Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I do know that my mind plays tricks on me. It's as if my memories are in a filing system in my brain and despite thinking that some memories are locked away in places where they are long forgotten, from time to time they just sneak out and surprise me. Maybe I'm going senile or something, but this seems to be happening more and more.

At times I think it's maybe a purging mechanism whereby I'm doing a type of 'spring clean' because I can be just going about my everyday business when "pop" out comes something I really didn't want to deal with right there and then but heck... there it is.

I think that keeping things like letters or really old photographs or other little tangible treasures like that is maybe our way of remembering something other than the shocking and bad memories we have. Because we can touch them and they have probably got a smell to them (even if it's age smell) and I personally think that our senses are so involved in memories. Think of the times when we smell something and it takes us back. I was cutting up a watermelon the other day. It was just right and it was crisp and the smell was so overwhelming. It took me back to my childhood and all these memories started falling out of their little compartments and they were good memories.

Alffe, you may never re-read them again. I don't know. Maybe you will keep them always. I don't see that as such a bad thing if it was me, but for you that might be different. The fact that you question having the letters still and I think you've mentioned them here before makes me think that you may not be ready to let go of them. Whether that's because your son sounded really happy in the letters, or if it reminds you of happier times, or even if it gives you some tactile reminder (one that affects your senses... touch or smell etc.). Maybe you will take them to a condo one day. Then again you may not. You just need to do what you have to do and I guess that the fact you've not thrown those letters away before now shows that it just wasn't the right time.

I don't necessarily agree with what Jeff Herring said in the original post. I don't think it's such a good or healthy thing to put something in a place as if it's a chapter of a book that's been read and we choose not to read it again. I do understand that there are things we need to deal with in certain ways and that's not so darn easy and it's not always something that other people can help us to do. I think, like those memories that keep falling out of my own head, that they're always there in some compartment/filing system which are in our brains. It's not as if we can purge them totally. We can tidy up our filing system of memories, but they're all still in there somewhere. Just one of those darn mysteries of our minds.

What I think we need to do is to keep on remembering that we are loved and that we have loved and that others do love or have loved us and to keep comfortable and safe during the really horrible and difficult times. Sorry to ramble on so much. I hope this is understandable. I just have a lot of thoughts about how memories work and how the senses affect them and I don't believe it's possible to move on as if it's a finished chapter in a book, but heck, that's just me.



You are loved. You also have loved others greatly and sometimes that's the most important thing to remember in our lives, whether they have realized it or not.