Experiential memory has a distinctive phenomenal character. Let’s call this pastness. Rather than a simple datum or ‘feeling’, I propose that pastness is complex, involving six strands that I term Presence in Absence, Personal Past, Actuality, Fixity, Personal Significance and Fragmentariness. In this paper, I argue that pastness can be explained by the characteristic pattern of dependence of memory experiences, both on their objects and on their subject. This pattern of dependence reflects the unique success conditions of experiential memory. In successful experiential memory, the objects and events recollected were once able to sustain our experience of them but can no longer. Rather the experience must be sustained by the remembering subject. At the same time, successful memory depends for its intentional objects on a particular past experience and whatever it was an experience of, as well as on the subject’s powers of preservation. Pastness is a phenomenological reflection of this intricate, nested pattern of dependence.