- My family has a history of people slowly losing their memory.
- My dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2017, and I started forgetting things in 2020.
My husband used to call me "Rain Main." I could recall random dates on request, birthdays and phone numbers of middle-school crushes, and could calculate the sum total of a basketful of groceries by looking at them.
My father wasn't the first in our family to lose his mind one memory at a time. His grandmother, his mother, his brother, and so on.
In the summer of 1984, the summer I turned 13, my father and my aunt made the decision to move my grandparents "to town" after my grandmother started to wander — during the day, in the dark of night, sometimes barefoot and topless in the bitter Midwest cold. The first time she made it out to the highway, a passerby stopped, rescued her, and walked her back to the front door like a stray animal.
My paternal uncle's cognitive decline began less than a decade before my father's. He, too, started to wander.
The first signs that my father might have Alzheimer's appeared in 2017. One summer afternoon, my mother discovered him standing on the front porch, garden tools in hand, his mind blank of the task he'd walked outside to do.
I started to forget things
My own forgetting started in the spring of 2020. I started having moments when I couldn't remember where I parked my car, I couldn't remember what day of the week it was. I blamed my forgetting on being overwhelmed with graduate school "at my age," sleep deprivation, or even menopause.
Then I started having episodes when I was teaching; words would fall away like a train moving along, then a gap in the track, and they're gone. I've found myself asking friends mid-conversation, "Did I just ask you that?"
I mentioned the lapses to both my rheumatologist and my therapist. They assured me it was from stress, maybe the brain fog of menopause, or the result of a chronically-inflamed body.
The anxiety of my forgetting is the worst at night. I often roam the house — ping pong from my bed to the couch and back again. I play word games on my cellphone. Scrabble. Two different versions of Word Stacks. I do this well into the night in an effort to sharpen the dulled edges of my memory, to preserve what's still firing well.
How many words can I spell with the letters V O I D E N? Void. Vine. Vino. Din. Dine. Dive. Ion. Dove. Done. End. Nod. Id. I plug the letters into allscrabblewords.com to see how many words I've missed. The site lists 55 words for that letter combination. I found 12.
I haven't had any testing yet, no genetic bloodwork to test for presenilin mutations, and no MRI to check for the constellations of brightness in my hippocampus caused by the build-up of beta-amyloid proteins.
On my worst days, my forgetting has escalated to leaving the kitchen with faucets running and burners left on. In my moments of panic, I recite my date of birth, my home address, and the day of the week to myself. I think of the faces of my children and their children. I imagine them older and wonder if they will experience the same forgetting. I recount places I've been and want to be, the smell of the hyacinths in my grandmother's flower garden, and I think of my father when we were both younger — remember the way he piggybacked me around the living room.
I remember how all of those things are connected like constellations — clusters of stars, of brightness, all related to one another. Familial.