Mother in Law: Memories

During lockdown Deceptively Angelic Child 1 (DALC1) (then aged 7) went through a phase of prank-calling my mum. It started because my mobile was set to withhold my number as I was phoning clients on it. For some reason, every day she pretended to be a lady called Elaine Paige. One day Elaine Paige was the customer services lady at John Lewis, claiming she was sending a lorry to collect my mum’s sofa, another day she would be from the NHS trying to make an appointment for my mum to have a vital and perfectly healthy organ removed. Anyway, that is all by the by as, like Elaine so often does, what I actually wanted to talk about was memory. I promise not to sing though. 

Some of you will deal with this issue day in and day out, whereas I have just had a spate of it recently. So I apologise for this all being pretty basic. But I have recently had to draft quite a few witness statements, and deal with some final hearings where the witnesses have been cross-examined. The upshot is this: memory is weird.

Some of the witnesses I’m referring to were the attesting witnesses to wills. The problem with this is it can be quite a boring event - not necessarily one seared on your memory like a car crash or a serious crime.

I just sat here for a full minute trying to remember what I ate for dinner last night (a curried chicken tray bake, which was the kids’ favourite a fortnight ago but they hated last night) but I can remember the exact shape of the huge hot chocolate stain I got on my suit before my Year 10 mock interview in 1997. Because the kids rarely eat what I put in front of them, dinner last night had no real impact on me, but the utter devastation of the stain - when I had looked forward to the mock interview day for four years and chosen my outfit so carefully - still makes me shudder.

I became a Dementia Friend a few years ago. In the training, they explained that a person has two sets of memories that work like two stacks of books. The emotional stack stays standing a lot longer than the factual stack. That is why, if you keep reminding a person with dementia that their husband is dead, they will feel the grief over and over. No doubt in 50 years time I will be rabbiting on about that stain.

Of the thousand wills I have witnessed over the last two decades, which ones do I remember off the top of my head? I remember my friend Debbie’s will signing, because she had laid on lunch with gin and tonics and I thought 'this must be what it is like to have children of school age'. (Reader - DALC2 has been at school since 2019 and I have yet to drink gin with lunch). I remember handwriting a deathbed will in a hospital, but I really only remember writing it, not witnessing it. I remember witnessing the wills of some family friends who insisted on me videoing the event - which rather negates the need for me to remember it anyway. I can’t even remember who witnessed my will. What I actually remember is the ones that didn’t get signed - the ones where I had to delicately/awkwardly doubt someone’s capacity, for example. So what if one of the other 9997 wills were challenged?

No doubt I would get a copy of the will file. I would look at the attendance notes, the address, the date and try to work out the context. Will I then remember it, or will my brain play a trick where I think I remember it because I’ve read about it?

In about 1992 we went to Center Parcs. My brother went out the back of the lodge to the pond and, when he came back, went in the wrong lodge. He thought the lady inside was our babysitter so just sat down on the sofa and started watching TV. As I tell you this, I can visualise it. But that must be wrong, because I was not there. I’d gone back to the right lodge. My family have told this story about fifteen times a year since it happened, to the point that my husband, who I did not meet until 2004, also probably thinks he was there. The same thing happens with photos. Do I remember wearing a disco wig to meet Duncan Goodhew at Pontins in about 1987, or do I remember the photo, and my guilt at having both hair and a wig? One of the witnesses I have been dealing with recently retold his story to various solicitors over a number of years. In each telling the story became more exaggerated - not intentionally, but nevertheless less accurate.

And what about context? Where does that get us? Does it improve memories or make them less reliable? The witness whose story became exaggerated also said things like 'that can’t be true because I wouldn’t have done that'. This is a particularly interesting aspect of memory. For example, 'I wouldn’t have gone in the house and had a cup of tea because I rarely have tea after lunch' is a lot less convincing than 'I wouldn’t have had a cup of tea because I don’t like it and have never drunk it'. What about the opposite - 'I know he made me a cup of tea because he always did'? A recent study by the University of Amsterdam showed that expectations made human memory unreliable after a matter of seconds.

If you are relying on the witnesses, for goodness’ sake do a risk assessment on them before the matter goes too far. And if you are the witness, I suppose, as with most things, the right thing is to make a detailed, contemporaneous attendance note. But there is another, interesting option that may be overlooked - as long as your file is in reasonable order and you did a good job at the time, I don’t think there is anything wrong in saying you’ve forgotten all about it now, if that is the truth.

Some facts and identities have been altered in the above article