The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [25]
I can’t remember the term for it, which is why I drew it (I used to draw better).
Or if it’s not like being under the sword, it’s like the Ancient Mariner, but I can’t remember why. And I don’t want to bother poor Noel again. I used to draw better than this.
The sword of Damocles! (I just asked Noel.)
Thank God for Noel. And yet even with Noel here, life can be so terribly lonely. I don’t see my old colleagues any more. Or my friends. Because keeping up my end of the conversation can be a real battle sometimes. Too often I can’t remember the last thing said. I can remember rocking Noel in his crib thirty-two years ago, I can remember my husband proposing to me thirty-five years ago, but often I can’t remember what was said thirty-five seconds ago.
I seem forever on the verge of remembrance, like trying to recall a dream, when you get the faintest of glimpses before the whole thing evaporates.
And it’s so frustrating when I explain what’s wrong with me. No one really understands. My lapses, I mean. My friends say things like ‘We all forget things, Stella. We all lose our train of thought. It’s normal in this age of PIN numbers and passwords. There’s really nothing wrong with you.’ And I just nod, instead of saying ‘No no, that’s not it, that’s not it at all. It’s more than that, you see.’
Émile says I have ‘mild cognitive impairment’. In conversations, just when you think of something relevant or clever or amusing to say, you forget some pertinent detail. And you lose your confidence. Or you’re afraid you’ve asked the same question and they’re tired of repeating themselves. And often you repeat something not because you’ve forgotten it, but because you can’t remember whether you said it or merely thought it.
Sometimes you just want to find a place to hide, a place to cry. What does an elephant do when its time has come? It walks alone into the jungle. Sometimes that’s what I feel like doing, assuming I could ever find a jungle.
Mild cognitive impairment, which is what I have, is the first sign of Alzheimer’s. I’m in a no-woman’s land, in a strange place where I’m no longer the self-assured and knowledgeable person I once was. A history teacher, for God’s sake!
But I’m not mad yet either -- I can still think, I can still reason. What annoys me is the way Émile is starting to bypass me, giving all the details about my case, and all the eye contact, to my son. It’s infuriating. I’m going to say something to him next time. If I remember. I’d better write it on my hand.
13 February 2001. Fugaces labuntur anni.12 How in heaven did I remember that, from my distant schooldays? I want to go back so badly, back to Aberdeen. I remember things that happened to me there better than things that happened here two weeks ago! Will Noel go with me, I wonder?
God, how I miss the things I used to have, the little things we take for granted. To be able to make small talk, to joke, to remember people’s names, to read a book or watch a movie without getting lost. To walk or drive without getting lost!
I can’t find my car keys, which has happened lots of times before, of course, but this time it feels different. This time I don’t think it’s a case of misplacing them, of not remembering where I left them. This time I have a feeling they’ve been stolen.
If Noel took them away, I must have really got lost, really gone far astray ... The mother who used to wonder where her son was now has a son who wonders where his mother is.
15 February. I wake up and my brain doesn’t seem to be wired right. I feel like looking in the Yellow Pages for a good electrician, one who knows what he’s doing, who won’t throw up his hands at the mess. ‘I can rewire it if you like, Mrs. Burun,’ he’d probably say, ‘or you can just wait for the fire.’ And then I start to panic, and get more muddled, and then pull the covers back over me and go back to sleep.
18 February. Noel and I were going through a box of mementos today and he showed me a card he made me years ago for Mother’s Day. It used the letters of MOTHER to make