How do you replace a life?

I know it’s unfashionable, but I value possessions. Not in an acquisitive sense, but in the way they tell the story of who you are.

Photos are not always replaceable, for example our wedding album. That would be one of the first things we would grab in a fire. My wife has kept her diaries from every year since we first started going out together so we could completely reconstruct our relationship if we needed to.

We have loads of programmes from concerts and theatre productions, which would remind us of the acts we saw and the plays we enjoyed. That is one thing that I really miss when I go to concerts nowadays. Add on to that brochures from places we have visited over the years and once again you are able to return to the time and place.

Physical media like Dvds and CDs are time capsules. You can put them on and you are right back in the time and place where you first remember seeing or hearing them. I wrote a blog post about the fact that so much media has disappeared from streaming services and the Internet or never made it there in the first place. If you don’t have the physical copies you can very easily use access to them.

Why is this all so important? Well, in an age where increasing numbers of people are living longer and living with the effects of dementia in different forms, you need to be able to reach those memories and moments that bring them back to you and to themselves. Tell them about a memory and it may not make it through the misfiring neurons, but show them a memory or play them a memory and you can get a glimpse of that person once again. Possessions are vital elements of who we are, and I would rather have too many than too few. If I lost all of them I could be completely untethered from my very identity in years to come.