The Brain Is A Funny Thing

“When I was young, my mother and grandmother held prayer meetings in our house. On Wednesdays.”

Amanda sits in her wheelchair eating lunch. She’s dressed in white pants, peach shirt and salmon-colored jacket.

“They told me I wore this yesterday but I wanted to wear it again because someone special is visiting me today.”

She wasn’t sure exactly who was coming, but she knew it was someone special. It was her daughter. And me, the daughter’s boyfriend.

We know she has dementia issues. It might be Alzheimer’s but the diagnosis is not definitive. She remembers earlier parts of her 86 years but not many recent parts. That’s typical of Alzheimer’s. However, sometimes she remembers recent stuff better. For example, she’ll struggle to remember the names of her three daughters while talking with them in person, but she’ll almost always remember my name, even though she’s only known me for five years.

One of my biggest fears is losing my memory as I age. I remember some things from my past in crazy, geeky detail. Example: during a recent conversation at my neighborhood bar with a friend’s sister who I had just met, we discovered that we both had lived in Milwaukee years ago. I remembered in great detail two apartments I lived in, the street name, the floor and floor plan, and the exterior of each. I recalled details of two bars, a concert venue and an annual festival.  I haven’t lived there since1981. Yet when I ordered a second glass of wine that night, i I couldn’t remember what the first one was.

Is that the onset of memory issues? The beginning of Alzheimer’s?  Cognitive issues related to my MS?  Or was I simply not paying attention when I ordered the first glass? 

A certain amount of memory loss is inevitable with aging. We jokingly call it “a senior moment”. We laugh at that on the outside but worry about it internally.

Amanda can’t remember what she had for breakfast but she knows every word to “Jesus Loves Me” and “A Bushel and A Peck”. She adores her man of 35 years but sometimes can’t come up with his name.

The brain is a funny thing but memory loss is no laughing matter.

During a sixteen-year battle with Parkinson’s disease, my Dad acknowledged his growing memory loss by writing the first few pages of what he intended to be an autobiography for his family. The plan was to write down his memories while he could still recall them. He wasn’t much of a writer but at least he did start the project and in a mere five or six pages he revealed several things about him that I didn’t know. One of our best personal family miracles is that those water-logged pages survived the floods of Hurricane Katrina.

I think my brain is functioning reasonably well and I have begun two autobiographies. I plan to publish one as a fictionalized novel based on my life. The other will be a completely raw and accurate recollection of all the crazy details of my life and I plan to print out only a few copies. I’ll send them to a select few friends and family members with instructions to only open and read after I die.

I wonder if my fascination with memory is something other boomers experience. It seems to be a legacy-building exercise. We try to connect all the disjointed pieces of our lives into a cohesive portrait of who we are and make some meaningful sense of our existence.

Maybe we’re just trying to relive or retain our youth. The brain is funny that way.