For years I’ve heard my elders speak about going into a room and forgetting why they went there in the first place.
Yesterday I went to the basement and just stood there. Why am I here? Laundry? No. Extra paper towels? No. I thought I could reconstruct what sent me down to the basement, so I backtracked through my thoughts. I came up with nothing.
But I wasn’t about to go back upstairs with nothing, so I grabbed a pair of pliers from my husband’s workbench. When I got to the kitchen he was there eating lunch:
“What are you doing with the pliers?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
(I thought for a moment about making up a story about how he had promised to fix the whatchamacallit months ago but forgot, and so I had to do it myself. But why compound memory loss with lying?)
“I went to the basement to get something, forgot what I went to get, so I grabbed your pliers.”
Here’s where I wish I could say we laughed, split an egg salad sandwich, and continued in our domestic bliss. But that’s not what happened.
He looked alarmed. Granted his expression of alarm looks the same as every other expression: pity, surprise, anger. That’s why he has no lines on his face; its never been used. But these are the kinds of digressions that got me into this mess in the first place.
So he says: “We only have one working memory between us – YOURS – and now you can’t remember.”
I told my friend Linda about this. She’s a decade older. Experience matters in these matters. Here’s what she said:
“Oh, that’s normal. I’ve heard experts explain the difference between normal memory loss and dementia: ‘Normal is when you leave the grocery store and can’t remember where you parked your car, but after a moment, you remember. Dementia is when you leave the grocery store and don’t know where you are or how you got there.’ ”
Or did she say that dementia is when you find your car and don’t know it’s a car?
Anyway, one last question: What do you call it when you leave the grocery store and cannot remember where you live, but it doesn’t seem to matter?
After all, I have enough groceries for a week, and I’m pretty sure I know where to find them.