Most people believe the kind thing to do is to say nothing. That if you mention the forgetting, you will hurt them, and so the loving choice is to let it pass. I believed that for a long time. All those years at a hospital pharmacy counter taught me otherwise. Silence is not kind. Silence is late. By the time most families say something out loud, there has been a year or more of small moments swallowed whole, and the person in question has often noticed more than anyone guessed.
The Brown Bag Comes First
Before any hard conversation, I ask for the bag. Every bottle, every box, the ones from the drugstore shelf too. I don’t say it’s the cause. I say look at the test strips first, because they’re easy to change. My organiser sits on the kitchen table and gets filled Sunday mornings, and even with that habit I have found a duplicate now and then. If it happens to me with my training, it happens in every house on the block.
Write It Down Before You Speak
The second thing is the notebook. Mine lives by the phone, next to the paper calendar. When a name won’t come, I write down the day and what I was doing. When the keys turn up in the fridge, that goes in too, and I can laugh about it because it is on paper and paper doesn’t panic. Ordinary forgetting has a shape. So does the other kind. You cannot see either shape without a record. When the pattern in the notebook starts to look like the other kind, that is when to call the doctor about memory, and you will have something real to hand over instead of a feeling.
Why memory slips after sixtyWatch the video and see how to get your memory back on track.
Choose a Tuesday, Not a Holiday
The third thing is timing. Never at Thanksgiving. Never in the car on the way somewhere. I tell people to pick an ordinary Tuesday morning, after coffee, when nobody has to be anywhere. Pick one variable, let it run for six weeks, and start by talking it through. If it is your husband or your mother, it sits heavier, and I have written about when it is your spouse or parent because that is its own long road. At the senior centre on Elm Street, Bev watched me fumble this with my own mother years ago, in her kitchen, the house we have since sold. I brought it up at Christmas. Wrong day, wrong room, wrong tone. It cost us four months of her not answering the phone the way she used to.
Let me give you a worked example, because I keep one in the notebook. A woman at the centre, seventy-one, was sure her memory was going. Her daughter had been dropping hints since March. We did the bag on a Thursday in April. The notebook ran from April 11 to May 2, twenty-one days. The hearing check, which she had been putting off for two years, happened on May 9.
The cost of all this, imperfect and rounded, since people always ask. The calendar was already on the wall. The pharmacist’s time was free, because he still knows me and will talk as long as the line allows. The brown bag was free. The expensive version is the one where nobody says anything for two years.
I had an exchange last month that I wrote down almost word for word, because it went the way I wish they all went. A man from the walking group said, “My wife put the mail in the freezer.” I said, “Once, or is it in your notebook?” He said, “I don’t have a notebook.” I said, “Then you don’t know yet if it’s a thing. Start tonight. Write down what happened and what day it is. Do that for three weeks and bring it back to me.” He said, “And if it’s a thing?”
Now the thing that went wrong, because I owe you one of those too. Years ago I pushed a friend to talk to her father before she was ready, and she did it my way instead of hers. She led with the medicine cabinet, which is my move, not hers, and he heard it as an accusation. He stopped letting her into the house for a while. What it cost was a winter. What it taught me was that the order matters less than the voice. You can borrow my order. You cannot borrow my voice. Use yours.
The steps I actually follow, in the order I follow them. Ask for the brown bag and look at every bottle. Start the notebook that night, one line a day. Get the hearing checked, because hearing is memory. Pick an ordinary morning and say the true thing plainly, once, without stacking examples. Wait six weeks before you judge any of it.
One more thing before you change a single bottle or circle a single date on the calendar. Go watch the full video before you change anything, because it walks through what is usually behind these slips after sixty and what to do about it, and it is easier to follow than my handwriting. Sit through it once with the notebook open beside you, then start the bag.