What Remains When Memory Begins to Fade
A few days ago, while my younger sister and I were talking in the quiet presence of our mother, she suddenly asked me a question.
“Did you ever ask Bou (which is how many Odia people address their mothers) about your future?”
Our mother sat beside us, listening—or perhaps simply being there. Her memory and attention have been fading rapidly over the last two years, and it is increasingly difficult to know how much of a conversation reaches her.
The question took me back many years.
My mother, with her warm and simple soul that endeared her to almost everyone who knew her, had developed a formidable reputation as an astrologer among family and friends. People came to her with their horoscopes, their anxieties and their questions about what lay ahead. Some of them, including my wife, still vouch for the remarkable accuracy of her predictions.
I always found this both amusing and fascinating.
Amusing, because I was never convinced of the scientific validity of astrology, or of the idea that the future could somehow be foretold from the positions of planets and stars. Fascinating, because despite my scepticism, I could not completely dismiss the sincerity of those who believed in her predictions—or the fact that some of them seemed uncannily accurate.
So when my sister asked whether I had ever asked our mother about my future, my answer was simple.
“No. I never did.”
My mother knew that I was sceptical. Whenever I expressed my doubts about astrology, she would smile and tell me that I would become more interested in these things as I grew older.
She even seemed to have a prediction for my scepticism.
“You will become interested in all this in your sixties,” she would say.
And then she would use a word that has always intrigued me more than astrology.
“Spiritual.”
I never took the prediction particularly seriously.
But here I am, in my sixties.
And the strange thing is that I have indeed become more interested in what some might call spiritual—not in the sense in which my mother perhaps understood the word, and certainly not as a sudden conversion to astrology, but as an increasing curiosity about things that age makes harder to ignore.
Also Read: When Labels Fall Away
One of them is the nature of memory.
Perhaps because of what is happening to my mother, I have begun to think of memory as more than the ability to recall names, faces and events. So much of what we call the self is woven from remembered experience—the people we have loved, the places we have known, the choices we have made, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
Watching those threads loosen in someone you love raises an unsettling question: how much of a person is contained in the memories they carry?
My mother’s dementia has progressed rapidly over the last two years. With it has gone much of the easy conversation that once connected us. I cannot sit with her now and exchange the light-hearted banter that was once so natural between us, nor have the conversations about life, destiny, God, astrology and spirituality that I had imagined we would resume when I had more time.
Yet there are moments when something familiar appears—a tone of voice, an expression, a response to affection—and I am reminded that the person I know is not simply a collection of memories.
I cannot quite explain what it is that I recognise.
Perhaps that is precisely the point.
I remain sceptical of claims that cannot withstand scrutiny. Yet I have become less certain that everything important about being human can be captured by what can be measured or explained. Memory may be central to our sense of self, but perhaps it is not the whole of it.
Maybe this is where spirituality begins: not with an answer, but with an awareness of something we cannot quite name.
I would like to ask my mother what she meant when she told me that I would become “spiritual” in my sixties.
Was it about God? About astrology? Or simply about the way age makes us look beyond the visible and the immediate?
I will probably never know.
She could not have known that, when the time came, she might no longer be able to have the conversation she had predicted. The question she planted in my mind all those years ago has returned to me at a time when I can no longer ask her what she meant or tease her that she was not right.
Perhaps that is the irony.
My mother once claimed to know something about my future.
Today, sitting beside her, I find myself thinking less about the future she might have foreseen and more about the part of her that remains beyond what she can remember.
Maybe that is what she meant by “spiritual”.
Or maybe I am only now giving her words a meaning of my own.
