Altered Memories

I am thankful that Alisha is a photographer. Thanks to her, we have visual memories of Roscoe that we might not have had if she'd taken another profession. Another reason I'm thankful that she's a photographer is because she can clear up some of the pictures we did take, to make them look even better than they actually were. In otherwords, she can produce new pictures of Roscoe that never fully existed.

Take a look at the pictures below. You'll see that with some careful editing, she was able to remove the oxygenation sensor from Roscoe's head in several pictures we liked. This made the pictures even better for us, since now we could see more of Roscoe in the picture (our focus) and less of the surrounding medical machinery.

She converted many of the new copies to black & white so that the details would stand out, because the lighting was poor for color photos. In a computer class I learned that black & white pictures look more detailed, even though they aren't. Your brain usually takes some effort to process the color in an image, and some effort to process the detail (shadows, sharpness). With all of the color removed from the image, your brain is free to focus all of its effort on understanding the details, so the picture's details stand out more:

And then comes my new favorite picture, which is now propped up on my desk at work:

Looking at these images above is a depiction of how we recollect our memories of Roscoe. Our brains focus on the part of the memory (Roscoe being happy) that we want to remember, leaving the unhappy portions to fade. We often think of Roscoe's smile, activity, and energy. We disregard memories of putting in IVs, struggles over growth, conflicts with nurses, or the uncertainty of his survival.

We get to choose which memories remain and which ones fade. It is a form of coping, and some might call it willful ignorance. The idea of selective memory has been a major plot component of movies like Solaris and Memento because we commonly change our memories to fit an idealized version of what actually happened. I like to think of myself as a very practical person, so the only reason I'd want negative memories is if they change me positively in some way by making me work harder or become a better person. In this case, we have the blog to look back on for a detailed account of everything that happened. The truth in memories comes shooting back when I read through postings during the rough times. But we don't want to remember those rough times.

We choose to remember a happy, playful, inquisitive Roscoe with a blur of sensors and beeps in the background, like non-principal characters in the screenplay where our son was the star.