\u201cYou forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.\u201d Cormac McCarthy\u2019s words. Lord knows I\u2019d like to forget some things, namely certain people I\u2019ve known. Memory is a blessing and a curse, but we are nothing without it.<\/p>\n
The Good \u2014 Mention Anthony Shoals and its shoal lilies, ospreys and bald eagles come alive. I hear its rapids. I don\u2019t need Dad\u2019s old 16 mm film to see vanilla ice cream oozing from the lid of our first electric ice cream churn. I hear its grinding, crunching whine. I see the grayed, salted ice, too. I see what I\u2019m remembering. Hear it, too, like a scene from a documentary. The only thing missing is fragrance.<\/p>\n
The Bad \u2014 McCarthy again. \u201cThe truth is what happened. It ain\u2019t what come out of somebody\u2019s mouth.\u201d It disappoints me when others don\u2019t recall special moments as I do. You\u2019ve talked with someone over some shared experience and noticed how wrong they get things. Maybe truth is like a rainbow. No two people see the same rainbow. It\u2019s a physics thing. Memory loss is physical, and it baffles everybody. That brings me to German psychiatrist Dr. Alois Alzheimer.<\/p>\n
In 1901, he began treating Auguste Deter, a 51-year-old woman who suffered memory loss, hallucinations and paranoia. At first, experts considered this a rare condition, \u201cpresenile\u201d dementia, afflicting younger people. In the 1960s and 1970s, neurologists confirmed it was common senile dementia, a leading cause of death worldwide.<\/p>\n
I won\u2019t get into gathering, encoding, storing and retrieving, the hippocampus, cortex, synaptic connections, neurotransmitters and all that. The truth is these days, however we remember, memory haunts us. I\u2019ll be talking and think, \u201cDidn\u2019t I just say that?\u201d A needle of dread pricks me. Someone will repeat the same thing within five minutes. Then I fear for him or her.<\/p>\n
The Ugly \u2014 We have reason to be afraid. Some 7.4 million Americans 65 and older live with Alzheimer\u2019s. The lifetime risk for Alzheimer\u2019s at age 45 is 1 in 5 for women and 1 in 10 for men. One in three older adults dies with Alzheimer\u2019s or another dementia. It kills more than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined.<\/p>\n
The Sad \u2014 There are stats and there is reality. Stats pale in comparison to seeing a loved one suffer dementia, a subset of Alzheimer\u2019s. As time passes, people aren\u2019t always who they were. Vladimir Nabokov alluded to memory\u2019s power in his autobiography, \u201cSpeak, Memory.\u201d Some memories inevitably fade, then quiet. The era of Alzheimer\u2019s and dementia haunts us, and two sorrowful quotes come to bear here.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere isn\u2019t any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn\u2019t fade out at last.\u201d \u2014 Juan Rulfo.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd as the years have passed … the sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too [often] needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute, like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.\u201d \u2014 Haruki Murakami, \u201cNorwegian Wood\u201d<\/p>\n
I have a friend. At first, a comment now and then didn\u2019t add up. She\u2019d forget where she lived. Outsiders often miss these changes. There is something worse than death: watching the light fade from a loved one\u2019s eyes, the slow-motion heartbreak they call the long goodbye.<\/p>\n
There is no training for the life experience known for confusion, bewilderment and loss of memory. For those of you with a loved one going through memory loss, I wish you both the best. As we all go, I read that a new wave of blood tests might detect our Alzheimer\u2019s risk early in the game. Would you want to know? I wouldn\u2019t. It\u2019d be like carrying a load of bricks. A weight I can do without.<\/p>\n
Tom Poland is the author of 12 books and more than 1,000 magazine features. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle and changing culture, and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, \u201cGeorgialina.\u201d Visit Poland\u2019s website at tompoland.net<\/a> or email him at tompol@earthlink.net<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cYou forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.\u201d Cormac McCarthy\u2019s words.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23200,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[14071,14075,14073,1859,1861,1862,14070,14074,14069,14072,1866,9,1860],"class_list":["post-23199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-poland","tag-alois-alzheimer","tag-alzheimer","tag-amnesia","tag-cognition","tag-cognitive-psychology","tag-cognitive-science","tag-dementia","tag-encoding-memory","tag-memory","tag-mental-processes","tag-neuroscience","tag-poland","tag-psychological-concepts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}