Memory - Our substitute for Love

"If there is any substitute for love, it is memory." - Joseph Brodsky

It's a hard sentence to sit with, because at first it sounds like a consolation prize.

Love, like Coca-Cola, is the real thing - warm and fuzzy and present in the room. Then whoosh… the rug is pulled, and we seem to be left with just a bunch of memories. Which, in the great theatre of our lives, looks rather like the understudy - the picture, not the person.

You'd be forgiven for reading it as a bit of a downgrade.

Brodsky, the poet who penned the line, was exiled from his native Russia, and knew something about loving what you can no longer reach. But I read his words as something a wee bit more generous. Not that memory is a poor replacement for love, but that it is love's continuation by the only means of transport available. The person leaves. The loving doesn't. It simply ups sticks, takes up residence somewhere inside us, and carries on with its quiet work.

We tend to think of remembering as a backward-facing act. Faintly sad, fairly quiet, with our gaze very much over the shoulder. Something we do when we stop doing everything else. We sit with an old photograph, revisit a familiar place, or find ourselves momentarily lost in a memory we would give a great deal to step back into.

And yet I'm experiencing some of it as the opposite of all that. I am trying to keep someone present through continual, ongoing reference.

If I see a news item on British politics, I can voice my Dad's opinion as well as my own. If the England football team lose 6–0 to Estonia, I will rate each of our players by his uncompromising yardstick and deliver his critical post-match analysis.

We lost our beloved dog Vito very recently, too. I still do his voice. To qualify… he was not a talking dog, but Vanessa and I gave him a speaking role in our lives. So each time we see a cat, a squirrel or a butcher's shop, we speak for Vito, knowing exactly what he would say, if only he could. There's something rather comforting about knowing how to hold a space for him.

And for us, that is not grief "clinging on" like a stubborn stain. That's love, still operating. Still, remarkably, making a contribution to our lives, long after the soft sound of padding paws has ceased to cheer our ears.

But I've also been thinking that memory does something more interesting than simply let us supply what the dog might have added to the conversation. It allows the departed to keep having a say. After all, I'm sure a good many of the opinions I now consider my own were originally borrowed from someone else. How many expressions, little rituals, instinctive responses and peculiar turns of phrase were quietly passed across the table, without anyone really noticing the transaction?

We spend much of our lives imagining ourselves to be independently formed individuals. Fully assembled, self-governing sentient creatures, responsible for our own thoughts, attitudes and occasionally questionable decisions. And yet we play to a far more crowded house than we care to admit.

Our parents have a few of the best seats, though they don't hold season tickets. Old teachers, friends and partners take up others. Self-help gurus and cherished thought leaders are scattered at random through the stalls. And somewhere in the back row sits a person we haven't thought about in years, who nevertheless said something life-changing in 1984 that still shapes how we respond.

It's quite a full theatre when you think about it, and the extraordinary thing is that most of these people have no idea they were ever in the audience.

Their contributions weren't necessarily grand declarations or carefully imparted wisdom. Sometimes it was simply the way they did things. How they greeted a stranger. How they handled disappointment. The particular brand of lemonade they made when life kept handing them lemons. The way someone folded a newspaper, laid a table, and insisted that soup spoons were not the same as other spoons. We absorb these things almost by accident, and then, years later, catch ourselves doing exactly the same.

That's another way people stay with us. Not as photographs in an album, waiting patiently to be revisited, but as quiet participants in the people we are becoming. We don't simply remember them; we continue to be shaped by them. And occasionally, when I find myself making an observation that could have come straight from my Dad's personal playbook, I realise he hasn't entirely finished having his say.

Of course, not everything we inherit deserves a permanent seat. Alongside the humour, the generosity and an excellent shepherd's pie recipe, we can also acquire fears, prejudices, anxieties and peculiar ideas about how the world works - what someone really thought of asylum seekers, say. I have had to examine some of these quite closely, before unwittingly passing them on to the next generation.

That's the other interesting thing about memory. It doesn't require us to preserve someone exactly as they were, or to agree with everything they stood for. We can love a person and still decide that certain parts of their outlook are better left in the past. In fact, I rather think that's a healthy way of honouring them: to recognise what they gave us, appreciate what was good, understand what was difficult, and make our own decisions about what deserves to travel onwards. Except for Vito, of course. He was right about everything.

Memory is not the dusty museum we treat it as. We don't have to rope everything off, polish the exhibits and stick "do not touch" notes everywhere. It's much more alive than that, and it changes as we do. Something we once found irritating can become oddly endearing. A piece of advice dismissed at twenty might suddenly make perfect sense at fifty. An argument we were convinced we'd won can, with the benefit of a few decades, look rather less decisive - or lose its importance altogether.

Age, too, has a funny way of introducing us to our parents as people. Not simply Mum and Dad, whose principal purpose appeared to be feeding us, housing us and occasionally preventing us from doing something overly stupid, but people with their own histories, disappointments, ambitions and unfinished business - making it up as they went along, just as we are. Sometimes we only discover this after they're gone: the pressures they were under, the choices available to them, the things they sacrificed, the fears they never quite managed to put into words. It is surely the great lesson of radical self-forgiveness - we all do the best we can with the tools and information available at the time.

Memory allows that understanding to keep evolving. We can revisit the same person, the same event, the same conversation, and find that it means something quite different to us now. Not because the past has changed, but because we have.

And that, to me, is where remembering stops being a passive exercise in nostalgia and becomes something much more useful. It becomes an ongoing conversation - one in which we are free to ask new questions, arrive at different conclusions, laugh at things that once drove us bonkers, and occasionally concede that the other person might have had a point, even if we're several years late in admitting it.

There's a tendency, particularly around bereavement, to speak of moving on. I've never been entirely comfortable with that expression. It seems to suggest that progress means increasing the distance between ourselves and what we've lost, and that the measure of how well we're doing is how rarely we look back. But I'm not sure life works quite like that. We don't move on from everything that matters. Some things move on with us. And that may be the fundamental distinction.

Remembering doesn't have to mean standing still. It doesn't mean refusing to accept an absence, or living permanently in the shadow of something that has ended. It can mean allowing what was good, useful, funny, instructive or simply loved to remain part of our present.

Not as a substitute life or a downgrade, but as part of the life we're still living.

This is why the smallest memories can sometimes be the most powerful. We might imagine the important things will be the big occasions: the birthdays, holidays, weddings and graduations, all the moments we hoped would make our loved ones proud.

But it's often something entirely inconsequential that brings a person back into the room. A favourite film, a shared joke, the sound of an over-excited sports commentator, or a government policy that whiffs strongly of bloated self-interest. Suddenly, without warning or ceremony, there they are. Not in the room, of course, but certainly in the spirit of the conversation.

I think there's enormous comfort in that, because one of the most cruel things about losing someone is the apparent finality of it all. No more shared anything, no new experiences, no chance to ask the questions we somehow never got around to asking.

The relationship, as we knew it, has ended. But perhaps it hasn't slammed on the brakes and deployed the airbags. It has simply changed the way it communicates. We can no longer ask what they think, but sometimes, remarkably, we already know. We can no longer share a joke, but we can still hear how they would have laughed. We can no longer write new chapters together, but the chapters we did write are still being read.

And I don't think that's an insignificant consolation. I think it's quite extraordinary.

Which is why a whole month set aside for remembering is no morbid indulgence. It isn't about dwelling on sadness or counting the people who are no longer in the line-up. It's about recognising how much of the present has been shaped by the past, and how many people continue to contribute to our lives without being physically present in them. It's about acknowledging the invisible company we keep: the voices that still make us laugh, the advice we still hear, the benchmarks against which we continue to measure ourselves.

I once told my Dad, in the tone of some wise Yorkshire farmer - possibly after a news segment on Meghan and Harry - that "you can't choose your family". His reply was simply: "Well, I chose everyone in mine." It was disarming, and entirely how he saw the world. So what I'm left with is gratitude, in full measure, for being fortunate enough to have known him at all.

To remember someone well is to let them keep contributing - to keep a seat for the ones who shaped us. Not because we cannot bear to let them go, but because we don't have to erase their influence in order to live our own lives, with purpose and vigour.

Which brings me back to Brodsky.

I first read his line as something terribly sad, as though love were the main event and memory the rather disappointing replacement, wheeled out like a spare tyre when the real thing was no longer available. But I understand it differently now.

Memory isn't second-hand, inferior love. It is not the understudy to affection. It is very much part of the same performance.

Every conversation, every shared experience, every rainy Wednesday afternoon was quietly becoming part of the memory we would one day carry. We just didn't know it at the time.

And that's what makes Brodsky's line so hopeful.

Love doesn't end when a person does.

It just slips quietly into the file marked "memory", and carries on with its quiet work.

On Platform 13, wholeness isn't found – it's remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.