Mystery of Memory

The answers might be in the stars

Photo by Felix Mittermeier

It is lightly raining.

Odd for this time of winter in the Midwest. The bitter cold had been here recently. but now an unusual warm-up and what would have been snow is rain. Puddles on the patio. The light from a streetlamp across the road reflects on the wet asphalt. The moon, the delicate sliver of a waxing crescent is obscured in thick clouds, and all the stars, are mysteries behind the deep black of pre-dawn.

I stand under the old magnolia tree while the dog does her morning business and keep an eye out for the omnipresent skunks and possums that roam the garden. It’s superbly quiet, the kind of quiet only a morning rain can offer, the silence of a hushed serenity.

And then, out of the nothingness, like a flashbulb in the mind, a memory. It’s my father, play-boxing. It’s Christmas, he’s on his knees on the living room floor. I am in pajamas and wearing child’s boxing gloves. I believe they were red. A Christmas Day gift. My hands have been transformed into fists nearly as big as my head. I am maybe two or three years old, in a fight stance, the orthodox stance as it is called, the one my father taught me. Dad is protecting his face with his ham-like fists and smiling, and I am aggressively stretching out to land a right, a left, a right again.

Why now, this memory? Why this memory at all?

I recently finished reading the memoir Voyager by Nona Fernandez. It is a remarkable story about memory, ancestry, the stars, NASA’s Voyager crafts, and troubled Chilean politics and oppression. The melding of these elements might seem disjointed, but it’s not in the hands of Fernandez, a celebrated novelist. One thread throughout this slim but powerful book is the fantastical idea, one produced by the author’s mother, that those who came before us and have passed on are in the heavens speaking to us through the flickering stars, using broken mirrors to flash messages: Hello. We are here. Don’t forget us. They are signaling to us with refracted light. The “people in the sky” are linked to our memories, ones that will burn out someday. like those stars, some now already gone although still shining through the distance of billions of light years. Memories will fade, but until then, the broken mirrors are flashing.

Comforting to think this, although none of it makes logistical or scientific sense, of course. But magic and mystery never do.

The other day my wife was clearing clutter from inside a nightstand. In a drawer were dozens and dozens of saved greeting cards. Ones given to her by her children, her parents, her friends, and from me. She had saved them because of the sentiments, and the memories they triggered, ones maybe she would have forgotten if she had not held on to the cards. After discarding some, she kept others. Beautiful cards. Loving greetings. Loving words. Those remaining cards, she said, would be returned to some of the givers to resend, to offer them again to her for a future birthday, an anniversary. a holiday greeting. Why not recall that gift, that memory, and make it new by simply giving it again? What was beautiful then, remains beautiful. Remembering, yet reliving. It occurs to me now that this act, this idea, is not unlike the signaling from those broken mirrors in the sky. Remember this card? It was so beautiful. Here it is again.

Hello. We are here. Don’t forget us.

I read that memories are first stored in the part of the brain called the hippocampus. They connect there with other memories and intertwine, engage with one another. In time, they are stored in what is called the neocortex. From here we retrieve the memories we sometimes call “long lost,” ones that are reignited by something unexpected, sometimes something unknown, like the rain and the memory of boxing with my father.

What is unsettling, however, is when we begin to forget, when our memory fails us. Still, brain scientists say we are built to forget. The process of forgetting is a natural act, even necessary for the healthy brain. Impossible to control. Yes, we can train our brains to remember—that proverbial string tied on the finger—still, forgetting is part of the larger memory process, in essence to make room for new memories. But, when we forget, where does that memory go? Apparently, it doesn’t go anywhere, only buried in the brain’s deepest recesses.

Yet, forgetting, or refiling those memories away, means that we, at least temporary lose those pieces of our past, and in turn we lose pieces of our personal identity. When memory fails us, and we forget, or place a part of our past in the darkest rooms of the brain, we obscure the self. The fullness of ourselves is eroded.

Before the holidays, I had a handful of decades-old Super-8 videos professionally digitized. They were films that my parents had taken many years ago. Grainy, unfocused, soundless. I gave copies to my sons. But before gifting them, I watched them all. Hours of them. There was my young mother in her Jackie Kennedy sunglasses. my young father just out of the Army, my grandmothers, my great grandmother from England, pet dogs long dead, Christmas toys long discarded. I was both renewed and lost in those captured moments. each frame like the flash of light from a broken mirror.

Although, my sons were appreciative, I know the likelihood of them watching those files anytime soon is slim. Taking a break from a busy daily life will be unlikely, believing there will always be time, knowing that they have Dad’s hard drive waiting in a drawer somewhere whenever they are ready for it. Still, as time goes by, I like to think those images, those “memories” are also, like the faraway stars in Fernandez’s book, delivering refracted light from broken mirrors, flashing from inside that dark drawer. Hello. We are here. Don’t forget us. Just like the greeting cards in my wife’s nightstand. Just like how the morning rain triggers something in my neocortex, offering a once forgotten image of my boxing father.

I return to the house, dampened by the rain, and open my laptop to those video files of my past now stored there, the ones I gave my sons. After a quick scan, there is it, a digitized snippet, less than a minute long, in the hazy saturation colors, a father and son boxing. A right, a left, a jab.

Flashing light from a broken mirror.

Why now? Why this memory?

I’m not sure the answers are that easy or even attainable. However, there’s comfort in knowing that all our memories, these pieces of our singular identity. are never really lost. They may flicker and fade, and disease and age may limit our brain’s ability to rediscover them when we most desire. But, like those billion-year-old stars in the distant heavens delivering light to us here on Earth, memories truly only burn out after we are long gone from this life.

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David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His latest, Daylight Saving Time: The power of growing older is available now. His debut poetry collection, Garden Tools is due out in October 2025 from Finishing Line Press. His novella, American Moon will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2026.