Time

In my family, we don't take pictures to record every moment of our lives. We take the occasional photo of something that might serve to remind us that we were once there, but we don't try to preserve the moment. In fact, in my family we can hardly think of a worse thing than to record the past in such a way that doesn't leave room for interpretation. Sometimes I wish that I could, so that I could counter my mother's insistence that I always loved mustard with incontrovertable proof, but that would require us to have taken pictures of every meal I've ever eaten. It's little excessive considering what's at stake.

In our family, we rely on time to blur the details. We remember brides being pretty rather than dressed up in an awful gown that was in vogue in 1984, but now resembles a $4 hooker costume. We forget the exact reason why we stalked out of the house in bare feet at the age of 13 in the dead of winter. We forget how our lively grandfather was before he was stricken with cancer and spent 6 months hauling around an oxygen machine, and only the happy fisherman lives. It dulls the edges, lets us forget, allows us rewrite things into a happier ending.

Forgetting the details makes it easier to forgive others, and forgive ourselves. It allows us to move past our own faults and move on to successes, as long as you chalk up some "lessons learned". It provokes friendly disagreements about who encouraged who to jump off first. It also gives us time to heal, to forget who broke off a relationship with whom and over what. We know we don't like broccoli, we don't have to constantly remind ourselves why. We sleep better at night.

People were built with a fallible brain, and I believe it's because we wouldn't be able to face ourselves in the morning if we remembered every instant of embarassment, every falsehood told to a parent and every time we failed at something new. Maybe poor memory in people with depression is a defense mechanism to held them to heal. Who knows the real reason why, but humans are fallible, and time helps us manage that.