This past Sunday morning, I was jolted awake at 3 AM by dozens of flashing lights and my grandma’s frantic yells of “Your auntie’s house is on fire!” I rushed outside to see half a dozen firetrucks and a few ambulances lining our block as flames danced across the roof of my great-aunt’s house. I watched helplessly as my great-uncle circled the home he’d dedicated his life to building and paying off. The house he’d raised his kids and grandkids in. The house where everything he owned was currently burning to a crisp.

Thankfully, everyone got out unscathed, but the house was declared a total loss. My great-uncle is a man of few words, but I could see the devastation in his eyes. As he walked around his burning home, all he could repeat was “There are a lot of years in that house. A lot of years.”

One of the more heartbreaking consequences of the fire is the loss of many of our family heirlooms and memories. My great-aunt is the de facto keeper of memories in our family. She had thousands of photos spanning several decades, family heirlooms like my late uncle’s chandelier, and countless plants gifted to her from those who are long gone. Losing these mementos got me thinking about memory — both collective and individual — and how we preserve culture when we don’t have physical artifacts to hold those memories. This is especially relevant, given that more and more memories are being held online and in the cloud and not in physical forms that we own and preserve.

When I Googled “what is memory?” one of the first results linked to the Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia, which defines memory as “the process of encoding, storing, and retrieving experiences and knowledge.¹” This definition covers the brain processes associated with memory, but it isn’t quite what I was looking for. Next, I searched for “cultural memory” and was led to National Geographic, which defines cultural memory as “the constructed understanding of the past that is passed from one generation to the next through text, oral traditions, monuments, rites, and other symbols.²” NatGeo also pointed out that cultural memory is the longest-lasting form of memory, often lasting for thousands of years, while individual memory fades with age and ends when life does. This came a lot closer to the type of memory I’ve been thinking of lately — and the type of memory that my family lost in the fire this weekend.

We didn’t lose the memories themselves. There are dozens of people still alive who remember the events that were captured in photos and the people who originally owned the heirlooms. Instead, what we lost was the potential for those memories to live on — to stay in our family when the generations currently living pass into the beyond.

I have conflicting feelings about the loss. I’ve personally never cared much about being remembered or having a legacy. As much as it pains me to admit it, at the end of the day, I’m just an average person living an average life. There’s no need for a record of my existence to continue after my death. Plus, I’ll be dead anyway, so I won’t be around to feel forgotten. On the other hand, the idea of the people that I love also being forgotten pains me in a way that I can’t quite describe. As an amateur historian, I also appreciate the value of artifacts and feel a bit of a sting at seeing them destroyed in the blink of an eye.

Part of me knows that written and photographic artifacts are very new in the context of overall human history, and that there are other ways of preserving cultural memory like oral histories. However, oral history requires having a community dedicated to remembering — and in a society that’s more isolated than ever, I worry that younger generations won’t care enough or have the attention spans to listen and remember.

According to Our World in Data, about 117 billion humans had walked the earth as of 2022.³ The vast majority of them lived, died, and were forgotten. Still, their collective stories and cultures still impact us today. It may sound a bit morbid, but I find solace in knowing that even if my entire family is never remembered, the way we live now still matters. (Aaaaaand now I’m wondering what it means to matter and why we so desperately want to. But that’s an essay for another week.)

I don’t have a tidy ending to this week’s newsletter, but I do have a request: take time to live in the moment and bask in your experiences to create strong memories. Even if they don’t last, they’ll still matter — if only for a single lifetime.

Yours in memory,
Mina

P.S. Apologies if today’s newsletter is a bit incoherent. My brain is not braining this week! Hopefully, it’ll be back online by next week when I attempt to answer the question, “What is truth?”