Love In Memory

In loving remembrance of my lovely friend who was lost far too early, I am sharing a few thoughts today about love. I hope that you are forever blessed to have friends who you can love and friends who you can love. To be honest, I never thought that the time was right to say goodbye…because I loved you. I am going to try and remember that: Anytime the next person tells me that they love me, I should not need to ask why, or even worry about the reason.

When someone loves us, and that affection is reciprocated, it is embedded in us and in our memories. When you decide to love again, the person that you loved deeply is now just a little bit part of what you are doing. As the healing begins, this love shows up in your memories rather than in thoughts of total loss and destruction. Incalculable sadness is joined by deep love in this intricate, spiraling tapestry about the people under siege in Freetown,

The woman Kaj Manseray loved has gone, postwar Freetown is devastated, and people are in turmoil, but her baby cousin, Abass, and a patient who needs her hold him steady. The power of the narrative, and the refrains about love after the tragedy, are obvious and heightened by author Aminatta Forna’s lucid prose. Fornas characters and themes are finally grounded, and the patterns emerging from disparate stories–the moments unguarded, the bonds of love tying all characters together–exceed his intentions.

She loves everything that life has to offer, and, having known her, I am fairly certain this is the best way she has ever gone about this life. The final quote that my friend shared sums up so much of how she lived and loved.

Love — Drinking makes more dopamine, and more dopamine usually means better memories. New experiences combined with heightened levels of alertness, together with the influx of dopamine, should, in combination, make our brains on love much more efficient at making memories.

The complex emotions activated in and following a romantic relationship means biases may enter into our love-related memory processes in many ways. Even memories of love, and things that happened when we were in love, can become seriously biased over the course of the relationship, or once the relationship ends. There are many times when people have used this to bring back negative things, reveling in their grief and sadness over losing loved ones.