind and provides a reference that I can periodically peek back on over time. It’s interesting seeing how some of my thoughts and circumstances evolve over time (and how some of them don’t). And there’s no greater feeling than looking back on an old entry where I was struggling with something and realizing that it’s since something I’ve overcome.

From a family perspective, these are thoughts and events that I want to remember not only for myself but for others as well. Research shows that the more children know about their histories, the stronger their sense of control over their own lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believe their families function. I know that my daughters will benefit from hearing stories and details of their earlier lives. To share the things they did that made them uniquely them. To share not only the times that I was so moved but what exactly moved me. To share, and thereby impact what they and others will remember about me — to play an active role in my legacy.

In a world where our attention is so extremely fragmented over so many things, I’m grateful that, from the billions of moments and conversations and photos and books and articles and podcasts, I’ve found a way to remember the ones that are most valuable to me.

So how about you:

• Do you feel like you’re remembering the things you want to remember?
• What is it that you would like to remember?
• How would you like to share these things with others, if at all?

And all of this is to say that: Zevin was right: memories should not be happenstance.

Especially for family memories, we are all in control of remembering our most important moments, conversations, and reflections. We must only decide to remember.