They inhabit my interior world by Jane Hamilton

I read this quote (below) from Jane Hamilton in a newsletter I subscribe to, “Dinner, A Love Story,” by Jenny Rosenstrach. I have often heard people say that when someone dies they live on in our memories. That has seemed oddly unhelpful to me. But reading what Jane Hamilton said here seemed more comforting and real somehow.

When I used to grieve for my mother, and later for my Aunt Kate, I told myself that although they were certainly as dead as they were ever going to be they were still mine, that they inhabited my interior world, which was at least as noisy and various as life itself. From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone. Memory seems a gift to me and I hold tight to those few things that are forever gone and are always a part of me, while the new life, the changing view, streams by.