OK, I'll admit that, at the moment, I'm feeling more than a little maudlin. I had a brief comment-conversation on FB with an old friend of mine, found after many years, that said so much without saying a whole lot about a mutual friend of ours who is nearly 23 years gone now. With the help of a soundtrack via Pandora and YouTube, I've been thinking about time, and memory, and the way that old memories - some of which can be painful - are necessary for us.
That's the theme of one of my favorite movies, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A couple, recently broken up, discovers they have availed themselves of the services of a company that erases memories. Love seems to be something "real", more powerful than our desire, let alone power, to control. Even more important, the film shows us that as painful as some memories can be, removing them robs us of something that makes us human.
Whether the pain is caused by a lost love, or the untimely death of someone near to us, that pain reminds us that what happened was real. The person who shared our life, now gone, was real. Those moments, never to return, live on.
It can suck, it's true. But the alternative is really too awful to contemplate.
