Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad

—Christina Rossetti, “Remember”

One midsummer day, my grandfather called from Korea. Without preamble, he asked if I could come home. I knew at once that something was wrong. He hated the thought of his granddaughter spending money and making the long journey. No matter how much he missed me, he never asked me to come.

He said my grandmother was showing signs of dementia, and that I should see her before it was too late. There was nothing to think over. I booked a flight and packed.

An emaciated old woman with white hair sat in the wheelchair a nursing home employee was pushing toward us. When I looked closely, I realized she was my grandmother. My grandmother, thin as a rail, with a short haircut I had never seen on her before. All my life, she had been a woman with a full figure and a generous head of black, permed hair. Just as I had failed to recognize her, she seemed not to recognize me.

“Grandma!” I called. No response. Whenever I used to run into her arms, she would cry and say, “Oh, my precious girl.” One look at her face gave me a terrible feeling: perhaps I was already too late.

I could not even tell whether she recognized me. We never managed anything resembling a conversation. The unfamiliar nursing home, my grandmother behaving in ways that kept catching me off guard—everything was bewildering. The only thing that seemed certain was that the grandmother I knew was already gone. My grandfather had made me promise not to cry, so I secretly wiped away my tears whenever she turned her gaze elsewhere. Dementia in the family was something I had encountered countless times in films and on television. Living through it myself felt utterly unreal.

My grandmother spoke in words I could not make sense of, ending her sentences with a sigh. As though a sigh were a period. She repeated the same words, seeming on the verge of telling us something, only to sigh and lower her head. Watching her, I could feel my heart breaking moment by moment.

Since we could not sustain a conversation, there was little to do but look at her. My grandmother in a brown shirt with a zebra pattern and loose blue floral trousers. Her name was written on the wheelchair she sat in and on the white slippers she wore. The clothes were unmistakably her taste, yet she did not seem to be my grandmother. She silently surveyed the visiting room, then looked at a painting of sunflowers on the wall.

“What kind of flower is that?”

“They’re sunflowers, Grandma.”

“Yes,” she said.

The thought that this might be the last time we would ever be face to face filled me with a grief I could not put into words. While my younger sister was in the bathroom, I put my arms around my grandmother.

“Grandma, I love you.”

She gently stroked my hair. It felt as though my grandmother had come back, and I forgot my grandfather’s warning and broke into sobs. Then I tried to pretend I had not been crying, and my grandmother smiled.

After we left the nursing home, I cried for a long time in my sister’s car. My sister had not shed a single tear. Suddenly feeling self-conscious, I asked how she could not be sad.

She replied:

“I’m going to spend the rest of my life trapped in that room with the sunflower painting.”

Without her memories, my grandmother no longer seemed to be my grandmother. I searched her eyes for the woman I knew, but I could not tell. I kept wondering: Is she still in there? Had all her memories of me died? How does a memory die? To my surprise, there was still so much science could not explain about the birth and death of memory.

This is how memories are understood to begin. During an experience, we perceive. Visual information activates the visual cortex; sounds activate auditory regions; hippocampal circuits help process spatial context. If the experience carries emotional significance, the amygdala may become involved, while other cortical regions participate in the thoughts and associations that arise.

All of this happens simultaneously in different parts of the brain. Neurons active during an experience undergo physical and chemical changes. After watching a sunset, the brain is no longer quite the same brain.

A memory is not a single cell brought into being, nor an object tucked away in a particular drawer. It is more like a map of the patterns formed by neurons that were active together during an experience. A memory has no tangible form of its own. Even an engram, which might be called the physical embodiment of a particular memory, is a memory trace. A memory is, in the end, a pattern of connections among brain cells. Nothing more, nothing less.

What, then, does the death of a memory mean? All those maps my grandmother and I had inscribed in our brains with every moment we shared. The maps had vanished, and my grandmother had lost her way. Where had her maps gone? Why could she no longer recall them?

The death of a memory might mean that the pattern itself has disappeared. Or the pattern might still exist, while the brain can no longer access it. Other patterns might interfere. The connections might deteriorate over time. Or there might be no suitable cue to bring the pattern back.

In other words, I could not know whether my grandmother’s memories of me were entirely gone, or whether her brain, affected by dementia and age, could no longer find its way to them. If those memories were still there, could she remember me again if she got better? Could we have our silly, aimless conversations the way we used to?

I had once heard a seemingly miraculous story about an elderly woman with dementia whose memories returned after she began walking barefoot. If memories thought dead could come back to life, would my grandmother be happy?

I thought of the last conversations we had had before her illness. Resentment toward her children, complaints about a relative, frustration with my inattentive grandfather. Stories I had heard countless times over the years. She often revisited memories of people who had hurt or disappointed her and complained about them to me. When she told me I was the only one who listened, I made myself listen. Secretly, I resented it.

Surely she also had memories of mistakes she had made, of love and support she had received. Yet the memories she returned to were always about someone who had wronged her. Those memories became well-worn paths, smoothed by a lifetime of walking them, and more and more, she took only those paths. They came to define her.

When she complained, I would sometimes change the subject and ask about her father, my great-grandfather. She looked so sad whenever she spoke about the hurts of her past. But if I asked about her father, or about the tattoos she and her friends had given themselves as girls with a needle dipped in ink, her expression changed before she even began to speak. My favorite story was about her father, a successful businessman who always remembered to bring her little hair clips when he returned from business trips to Japan. I had heard it dozens of times, but unlike the complaints, it never grew tiresome. It was the look on her face, as though she had become a little girl again. How strange that a woman could turn from a wounded grandmother into a young girl, depending on which memory she recalled.

My grandmother no longer complained. Even if she kept me beside her all day and did nothing but complain, I wanted, just once more, to see the full range of her emotions. The surprise on her face when I walked through the door, then the way it crumpled as she was overcome. The tears when I fell into her arms and she called me her precious girl. The little laugh when I played at being her doting granddaughter.

There was a peacefulness in her face now that she had lost her memories. Was she happier now? If a memory makes us unhappy, what does it mean to keep it?

Our memories are almost everything we have to define ourselves by, yet they have no tangible form of their own. What is more, recalling a memory does not simply strengthen it; through a process called reconsolidation, it may also change. Even the vivid memories we trust so completely, then, may be closer to subjective interpretations than to objective truths.

Had I known how elusive and insubstantial memories were, perhaps I would not have suffered so much from the versions of the past I kept constructing and retrieving. My grandmother, my mother, and I had all done this. The memories we returned to and turned over became our identities, our impressions of the world. My grandmother who had sold even her wedding ring to help raise her husband’s younger brothers, holding on to the ways they later disappointed her, she came to believe there was no point in devoting yourself to family. My mother, cheated by a friend out of the life insurance money she received after my father’s death, came to believe that no one could be trusted, that anyone might betray her at any moment.

My grandmother and my mother had been victims, but that was not all they had been. Yet in the memories they returned to so often, they were always the ones who had been wronged. Of course, this was not their fault. They must have tried, again and again, to forget the people and events that had wounded them and get on with their lives. But as the world dealt them blow after blow, those recurring beliefs must have hardened. I must learn from the lives they fought their way through, so that their wounds will not have been for nothing.

I have the power to end this pattern. Even if I cannot save my grandmother or my mother, I can save myself. I have to choose the path I walk. Because it is a path that is good for me.

If only I had stayed beside my grandmother, held her hand, and helped her walk the paths made of good memories, like the man who supported his ninety-two-year-old mother as they walked barefoot together. If only I had not moved abroad ten years ago. In place of these anguished regrets, I try saying to myself the things I wanted to tell my grandmother, the things it was now too late to say.

It’s all right. You can let the bad memories go. It’s all right to live holding the good ones close. A memory of the past is only a map of neurons that once lit up. You are the one who lights them now. Sometimes people will disappoint you and hurt you, but that is not the whole story. I have received as much love as I have hurt. I can carry that love in my heart. Don’t give the past the power to define the future.

After I returned to the U.S., I saw sunflowers everywhere. A man passing by carried a bag with a large sunflower on it. The cover art for a song I had just discovered showed a field of sunflowers. For the first time, I noticed the sunflowers blooming in abundance outside the entrance to my building. A flower that had once meant nothing to me now undid me every time I saw it. Would this association have an expiration date, too? When would I be able to see a sunflower without thinking of my grandmother? When I reach her age?

Tears gathered in my eyes at the sight of the sunflowers blooming outside my building, but I held them back and kept walking. Memories would come unbidden, but I still had a choice. I would focus on the things that had made me smile today. Return to them often enough to make a path. I thought again of the dog walking with a branch in its mouth, the eye contact and smile of a complete stranger, a passage in a book that had carried me into another dimension. Because I did not want to spend my life trapped in a room with a sunflower painting. Because next summer, when the sunflowers bloomed again, I wanted to greet them with a wide smile.