Memories Encoded

I’ve been trying to share a text a day from Adri, and the one that I used today was from 2018 where she talks about wanting tangible photos instead of just relying on digital representations stored somewhere in the cloud. She has memories, she explains, but the boys have none of when they were babies:

5/27/2018 8:54:05 AM

 

I want to do photo albums, because I like tangible pictures but I guess with technology THAT would be the best bet. I want some, and also they need it. What if the internet or Facebook or Instagram or iCloud are gone or get destroyed? They won't have anything. I have memories, but want hard things, but they won't have memories of being BABIES.

 

So maybe I start working in it and maybe like part their graduation present I'll give them all of them.

Of course this got me thinking yet again about the nature of consciousness in general and memories, in this case, in particular. How and why do they manifest themselves, and what is their nature? How are they encoded within our brains, these organic repositories of a lifetime of experiences? And what happens to those memories when, somehow, that brain stops receiving oxygen?

Each of us have a warehouse of memories and recollections within our mind, a vast library of moments, experiences, images, sounds, aromas, ideas, notions, results, and a myriad of other interactions with our environment that are somehow stored away inside our brains. Some do this better than others, of course, but we all do it.

But unlike a public library or wiki page, these vast storehouses are individual to us, inaccessible, really, by anyone else, each reflecting and filtered through our own unique individual interactions with the world around us. And that’s where they remain for the most part. Creative types such as artists and writers and actors may be more adept at sharing these memories or at least create a reflection or echo of these experiences, but even then they’re just echoes, inadequate stand-ins for the real things.

This then adds to the tragedy of death, because when one dies all of those encoded memories of a life lived are gone forever. It’s equivalent to the burning of the Library of Alexandria but occurs multiple times a day, year in and year out, and there’s nothing we can do about it. A lifetime of accrued knowledge and experiences here one moment and lost forever the next.

Adri mentioned in the above text that she had memories, and her unique take and experience of life that formed those memories are now gone forever. They were there on May 21, 2025, but then by mid-morning on May 22, 2025 they were lost, along with the rest of her, no longer accessible to anyone.

They were there inside her head and consciousness, a real thing if not exactly tangible, and then they were not. Where did they go? And this, the loss of a lifetime of memories of too-short life and all the unique perspectives they brought to the table wrecks me about as much as anything else wrecks me.

I am forced to live the rest of my life with Adrianna only existing now in my own memories of experiences and interactions, of sights and sounds, of moments both exhilarating and heartbreaking. That’s all I have.

And when I’m gone, even those won’t exist anymore.