Auntie Bill

A proverb for family gatherings is the story of kindly, but forgetful, old Uncle Bill – forgetful of yesterday’s grocery shopping, of invoice due dates, perhaps even of the faces gathered around the table – but never forgetful of his time-honored memories.  These he tells and retells, while his niece tries to interrupt and redirect, to no avail.

A warning to retirees:  those behaviors we found troublesome in older relatives may well reappear again in us.

I’ve thought often of Uncle Bill in my own season of aging, and I can see now why he spends so much time in his past.  No, it isn’t necessarily because the past, the “good old days,” really were good or better than the life he leads now.  I believe it is because, as we age, with many years of experiences behind us, we (I) continually run into something called a “trigger.”

I learned the term many years ago, in a divorce recovery workshop – there will be incidents, I was told, that remind me of this difficult time, and that trigger sadness, anger, frustration, all the emotions that divorcees struggle to overcome.

But aging has brought a different kind of triggers, some positive, some negative, and all leading to a poignant nostalgia. It seems to me that I cannot go through a day without being ambushed by at least one, and often many more, triggers.

During the summer, I live in Denver, the city where my parents grew up, and the city I visited every year of my childhood.  It is filled with memories:  sometimes, my route takes me past the high school my mother attended, or the house where my father grew up.  And I imagine their childhoods and think about our family, and miss them, and regret that I was in such a hurry to grow up.

I’m working a crossword puzzle, and the answer to one of the clues is a letter of the Greek alphabet — and my mind goes immediately back to my college days, when memorizing the alphabet was a requirement of joining a sorority.

Shutterfly provides its own triggers – unasked for pictures, like the one that appeared this morning, of my granddaughters 13 years ago, when they were 4 and 5 instead of 17 and 18.  And I remember the fun games we played, and the stories I read them, and the way they celebrated when I walked into a room.  And I miss their young selves, even while being awed by the young, capable, outstanding young women they are today.

When we consider the human memory – the vast storage of images from a variety of life stages, it is not surprising that an encounter with a trigger today will bring up a memory from the past.  But, particularly for those whose short-term memory is less dependable, more and more time may be spent in the past – to the detriment of the retiree and the dismay of their friends and families.  

We can’t control the stream of memories that can occur – but we can control our responses to them. 

Depending on what I am doing when I am interrupted by an old image, I either turn my attention away from it, or spend some time going back to it.  If it is a negative image – and many of them are – I dismiss it quickly.  If it is a memory of a happy or enjoyable time, I can entertain it again, but I must be willing to accept the nostalgia that accompanies it.  But what I do not do is continually talk about those times when I am with family and friends – only if it connects to the dinner-table conversation already in process.  And so, I avoid becoming Auntie Bill, whom people tolerate but avoid. 

Most important, I have learned to turn my attention away from remembering the past to enjoying this present moment – this place, these friends and family members, this experience.  I am intent, not on replaying memories, but on creating new ones.