What do our memories of someone attach to?

 I had an interesting conversation with a relative yesterday about the getting rid of old things. In particular, things that have a strong link to a loved one who has died. We have all had the question 'Do I send Mum's old handbag to a charity shop?' or its equivalent. Things like that which have such a strong association with a loved one who has died are hard to get let go of for many of us.

Not everyone is the same in this, and you have to allow people their own version of it. Some people can not let go of anything. They live in their late parents' house, or they cannot bear to leave or change the place where their late partner lived with them. You can understand it, even if it is completely not for you. They have such a strong identification with the place that perhaps they feel they would be killing their loved one again if they left or made changes.

At the complete other end of the scale I heard of a friend of a friend who had no attachment whatever to the physical signs of someone's life. They were happy to dump everything in a skip, but it didn't mean they loved their parents or partner any the less. They had had a very mobile and transient childhood, so maybe they never got into the habit of investing places with memory value.

I feel closer to the second viewpoint than the first, and it was one of Cro's observations on her possessions when she knew she was dying that, really, it's all "just stuff". After the person who owned them dies it does not contain any of their spirit or character. All of that spirit and character is contained in the memories of the people who knew them (and perhaps also in things that they wrote, if they were good at writing). 

So what things do have that strong memory attachment? Their books? Their jewellery? The plants they loved in the garden? I think things that link to pleasure that they had in their lives is often a strong foothold for memory. If they loved cooking, then maybe that favourite pan will bring them back to your memory. A musical instrument perhaps? Although being now mute, maybe that would just emphasise their absence.

I have read about theory of memory and one idea I took from this reading was that most strong memories are multi-dimensional in that they include the place very strongly, the people, and how you felt at that moment. And also, it seems that you can't just remember one of those elements. Each triggers the other, from the memory of the wind on your face to how tired you felt to the expression on the face of the person you are remembering.

To my mind, it is somewhere in the things that you did together with that loved one that the strongest memories reside. An object may bring them to mind, but for them to really live again in your mind you need to recall one day and what you did together. I might think of the day I was fishing with my Dad and brother and I fell into the lake; I might remember singing my way through a downpour in Croatia with Cro; I might remember churning butter with my Granny in Rathreedane.

I would finally put in an honourable mention for photographs, but only because of what I wrote in the last paragraph. When you see a picture of a day you spent together, and the look on each other's faces, you are back in the moment. The expressions bring the emotion, the emotion brings back everything else. And for that moment they are not dead. They are alive in that second, and the memory of feeling is still alive in you. And indeed when you die, you will both be completely dead. But for this glorious second of memory, the truth is you both live in the moment of that memory.