I Had A Title, But I Forgot It....

Memory is a funny thing.  We all have things we swear we remember with absolute clarity, but if we compare notes with someone else who shared the experience, their memory may well be at odds with ours.
I always prided myself on my memory.  It wasn't a photographic memory, but I always had a knack for remembering dates, phone numbers, license plates and other relatively useless pieces of data. As I've aged, I am simultaneously alarmed and amused by my absolute total lack of memory regarding certain things.  I am reminded of one day when my grandmother at 95 years old complained that she couldn't remember something.  I tried to console her by pointing out her head could only hold so much information and as she continued to learn new things, she had to let some stuff go.  I think I've already reached that point.
I have been spending a lot of time over the last few years going through the stuff people in my life have left behind after their deaths, especially photos.  I love old photographs for a number of reasons, and they clearly help to jog the memory about certain times and places that might otherwise have been forgotten.  There are a few old 16 millimeter home movies from the late 1940s that I also love to look at, but that sort of documentation is rare in my family.  In an era when children's lives are documented from before they are born in ultrasound pictures, with every day chronicled on video and on phone snapshots, I wonder how all those photographic records will color actual memories.
My siblings and I have on occasion had spirited back and forths about how certain things happened in our family with each of us having very different recollections, colored by our own narrow viewpoint or skewed by time and distance.  I can picture some family down the road getting into a discussion about such an occasion and bringing out exhibits 1 through 5 to show why their memory is the correct one.  It may be more accurate, but I think the fuzzy edges of some memories may be preferable.
I also sometimes fear that we are so busy these days chronicling everything in real time that we forget to actually experience whatever is actually happening.
Almost five years ago I went through a month in which my partner suffered through what would be his final fight with the aftereffects of a cancer battle we thought had been won.  It was a month made more difficult by additional trauma happening in my life.  I felt I was on high alert all day every day and never thought I would forget one minute of what I went through.  Imagine my surprise last week when I discovered some notes that my partner had written me in the hospital when he was unable to speak.  They were by turns funny, heartbreaking and touching.  And yet until I stumbled across them I'd forgotten I had them.  I suspect part of that was due to the fact that  I simply had too much to process and I had held on tightly to the actual conversations we did have.  Those I could repeat verbatim even now, but the notes? 
Shortly after beating myself up for forgetting those treasured notes, a friend posted a quote attributed to Walt Whitman on Facebook which read. "We were together.  I forget the rest."  There it was.  I was so busy living that month with a capital "L" that I did forget the rest.  And you know what?  I think that's okay.