“I’m going to give you three words,” said the nurse practitioner, “and then we’re going to talk about some other things.” My United Healthcare “House Calls” visit had been well under way when Elaine gave me the start to the dreaded memory test. Lately, words have been escaping the corral; I can hear them whinnying in contempt for my attempts to rope them, but I’ve been spending anxious moments trying to recall the name of the horse I want to saddle.
My mother was 86 years old when she died, but long before she reached that age, she told me, “I think I’m getting Alzheimer’s.” When I asked her why she thought that — she was in her late 60s — she said, “I keep forgetting things.” I said to her, “Mom: You haven’t been able to remember my name since I was a kid.” Then, I recounted her sputtering up and down the 5-scale name of her children when something had gone sideways: “Joni-Jaci-Jerri-Clifford-Curtis…!” I presume that the offending party was supposed to hold up his or her hand when the name was correct. We giggled about that, she reminded me where the “dead box” was, and we moved on to other memories. (The “dead box” was where my mother stored all the necessaries for her children in the event of her death: insurance information, gravesite and plot reservations and the admonition to “be good to each other.”) But my mother’s memory remained sharp until the day of her death, and as I sat at her bedside, I was often astounded by the things she remembered — and told me — of the life we had lived together and apart.
Memory has always been an underdeveloped muscle for me, which is one of the reasons why I write so many things in my notebooks. When people tell me that they recognize me from my picture at the top of this column, I am grateful for the readership, and bewildered, for I often fail to recognize people with whom I have spent time when they are outside of the space we had shared. (Unless, of course, I had been married to them.) There is a couple who reads this paper and spends some time at a coffee house I frequent. I asked their names, recorded them, and mentioned them in a column, but I’ve only ever seen them as a unit of two. Should I see Tom without Tina, or she without him, I’m not sure I would recognize that single person. That bothers me so that, I write in my notebook, the name of the person, where I met the person, and some general physical characteristics to help me remember the person. These are good strategies that fail me, daily, especially if I do not see a person on a regular basis.
I remember reading about a study about the brain and memory, and how the aging process does not erase memories, but the paths our minds need to travel to reach specific memories, deteriorate. I have entered my eighth decade of life, and things fade: instead of a single bound, it now takes me two-and-a-half to leap a tall building. But for the last four years, I have been able to recall the three words given to me by the nurse practitioner. Still, I was nervous about my latest exam, and once Elaine had given me the three words, I forgot them as we talked about other things. But then, this happened: Elaine suddenly asked me to recall the three words, and an image of the cat below exploring my drawing materials came to me, and I said, “Orange. Cat. Pencil.”
I’m good, for another year.