Sunday morning, eight o’clock, and I am at my kitchen table filling the little plastic boxes for the week. Walt has taken the dog out. The paper calendar by the phone says it is March, which I knew, and that Bev’s walking group meets Tuesday, which I had forgotten. This is the hour when people my age get to thinking. You put a pill in Thursday’s slot and cannot recall if the roofer is coming Thursday or Friday, and a small cold thought walks through. Sixty does that to a person. So let me say what I say across the counter, because it has not changed in thirty-two years.
The name that would not come
Ordinary forgetting has a shape. You lose a name and it comes back at two in the morning. You forget which day it is and then you remember. You make a bad decision once in a while, like the winter I wore slippers to the pharmacy counter at the grocery store and pretended it was on purpose. The other kind has a different shape. Trouble having a conversation. Losing track of what time of year it is. Bills you have paid for forty years suddenly making no sense. Ordinary forgetting at sixty looks like a missing word, not a missing month, and those are not the same animal.
The brown bag on the table
Before anyone lets their mind go to the worst place, I want the medicine cabinet emptied into a brown paper bag and set on this table. Every bottle, the sleep aids, the allergy tablets, all of it. I have watched more memory trouble come out of that bag than out of anyone’s brain. Ask the pharmacist to look at the bag too. She has more time than the doctor, and she is not shy about saying so.
Now, some people tell me I make too much of this, that a checkup for a forgotten name is fuss. There is something in that. Nobody needs to run to a doctor because they lost their keys, and I say so plainly. A follow-up is not a verdict. It is a pencil mark on the calendar, like the one I keep by the phone. It costs an afternoon and buys you either peace or an early answer, and early is the only kind of answer worth having in this line of work.
I think of a woman who came to my brown-bag reviews at the senior centre on Elm Street. Her daughter had been nudging her for over a year. She laughed it off, said everyone forgets. By the time she sat down with me, there was a stack of unpaid bills in her purse and she could not tell me what season we were in. I sent her to Dr. A doctor I trust, and he did right by her, but the year of waiting cost her. Things that might have been untangled early had knots in them by then. What it cost was time, and time is the one thing none of us gets back. I do not tell this to frighten. I tell it because she asked me to.
Now that this is on your table the way it has been on mine, pull up the explanatory video on what is usually behind memory slips after sixty and one way to work on it. Watch it before you talk yourself out of it.
People ask what I use myself, so I will tell you. Two things. A paper calendar hung by the telephone, where every appointment goes the moment it is made, in ink. And a small names notebook in my bag, where I write a name the first time I hear it, with one line about the person. Walt teases me that I could find a pill bottle in a haystack but need a written record to recall his cousin’s husband’s name. He is not wrong. I have tried keeping it all in my head and I have tried keeping it on paper, and paper wins every time. The notebook beats the calendar for people; the calendar beats the notebook for days. I would not give up either, and I wrote down my thinking on the best way to remember names after losing one too many at the walking group.
If a friend sat at this table and asked me straight, here is what I would say, near enough to word for word: “Check the medicine cabinet before you suspect your mind. Get the B12 looked at. Write things down. And if the forgetting has the wrong shape — not a lost word but a lost season — make the appointment, and make the next one six months out while you are still in the parking lot. Then go home and stop worrying, because you have done the doing part.” That is the whole of it. Change a single thing, then give it a month and a half before you decide if it made a difference.
How to keep your memory steadyThe video walks through the common cause of forgetting after sixty.
So open this video guide now and see what it shows. It will take less time than the worrying does.
The name always comes back at two in the morning anyway.