Have you seen "Inside Out"?  California-based Pixar Film's newest offering to hit the theaters, "Inside Out" presents, in the emotional life of a young girl named Riley, the inner workings of memory.  Identifying four emotions--joy, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger--as prime in an individual's personality, "Inside Out" paints a tale, centered in a significant and enervating move Riley's family makes when she is twelve years old, of how although we may want "joy" to be uppermost in our minds, sometimes it is "sadness," not unmitigated happiness, that leads to genuine joy.  When "joy" (the emotion) realizes that Riley is unhappy with her new situation, she tries to fill her with even more joy.  Along the way, however, it becomes apparent that what Riley needs is not superficial happiness but rather to grapple with the sadness she encounters and consequently transform it into lasting joy.  She needs, as our Buddhist friends might say, the journey, the good, bad, and ugly, to become whom she is supposed to be.  Riley needs the full span of her memory to become herself.  Though we might conclude she should lose her recollections of sadness, it turns out that she needs them as much as she needs her recollections of joy.
     As I've been working on a book I'm writing about memory, I've thought often about memory and sadness and joy.  If we are to set memory into the context of an afterlife, for instance, our first inclination would be to say that we would not want any sad memories in it. However, as "Inside Out" (and countless psychological studies) suggest, everything that we experience and remember goes into shaping who we become, here and in the next life.  Do we really want to remember only the good?  Would we really be ourselves if we forgot about the bad?
     It seems that the only way that we could enter the afterlife with the full effect of our memories would be if God, being God, transforms them into something totally new.  We will remember, but we will remember in a completely new way.  How God would accomplish this, however, I'm afraid I cannot readily say, as I would be probing intimations of the metaphysical whose full purview I simply cannot access in the present moment.  (Nor can, I might add, anyone else.)
    For the time being, then, if we believe that we carry our memories, in some way, into the afterlife, we walk in a mystery.  We believe that we will carry them, but as to how we will do so, we cannot now say.  We know only that if God is there, and if God is greater than heaven as well as earth, he is fully able to make all things, joy or sadness, new.
     So does "Inside Out" tell us:  memory presents what life, now and later, most is.