A lot of people believe that once you pass sixty, poor sleep and dimmer hearing and weaker eyes are just the body winding down, all three on the same slide, nothing to be done. I heard it at the pharmacy counter for thirty-two years and I hear it at the senior centre now. It sounds reasonable. It is wrong, or at least wrong in the way that costs people. These three do age, but they age on their own clocks, and each one can look like something it is not. Trouble sleeping gets blamed on age when it is a pill taken at the wrong hour. A memory that seems to be slipping is sometimes a set of ears that missed the sentence in the first place. A fall in the hallway is sometimes a lighting problem, not a balance problem. You cannot sort any of that out if you have already decided it is all just the slide.
How to keep your memory steadyWatch the video: what is usually behind the slips, and a way to improve it.
The brown bag on the table
I will start where I always start. When someone tells me they are not sleeping, I ask for the brown bag. Every bottle and box, including the drugstore shelf ones and the ones that live in the bathroom drawer.
At the counter I saw the same pattern for years. A person takes something for allergies, or a sleep aid, or a tablet for a stomach that acts up, and they take it at night because that is when they remember. Then they are up at three, or foggy at seven, and they chalk it up to being sixty-eight.
I don’t say the pill is the cause. I say it is the first thing to look at, because it is the easiest thing to change. Timing matters too. Some medicines wake you, some make you drowsy, and the same tablet at eight in the morning and eight at night can be two different experiences.
The pharmacist can lay the whole bag out and see at a glance what I used to see in the basement pharmacy when we filled carts for the floors. Ask her. She has more time than the doctor, and this is the part of the job she knows best.
The ear and the notebook
Now the hearing. This is the piece people argue with, so I will say it plainly. Hearing is memory. If the sentence never made it into your ear, your brain never had it to keep. That is not forgetting. That is not receiving.
I watched it happen at the senior centre on Elm Street. A man in the walking group, sharp as anyone there, started missing appointments and getting names wrong. His family was worried. Bev noticed he had started answering questions a beat late, and slightly off, the way you do when you are guessing at the words.
He got his hearing checked at his daughter’s insistence, and then he got it helped, and the memory complaints mostly stopped. Not because his memory changed. Because the supply of words reaching it changed.
Walt teases me about my lists, but he does not tease me about this one. I tell everyone over sixty to put a hearing check on the paper calendar once a year, same as the dentist. If your family says you have the television loud, believe them. They are the meter.
The lamp in the hallway
Eyes get the same treatment as ears. People accept dimming as fate, and then they trip on the step they have used for forty years, or they misread a label and take a Tuesday pill on Thursday.
Sight after sixty is partly the eye and partly the light. Older eyes need more light to do the same job, and most houses are lit for young eyes. My mother’s house was like that, dim hallways and one small bulb over the stove, and we did not fix it until after the fall. I think about that still.
So I walk my own house the way I walked her house afterward. Hallways, stairs, the path from the bed to the bathroom at two in the morning. The labels on the bottles in the organiser, in daylight, not in kitchen gloom. If I have to hold a label at arm’s length and squint, that is a note for the eye doctor, not a fact of life to accept.
Eyes change slowly, and the prescription that was fine two years ago may be quietly wrong now. A wrong prescription looks a lot like clumsiness and a lot like confusion, and it is neither.
The candle from both ends
Here is where the three meet. A bad night makes the next day’s hearing feel worse and the next day’s eyes feel slower, and two bad nights make a person feel like their mind is going when their mind is fine and their sleep is not.
I think of sleep like a candle. Some of us burn it from both ends without noticing. Coffee late, a nap that runs long, the television glowing until midnight, a pill at the wrong hour, and then the lying awake gets blamed on age.
One change at a time, and six weeks to judge it. That rule has never failed me. If you move the coffee and change the timing of a tablet and fix the lamp and get the ears checked all in one week, you will not know which thing helped, and you will be back here in a month.
Pick the one that looks most likely. Usually that is the brown bag, because it is the quickest to check. Give it six weeks, written down on the calendar, because what is written down is remembered and what is not written down turns into a feeling, and feelings are bad witnesses.
Now, some people push back on all of this. They say it is fuss. They say their mother slept badly at seventy and their father was deaf as a post by seventy-five and both got along fine, and there is some truth in it. I have known plenty of people who got along fine with a hearing aid they never wore and a lamp they never turned on.
I will grant half of it. Not every bad night needs attention, and not every missed word is a hearing problem, and some of us have always been light sleepers, even at thirty. Bodies vary. I don’t want anyone running to a doctor over one rough week.
But here is where I stop agreeing. “Fine” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The mother who slept badly also stopped driving at night. The father who was deaf as a post also stopped going to the lodge because he could not follow the talk. Getting along fine sometimes means getting along smaller. The slide is real often enough, but it is not real always, and you cannot tell which you have until you check the easy things. Checking the easy things is not fuss. It is the whole job.
A friend asked me last spring over my kitchen table, and I told her about what I’d tell you. I would say: before you worry about your mind, bring me the bag, get your ears tested, and let me look at your hallway. Then I would say: pick one thing, not three. Then I would say what I say to everyone, which is that if it still worries you after that, we call Dr. A doctor I trust and we do it properly. She did the bag first. The bag turned out to be the story.
Go watch the explainer video before you change anything else, and let it walk you through what is usually behind these slips after sixty. It is worth your time before your next six weeks start.
I will tell you the thing that went wrong, because it is the reason I am so set on the order of all this. At the centre, a few years back, a woman in her seventies told me her memory was going, and I was new at the brown-bag work and slow off the mark. We talked for two sessions about her sleep and her pills and her schedule. What I did not do, in week one, was ask about her ears.
It took her son mentioning, almost as a joke, that she had stopped answering the phone, before the penny dropped. She was not forgetting conversations. She had not heard them. The phone rang and she did not know it. By the time her hearing was tested and helped, four months had gone by, and in those four months she had quietly dropped two clubs and stopped hosting her card night, because she thought her mind was failing and she was embarrassed. That is what it cost. Four months and two clubs and a card night, for want of one question in week one.
Things have changed since then, and they changed in an order. The first year, I kept the brown-bag reviews to the table by the door at the centre, one person at a time, and I asked about pills and sleep and nothing else.
The second year I added the ear question, after that woman, and it changed the room. Maybe a third of the memory worries that walked in turned out to have a hearing piece in them. Bev started keeping a note in the walking group sign-up about who seemed to be missing the conversation, gently, no names in a file, just an eye kept.
The third year I added the hallway walk, because two people in one autumn mentioned tripping at home, and both of them, it turned out, were reading labels badly too. Now the three questions come as a set: the bag, the ears, the light. In that order, because that is the order from easiest to slowest to fix.
What I actually do myself is plain. The organiser gets filled on Sunday mornings, in good light, with Walt at the other end of the table pretending not to supervise. The calendar by the phone gets the hearing check and the eye check written on it for the year. The hallway lamps get replaced the week they dim, not the month. Bedtime is a time, not a suggestion, and the names notebook stays by the chair because writing a thing down is still the cheapest memory aid I know. Those are the habits that hold the rest of it up, and none of them is complicated.
If you take nothing else from this, take the order. The medicine cabinet before the mind. The ears before the memory. The lamp before the fall. One change, six weeks, written down. And when the worry is still there after the easy things are checked, that is what Dr. A doctor I trust is for, and going to him is not a defeat, it is just the next step in the same list.
Now that the three of them are on the table, watch the memory slip video and see the whole thing laid out from the start, because it shows what is usually behind these slips and what helps, and it will make your six weeks count. Watch it tonight if you can, while the hallway light is on and the calendar is within reach.
The walking group lost again to the trivia team from the library on Tuesday. Bev is taking it hard. Walt says we should demand a rematch on questions from before 1980.