Fellow Pilgrims

Tomorrow: Stranraer to Ballantrae (est 19.8 miles)

from Pilgrim Michael

My thoughts, on this your rest day on the ferry, are of admiration for your journey and the daily distances walked . The number of miles seems to be similar to the number of kilometres that we covered each day en route to Santiago de Compostela. You do though have a 10 year age advantage over me when I started, and 20 years when I finished! But also, walking solo must be infinitely harder than in a group. You've covered half the distance now - I'm sure you'll manage the other half!

from Pilgrim Cath

I've been reflecting on the concept of both place and memory, and the connection between them, because this is a subject close to my heart. In June 2014 I took my own pilgrimage (I've looked up the definition in Chambers and have decided this still counts!) to the remote island of St Kilda with a lady called Claire who has a very dense amnesia following a brain infection many years before. 

Coincidentally, I was reminded of this last week because Claire called me to say there was a programme on the BBC about "our island", but it was already very much on my mind because of some of the points made in your blog. Claire has no memories for most of her life. She doesn't remember meeting her husband, or of any of her 4 children being born, or indeed anything of them growing up. In fact, she remembers almost nothing at all of any of her life. She’s also unable to make any new memories. This means that she has to rely on whatever concrete evidence she can get her hands on and when this fails (which is often), she has to rely on other people’s accounts. She finds this very difficult. It makes her vulnerable because she has no measure of what is true or not true, but more importantly it feels to her that other people have more ownership of her memories and identity than she herself has. 

This takes us to the relevance of St Kilda. This remote island off of the Outer Hebrides (you will remember I spoke about it to your mum at length) had been inhabited since prehistoric times but was evacuated suddenly in June 1930. There are various accounts explaining why this happened and whose decision it was. The history of that island has been told by many people and there are over 200 books written about it, but here’s the thing: only two of these are written by former inhabitants. The artist I was working with knew the island well and saw parallels with Claire. As with Claire, the stories that are told are based on other people’s interpretations of the evidence they see and this in turn is shaped by the context and knowledge of their own life. Neither Claire, nor the St Kildans, have much in the way of their own records which means that their history – and thus in my opinion, their very identity - is dependent on what others tell them to be true. 

Those of us without memory loss are in a much better position, in that we do have access to our own autobiographical memories – the ability to recollect many different moments in our life, all of which make us who we are and shape our relationships. But the science is also quite clear in showing that we all massage our histories to some extent. Experiments that have been replicated many times show that adults are entirely able to “remember” something that demonstrably never happened. No one wants to believe that their memories are fallible, because that would make us feel like Claire – scared, vulnerable, uncertain. Our histories are so much part of who we are. But the gentle reframing of the past that every one of us does is mostly seen by psychologists as a positive and adaptive response. We fair better when the story we tell of our lives is in keeping with the values we hold and with our sense of self. 

To return to the subject of “place”, this is one of the most powerful ways we can both stimulate and scaffold those memories that tell us who we are. Moving about in new places activates the hippocampus where memories are stored (again this is an adaptive response – if you leave a safe place, the brain generally turns on the memory centres so that you can find your way home again, though not necessarily to the Giant’s Causeway). Anyone who walks a lot knows that you can often remember exactly what you were thinking at certain points in the journey, particularly landmarks or turnings, which is because the hippocampus is at its most alert when a navigational decision is being made. And using similar mechanisms, returning to familiar places from the past can also bring older memories back to life. Sometimes these are good memories, sometimes less so, which brings me to my very last point (I promise!) – that the light and dark in our remembered experiences are a crucial part of how we navigate the world. Claire would give anything to be able to access her past – not just the happy stuff, but the difficult stuff that made her who she is. In our research, we find that even the happiest people (maybe even, especially the happiest people) choose “redemption memories” as the ones they would least like to lose. These are recollections of really horrible difficult times that we have come out of the other side of. They give us strength and remind us that we can cope and that we will survive.

My very very final point (and this time I really do promise) is that my mum – who now has a very sparse memory of most of her life – is very clear about one thing, and that is that she is a survivor. For example, she remembers hating school but she also remembers that she came out the other side. Those difficult memories are what give her the most strength now when life has thrown her the biggest challenge of all. Her language is failing but the other day when I was worrying about something, she said to me, “I always work on the basis that there is an answer to every problem, even if it doesn’t come exactly when you want it to.” By mentally rehearsing some of those difficult experiences from her childhood as well as her ability to cope with them, she made those memories strong enough to withstand the ravages of dementia. And because of this she will frequently say to me, “I am a survivor”.

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Thanksgiving: for Michael and Cath.