WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER THE PAST

Sometimes people will say to us when we are grieving, “You must not keep thinking about the past. The past is gone. You have got to focus now on the future.” As well meaning as this advice might be, the advice can be wrong. For reminiscing — recalling events, conversations, occurrences from the past — is one of the important ways that we mourn. In fact, the word mourning in Sanskrit means “to remember.”What is the value of reminiscing?When you reminisce, these memories remind you of the person who were before the loss and can unite that person with the person you are now. In memory we can recognize and recall a self we were earlier in our life. And perhaps some of the qualities of who you were in the past can be very useful to who you are now.Think about a mother who has lost a son. Perhaps when she reminisces she recalls how she helped her son with his science fair projects in middle school. Perhaps she remembers making papier-mâché to create a big globe; perhaps it was a string of Christmas lights she and her son stapled to a piece of poster board to create a system of signals needed in a project explaining how a power plant works. This reminiscing reminds this mother of a person she was in the past, and she might imagine bringing that person into the present. Perhaps she asks, “Could I volunteer in a school in the neighborhood as a way to honor the memory of my son?” Or she might decide to work as a volunteer at a children’s Discovery Museum nearby. By reminiscing she finds a role from her past that she can bring into the present as a way of honoring her son.Professor Pietro Castelnuovo-Tedesco has studied reminiscence at Vanderbilt University. He reminds us that this form of thinking about the past is “one of the principal means by which a person continues to have a relationship with old parts of the self.” Through reminiscing, he says, we are able to maintain an “inventory” of the key images of ourselves from the past and are therefore able to keep “a thread of continuity among them.” (p. 138, Seven Choices)Reminiscing about the past can be serviceable. “Serviceable?” someone might ask. “How can a past we can never return to be serviceable?” Because through reviewing our past accomplishments as well as our failures, we can better set goals for the future. Reminiscing works a bit like trial action. When we remember the values and ideals and dreams we held in the past, these memories can point the way as we think about the future.