Personal time machines

As I was watching what I thought was a comedy, I started to think about a very serious subject: the loss of a parent. It also got me thinking about the deceiving nature of human memory.

It is often said that memories can be highly subjective and that they have the ability to distort reality. Still we rely heavily on them to guide us and to remember our past. But the question is, how accurate is this remembering process? Do memories reveal the truth, or do they only reveal what we want the truth to be? The smallest memory can be tainted by personal agendas and subjectivity and therefore become superfluous. Someone once said that memories are irrevant if one has the facts, yet we continue to cling on to the past. Why do we choose to believe our memories over the cold, hard facts?

Maybe it's because we don't like where we are now and by changing a few details here and there, we prefer to indulge ourselves in a fantasy. A scapegoat into a better life.

Forty years into the future, my father -should he still be alive- will supposedly be in a dire state. He'll be needing help twenty-four seven. And as my father's condition deteriorates, I'll start to look back on my childhood, remembering the times when he was still able to pick me up and when he was the strong man I knew him to be. But when I think back about my childhood, I'll inevitably look back on our fights and our arguments and all those old feelings of resentment will start to resurface. At that moment, with my father's life slipping away from him, I'll choose to omit or change a few details, because I want to remember the past the way it should've been. When remember my father, I won't look back on our grudges and the spiteful things we've said to each other. Instead, I'll forge my own version of the past, I'll rewrite it to make it all better, make it perfect.

I think that's how it goes with a lot of things in our lives. Throughout the years, we're confronted with so much drama and heartache that sometimes, we just let our imagination take over and rewrite some of the hardest moments in our lives.

Maybe it means we're only fooling ourselves. Maybe it means we're living a lie. But I dare to ask which one of you hasn't wished he'd done things differently at some point?

In a way, we all have our personal time machines with which we can alter the past. Only ours doesn't include the dangers of paradoxes or the threat of stepping on butterflies and destroying the future. It's a sort of do-over, because we're rarely awarded one in real life.