The Deeper Well of Memory

Watching her mother battle Alzheimer's, Christine Cleary feared she might one day forget things she holds dear, including her own late husband. Now Cleary believes memory is more about heart than mind.

Welcome to this I believe, an NPR series presenting the personal philosophies of remarkable men and women from all walks of life.

I believe in figuring out my own way to do things;
I believe in the power of numbers;
I believe in barbecue;
Well, I believe in friendliness;
I believe in mankind.
This I believe.

Which is the name of the series we bring you every Monday and our essay today comes from listener Christine Cleary, who lives in Cambridge Massachusetts with her two daughters. Cleary works at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where she helps patients and families write about their experiences. Here is our series curator Jay Allison.

Through her work, Christine Cleary knows that loss creates a context where belief becomes especially important. She knows this from her own personal experience, too. Having faced the death of her husband from cancer and of her mother who suffered from Alzheimer's, enduring these events at the same time, illuminated her belief. Here is Christine Cleary with her essay for This I Believe.

I believe that memory is never lost, even when it seems to be, because it has more to do with the heart than the mind. At the same time my 44-year-old husband Ed, was losing his life, my mother was losing her ability to remember. As Ed's lungs filled with cancer, Mom's brain was becoming tangled in plaque. She forgot how to start the car, whether or not she had eaten and which family members had died including my father.

I became afraid that one day I, too, would be unable to recall my husband, not because of Alzheimer's, but simply because my memory of him might fade. So from the day of Ed's diagnosis until his death a year later, I set out to memorize him. His crooked smile and vigorous embrace, his woodsy smell and the way cleared his throat when he reached the top of the stairs. I knew I'd always be able to recite his qualities, kind, gentle, smart, funny, but I wanted to be able to conjure up the physical man in my mind as fully as possible when he was gone.

Back then, I thought memory was a deliberate, cognitive process, like remembering multiplication tables or lyrics or where the keys were. Unable to rescue Ed from cancer, I was determined to save him form the only thing worse than dying, being forgotten. Later, I learnt that memory has a will of its own. You can't control it any more than you can influence the weather. When it springs up, a person loved and lost is found if only for a few seconds.

Recently, when I was driving, I had a deep and sudden sense of Ed, and the way it felt to have him next to me in the car. My body softened as it used to when we were together seven years ago, living a shared life. I wasn't remembering his face or the way he walked. The careful details I had stored had nothing to do with this moment in the car. Looking in the rearview mirror, I recognized in my own face the same look I once saw on my mother's face in the nursing home.

I had asked her questions about my father and she became confused about his identity. Yet as she sat there, dressed in a shapeless polyester outfit, she briefly appeared young and radiant, her face filled with love and her eyes misty. Her brain couldn't label the man correctly, but that wasn't important. It was clear to me that her husband was vivid in her heart, a memory even Alzheimer's could not crush.

I believe there is a difference between memory and remembering. Remembering has to do with turning the oven off before leaving the house. But memory is nurtured by emotion. It springs from a deeper well, safe from dementia and the passage of time.

Christine Cleary, with her essay for This I Believe. Cleary said that she did not fully understand what she learnt from her experience until she sat down to write about it. If you would like to write for our series, please visit our website at NPR.org. For This I Believe, I'm Jay Allison.

Support for This I Believe comes from Capella University.

This I Believe is produced for NPR by This I believe Incorporated at Atlantic Public Media. For more essays in the series, please visit NPR.org/this I believe.