My wife’s maternal grandmother passed away yesterday.
We had less than 24 hours advance warning that something was really wrong – although in some ways we knew it was coming sooner rather than later.
My wife and I have been talking about it quite a bit, and she’s been telling me a bunch of stories about her grandma. In return, I told her about some of my memories of my great-grandma, and we’ve been having a lot of good discussion.
We’ll be travelling to visit my wife’s family sometime this week; we’ll know when exactly once the plans for the memorial service are finalized.
This whole experience crystalized some thoughts I’ve been having about nostalgia and memories, so I thought I’d share them with you.
Nostalgia & Memories
Let’s get this straight, once and for all.
Nostalgia is when you look at the past and idolize it. You wish it was the past again; you wish you could go back. You think life was better then. Since you’re wishing for something that can’t ever happen, you’re going to be disappointed.
Nostalgia is, for the most part, negative.
Memories are when you look at the past and remember. You don’t wish it was the past again, but you can enjoy telling a few stories and talking about where you came from. There’s no expectation, although sometimes it can lead to some self-analyzing.
Memories can be positive or negative, depending on how you process them. If you wish that something never happened (a sort of reverse nostalgia), they can be negative. But if you remember the good things, they can be incredibly positive.
Triggers For Memories
Memories aren’t stored in physical objects; they’re stored in the brain. That being said, however, photos can be triggers for memory.
For example one year, around Christmas, my brother scanned in a bunch of old photos and copied them to a digital photo frame. My parents, my brother, his girlfriend, and my wife and I sat there and watched while they flashed by.
My wife got to see a bunch of pictures of me when I was a little kid, my brother got to see some pictures of a house that he’d never lived at (a big deal, since my parents have only lived two places in my entire life – only one in his), and we had a lot of fun just talking and remembering.
The key here is that the information was actually in all of our brains – if it wasn’t, we would’ve stared at the pictures and said, “who’s that?” But the photos served to jog our memories.
Surrogate Memories
Of course that’s just the direct memories. Sometimes photos trigger others’ memories, and we benefit.
I know that most of the knowledge I have about my grandpa on my dad’s side comes from stories and pictures that I saw after he passed away.
I learned about how he drove a bread truck for many years, custom-built a furnace vacuum into his van (Grandpa repaired furnaces, just like my dad), and waved to everybody he passed on the street because he was bad at remembering people’s faces – he couldn’t always remember if he knew them or not!
These are all great stories, and in every example they were preserved by (and triggered by) photos that somebody kept – sometimes for decades!
A Digital Reality
I just looked at the photos of our wedding last September. We have about 290 good photos of the wedding. That includes setup, rehearsal dinner and rehearsal, the wedding, and the reception.
Those photos take up about about 500 megabytes on my hard drive. If I scanned in every photo in the several shelf-feet of albums at my parents’ house (which I wouldn’t mind doing, for the record), we might have 2,000 photos total.
Those photos will all fit on a DVD that costs fifty cents, and takes up one of twenty four available slots in a case that’s about 6″ x 6″ x 2″.
All the photos from the rest of our lives will probably fit on one more. Of course, with Blu-Ray burners coming on the market, all the photos of our entire lives plus our entire music collection will probably fit on one disc within a few years.
One disc.
The Arrogance Of Destruction
I read other minimalist bloggers talking about destroying everything. All the old writing, all the old photos, everything. “Delete everything” they say. They talk about how much it weighs them down, and how “liberating” and “freeing” it is to be rid of your data.
Since we’re talking about a single optical disc worth of data, how much arrogance and hubris does it take to say something like that?
If you ask me, it takes enough to have the attitude that you’re really the only person of any significance in the world. And that’s sad.
A Disc Full Of Memories
Some day, if I have kids, I’ll be showing them the pictures that the radical minimalists would have me destroy. The destruction wouldn’t even be for any good reason – it would only serve as fuel for the vain notion that I’m the only one who matters.
It’ll be nice for the kids to be able to see the relatives they never met, and to hear the stories about them. I know some of the best lessons I’ve learned about who I am have come from learning about where I came from.
Of the photos I’m keeping, one of my favorites is the one shown above. It’s from our wedding. It may not be obvious from the photo, but we put the reception on hold for a bit while we all sang “happy birthday” to my wife’s grandma – the one that just passed away yesterday.
We’d scheduled the wedding to land right on her birthday, and surprised her (and most everybody else) by singing to her right before we did the cake cutting.
Say all you want about the “weight” of the digital photos; you couldn’t pay me to destroy those. There are certain things that are just worth preserving.