I keep remembering the last time my Dad told me he loved me. I can hear his voice, see his face. Was he sitting in his recliner after a meal or a snack? Was it when we got him into bed, ready for bed, with all his accoutrements around him and we said good night? It was Monday, June 3rd, that was the last day I really had with him. I know for a fact the hospital bed was there then, but I keep seeing him in his chair in the corner, where the bed was in the end, so something isn�t right. Does it matter? Not really.

My Dad and I could spend hours, or at least an hour, going over a subject from one angle, then another. What happened, what we thought, what it felt like, what it might mean. What did we know? I remember, after I moved home when a long-term relationship failed miserably and I was miserable, we spent more than hours asking questions, coming up with answers, and then I would cry. And my Dad would cry too. All those words and then it was all those feelings.

It�s the memory of the sound of his voice, as he said the words, he loved me, with such warmth and firmness, I feel like they were a fact, as simple and true and forever as�as�as what? Nothing is forever except maybe rocks and the sky. You know what I mean. It sounded like both of them. It sounded like a heavy color feels. I think so, though thinking and feeling are kind of messed up. I theel.

The forgetting curve illustrates the decline of memory retention in time. A related concept is the strength of memory that refers to the durability that memory traces in the brain. The stronger the memory, the longer we can remember it. A typical graph of the forgetting curve shows that humans tend to halve their memory of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks unless they consciously review the learned material. We can roughly describe forgetting with

R = e _ t / S

where R is memory retention, S is relative strength of memory and t is time (see exponential decay).

From Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve

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