Hold on to your memory

THIS past Monday I set out my coffee cup, put a spoon next to it and turned on the kettle of my despair. Heedless of my hostility toward it, the wretch provided perfectly acceptable boiling water. I filled my cup, stirred and went outside. There I sat peacefully for a full four minutes until it was time to come back into the blinding light of the great indoors.

The disturbing thing about the revelation to come was – how do I put this? – everything.

Inside, without the scenic bamboo and ivy to hold my attention, I discovered that for those four lovely minutes I’d been sipping very, very hot water. Of coffee there was none.

I take my coffee black, no sugar, so there was nothing to disguise the unadornedness of the water.

In the past I’ve added more coffee than I meant to because I forgot I’d already done so. I have put two teabags into a cup because I forgot I’d already put one in.

With caffeine, mine has never been the sin of omission.

The moral of this story is instant coffee and teabags are not for me. I must stick to brewing things: coffee, tea, leeches, wool of bat and all that.

No, the problem is I’m forgetting things. More things than I might care to admit. The coffee, admittedly, was a new low, because it also calls into question what my nose and tastebuds were thinking. But those questions feel so very big right now.

It’s happening more and more. So much so I don’t even know if this is what I wrote about last week.

Maybe I’m preaching to the choir to many out there. Everyone says forgetfulness is normal. But how much is normal?

Let us agree that all the people all over the world will – at some point – forget what day of the week it is. But is it normal not to remember where you put your shoes? The ones you just took off but ten minutes ago (and must be by the door because that is where the shoes live)?

We can forget where we parked the car and where we left any or all our keys.

Surely no one can remember all the birthdays. No one. But what does it say if the only birthday you can remember is that of a baby born in a barn in Bethlehem a couple thousand years ago?

Part of the worry about forgetting is knowing what – if there is one – is an acceptable range. Were you always prone to mislaying your wallet, or is that new? Have the number and variety of things slipping away from you increased with age or some other variable (moving house, change in job, loss of a beloved)?

“It’s a phase.” That’s what people keep saying to me. Or it could be my meds, my mood, something hormonal. People will say anything really not to encourage you to think something is wrong.

I don’t want to pathologise everything (a thing of which I stand accused), but I definitely want to know what the state of play is with my increasing forgetfulness.

Let’s take away the big reasons: dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, brain tumours. There are still lots of things that help us along in the forgetting department.

Stress, depression, preoccupation with specific things, maybe. You might be overwhelmed by your upcoming piano recital or a terrifying exam. Or even by something nice like – whatever nice things are.

I think distraction gets short shrift when we think about why or how we forget. Not wispy, head-in-the-clouds distraction. Real distraction. Not being present. Absent-minded, scattered, abstracted – if you walk like you’re not present and talk like you’re not present, you must be a duck. Duck being a euphemism for not-present. If you really are a duck, we’re on to very different issues.

When I think of all the things that can make just anyone keep losing the thread, distraction seems like the most readily available. Work can be very distracting – both when it’s bad and good.

Worry and flat-out sadness are also high on my list. They take you out of yourself, often in ways you can’t see.

One day it may hit a frightening point in the I-may-be-losing-my-mind sort of way. Talk to someone.

The world is too fraught with difficulty and distress to now add this terrible worry of forgetting. When you forget enough small things, you begin to fear you’ll forget something of great importance.

And then what? That’s the thing, isn’t it? The not knowing the consequence of your forgetting.