William Fancher, the writer's grandfather, is second from right in photo of B.F. Goodrich tire dealers. (Family Photo)

By Robert T. Fancher
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 14, 1998; Page Z17

"I fear that I have done a disservice to my father's memory," my father said. "I was so concerned to keep you boys away from alcohol that I emphasized how his drinking had harmed our family. I gave you a very distorted picture of him."

Those words, in my father's 68th year, began the first positive account of his father's life that I had ever heard from him. What a story it was! My grandfather, who had died before I was born, turns out to have been a shrewd, kind-hearted charmer. Every morning, he walked to work at his tire store, so he could see which cars in town needed tires and call the owners to alert them. During World War II, he had bought up odd, non-rationed tires and modified wheels to make them serviceable on ordinary vehicles. He and Dad camped and fished and made road trips together. He sang in a Gospel quartet all over northern Mississippi.

My father was no longer telling morality tales to shape his family; he was bearing witness to who his father had been and, in his own role as keeper of his father's legacy, setting the record straight.

As distinctive as this moment was for my father and me, it was not unusual as a human event. In the later decades of life, how we remember, and the place of memory in our thinking, changes.

In America's youth-dominated culture, we pay so much attention to the things that show whether or not we are young that we miss the unique attributes of age. We overestimate memory's losses, and we overlook its increased importance. Yes, some elements of memory do decline, relative to youth. However, except in cases of dementia -- which most people do not suffer -- such changes have little practical importance.

Here is what's important: As we age, memory moves to center stage in the shaping of our lives, and it is good at its work.

"The big question," according to John Kotre, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, "is, 'What is memory for?' When you are younger, memory is for figuring out how things work. As we age, memory is for identity -- constructing a sense of who you are, how your life has been. You want a sense of the integrity of your life and how it fits with the lives of others."

In our twenties and thirties, what we might call "living memory" -- what comes spontaneously to mind when we're offered a cue -- extends back only a few weeks or months. In our forties, an odd thing begins to happen: We spontaneously remember a great deal from our late teens and early twenties -- we begin to recall things that we apparently rarely thought of in our twenties and thirties.

This shift helps people in the new tasks specific to aging. We begin to remember more as we shift toward a new way of thinking about life -- toward a sense of who, really, we are and what our lives amount to. In middle age, we begin contemplating our late teens and early twenties because that is the time of the defining decisions and experiences that set us on our life courses.

People who spend a great deal of time remembering their successful plans and goals, and reconciling how their lives have gone, enjoy better moods and suffer less depression than those who do not. People who dwell on guilt, disappointment or regret suffer badly. Curiously, those whose tales of the past are largely self-glorifying suffer too. Perhaps memory, in their private moments, gives the lie to their boasts.

Why, though, should memory become more important as we age? Charles Scott, a professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, says, "For younger people, experience is meaningful as it relates to their plans, to who they may become. For older people, meaning has to do with who they have already been."

Memory is not just a backward-looking process; it changes how older people experience present and future. In the present, memory possesses the storehouse of experiences that enrich whatever we do. Think of attending a wedding in the church of your childhood, where you were confirmed and married, where various friends and relatives went through momentous events. Your memories of all your experiences in that church shape your experience of this particular wedding. In our later years, new experiences resonate through a store of memory richer than we could ever have possessed earlier in life.

Assessing the past shapes how we are able to approach the future. "Seeing one's further activities as expanding on a body of experience that extends from one's past can help counter a tendency to think that one's life is shrinking," Scott says. Our lives, in fact, do not grow shorter as we age. They grow longer.

In a couple of ways, memory does decline for almost everyone as we age. We tend to have difficulty remembering exactly where we learned or experienced something, so we confuse events, and we tend to have trouble retrieving memories without external aids. But these losses rarely interfere with living one's life.

We can compensate for the tendency to forget where we heard, saw or experienced something by consciously paying attention to the details surrounding our experiences. Psychologists call this "semantic elaboration," and it is how everyone remembers. Experiments show that as we age, we tend to neglect such elaboration, even when we still possess the brain power to do it.

Our difficulties with spontaneous retrieval of memories decrease when we surround ourselves with external cues: pictures, mementos, notes and so forth. The tendency of the elderly to keep and cherish "stuff" reflects this fact: The stuff of life cues our memories.

For most people, though conventional wisdom says otherwise, memory's losses have little consequence. As Kotre puts it, "We become overly sensitive to ordinary forgetting, fearing that it is a sign of decline." Thinking of yourself (or your parents) as old, you interpret ordinary forgetting as a sign of age. If someone forgets to turn off the stove at 25, we express shock and thank God the house did not burn down. If one does the same at 70, we sigh ruefully and start thinking about nursing homes.

If we understand the changing functions and importance of memory as we age, we can appreciate the richness that memory brings rather than scaring ourselves silly. We can appreciate and enjoy the fact that memory does well what it is supposed to do in our later years.

My father did everyone a favor by recalling and enjoying his father's charms. He could have continued emphasizing my grandfather's failings and boasted of his own superior achievements. He could have looked at his own disappointments in life and immersed himself in self-pity over the obstacles his father's failings had posed for his own life. Instead, he reclaimed for himself a fuller picture of his experience of his father. He changed my grandfather's place in our family's memory. He opened a new ground for discussions between us.

Our family is doing a lot of remembering these days. As this essay neared completion, we discovered that Dad has metastatic cancer. Spontaneously, we have all begun recalling together who Dad is for us, all sorts of things we have experienced together.

It is a horrible time. But it is also a good one, because memory holds the richness of my father's life, even as it approaches completion.

Robert T. Fancher is a psychotherapist in New York and the author of "Cultures of Healing."