Memory As Trickster

from deviant art

Over Mother’s Day weekend, our daughter came home for a long weekend. And whenever Megan is home, her friends drop by to touch base and hang out. One of her friends, Ashley, is nine months pregnant and due to deliver – a girl – any day now. 

Rob and I were in the backyard talking with her husband, Moe, about where Ashley is going to have the baby, what sort of delivery she wants, the details. She plans to go natural – controlling the pain through breathing techniques. But since the baby already weighs 8 pounds, Ashley’s OB says he will induce the delivery if she doesn’t deliver in the next three days.

“May her labor be short,” I remarked. “Mine was 30 hours, and it’s painful.”

“No epidural for Ashley,” Rob remarked.

“Nope,” Moe said.

“Trish had an epidural,” Rob said.

Huh? I looked at him, sort of shocked that he remembered it all wrong. First off, I have an version to needles. And the idea of someone sticking a needle into my spine, numbing me from the waist down for hours, is terrifying. “Are you kidding?” I said. “The doctor offered an epidural and I told him to forget it. I had a shot of Demerol that took the edge off.” And that Demerol took me into some other place and time, but that’s a whole other story!

I remember this conversation with the doctor clearly. I also remember telling this to actor Jamie Cromwell, when Rob and I were working with him on a project several years after Megan was born. No epidural. Oh yuck and gross and no way.

So how can his memory of the delivery be so different than mine? What is memory, anyway, and how often do our memories of an event we share with someone else differ? According to this article, there are three types of memories: sensory, short term, and long term.

In Alzheimer’s and dementia, short term memory is the first thing to be swallowed up by the disease. This can span the spectrum from, What did I have for breakfast to who is the person sleeping next to me in bed? For my mother, who suffered with this disease for at least eight years, it started with small things – she thought the cleaning lady was stealing stuff, she forgot appointments, she got lost driving home from the mall that was only a few miles from her house.

The memory gaps gradually grew much larger and more alarming. She eventually forgot how to play bridge, a game at which she had excelled for at least 50 years; my dad was the stranger in her bed, incidents that happened several times and prompted calls to 911; to confusions so profound she forgot how to use utensils, to feed herself. And toward the end, she didn’t recognize my dad, my sister,  or me. 

Memory. According to Carl Jung, we also have a genetic memory – the collective unconscious . From Jung’s Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious:

 “… in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”

 I don’t think Rob’s memory versions of Megan’s delivery were connected to the collective unconscious. His experience of her birth differs because he wasn’t the one giving birth. But I do think the collective unconscious played a role in the later stages of my mother’s Alzheimer’s. During many of our visits to the facility where she spent the last two years of her life, she said that her mother – who died in 1969 – had dropped by for a visit. Or that her brothers and two sisters, who had also passed on, had come by bearing gifts. I believe she was tapping into the collective unconscious during these periods, where the dead aren’t dead, where we have access to other dimensions of consciousness, where synchronicity flourishes.

Perhaps the birth process is something like dementia/Alzheimer’s, but in reverse. During birth, we leave the place between lives, where we have access, I think, to our past life history, to the talents and skills and challenges that we have faced in other lives, and we have a sense of what we hope to experience in the life we are entering. With Alzheimer’s, we re-enter that place while we’re still alive, in a physical body, and prepare ourselves for the transition.

In both states, synchronicity is an ally, a friend, a beacon. It may be the voice that whispered to Steve Job as he was dying and uttered his final words, “Wow, wow, wow.” It may be the voice that a woman hears when her child is being delivered about their past-life connections. It may be the voice, the impulse, the feeling that prompts us to follow Path A instead of Path B. 

Who knows for sure? At the end of the day, memory may be the ultimate trickster.