Forgetting Death

It's hard to forget the loss of a loved one or those that were close to us, it's something we never really get over.  When it comes to people who we barely knew, or who were only part of our life in passing, it becomes difficult to remember their life and their death.  When it comes to those we never knew at all, celebrities and public figures for example, they represent people who don't enter into our conscious day to day.

Memory is a strange thing, it is somewhat mysterious in how it functions.  I mentioned before how I can still picture my primary school classroom, with all the desks in line and the chairs that in my mind now lie empty.  Chairs that I know people sat in, but I have no recollection of them.  Not a face, not a voice, not a name, not a single detail.  I've forgotten entire people and I'm not even that old, it was some 20 years ago now that I left primary school for the last time.

One of the most interesting things about this lack of recollection is that although we label it as forgetting, that's not really an accurate description.  For most of these people, a picture of them, a name, or any other trigger would be enough to bring back memories of who they were and what experiences we shared.  Therein lies the issue with calling it "forgetting" - the information is still there it's just not accessible.  Perhaps a better term could be borrowed from computing and say that the memory has become corrupted, no longer accessible because information needed to get to it is missing.

When it comes to recalling the life, and death of other people, it is often necessary to be reminded of the fact in order to recall it.  The year 2016 was pretty grim for many reasons.  There were a slew of high profile deaths that happened in that year.  Not all of those are easy to recall.  Every now and then I watch a movie, a TV show, or listen to music and that trigger is pulled and I remember those people I see or hear are dead.  That is a peculiar sensation, when you feel the mixture of sadness at the memory, happiness at the innocence of the content, and bewilderment of the fact you forgot someone is dead.

That moment of realisation however demonstrates how people we have never even met, can be part of our lives, how little we can actually know about other people, and how we focus on our own lives so much to the point where we forget other people have theirs.  We acknowledge easily in social situations that other people have their own lives they are living but we rarely stop and actually process that in depth, for the hours, days, weeks, or even years in between our meetings with them they have been living their lives, gaining experiences, having thoughts, feelings, emotions, and everything else that makes up life.  There is a depth that we forget because a few moments, a few words, a few characters on a screen let us shorten our attention spans to something small and often insignificant in the grand scheme of things.  Even death itself can become meaningless when you consider the years of life that were lived before it happened, however long or short that may have been, they lived.