When I walk into the living room, my cat Harriet is curled up on the TV box. She blinks slowly. Cats blinking at you should be a sign of affection. I blink back.
“Look at you at…”
I fall silent. What is she sitting on? Closet? Shelf? It takes me about five seconds to remember this word.
“Console,” I finally say.
I feel awkward. I'm talking to my cat! But more importantly, I couldn't remember the word “console”.
This has been going on for a couple of years now. And I forget not just words, but simple tasks. Sometimes I forget to lock the car. Sometimes I leave my keys at the front door.
In the summer of 2023, I forgot my toiletry bag at the Rome airport hotel. During the same trip to Europe, I left a vibrator in a Paris hotel and asked a friend to return it to me. (It was a very good vibrator and she is a very good friend.) On my next trip to Europe in 2024, I left the sweatshirt at the same hotel. God knows what the hotel manager thought of me.
My mother lost her mind about ten years ago, and I'm afraid that mine will lose her mind too.
My mother never took much care of herself, so I was not particularly surprised when, in her early seventies, she suffered a series of mini-strokes. After this, her cognitive abilities began to deteriorate. At first it was just absent-mindedness, which I associated with age, and not with a deterioration in my condition. Nobody was that worried. First, my mother still read a lot: thick, thick books about American history, race, gender and religion. She wasn't locked out of the house and the bills weren't allowed to pile up. She could write and mail a check in her impeccable cursive handwriting.
Then, when she was approaching seventy, she began to forget things she had just said, not just facts from the more distant past. Medicines were ignored. I started to worry about her driving. Finally, in the spring of 2019, her doctor suggested she undergo a neuropsychological evaluation. My mom complained about the test—it was long and difficult, she told me after I picked her up at the doctor's office in Sacramento.
A week later we received the results: a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment. This is, as we were told, could be a precursor to a more serious condition such as dementia. My mother didn't seem to fully accept the news. I didn't know if it was because she was stubborn or because she was depressed (or maybe both), or if it was a symptom of MCI itself.
Then in December 2020, my mom fell and broke her wrist. She made a contract COVID-19 in the emergency room, he became delusional and aggressive. She didn't seem to realize she was sick or that anyone was trying to help her. Even after the infection cleared up, things weren't much better. So, in February 2021, I visited several nursing homes and moved a mother and her cat into one of them, a studio on the ground floor.
The onset of my mother's dementia coincided neatly (or not so neatly) with my concerns about my own mental state. I forgot events from the past and the names of people I met several times. I felt unmotivated and easily distracted, and that was on a professional level. I had a regular job, plus I had to write a book. Things weren't going very well for me either. And my job helped me pay for my mother's care.
It made sense that my cognition would be challenged by all the logistics involved in getting my mother's affairs in order and navigating the medical and aged care fields. But I always prided myself on being able to multitask and do it well, and I never felt like I was doing anything well.
At first I tried to convince myself that my difficulties were COVID-19-connected. It seemed like everyone was suffering from brain fog during the pandemic, whether they actually experienced it or not. COVID-19. I also knew that memory loss can be caused by perimenopause. I was in my late 40s and had a few other symptoms (mostly night sweats) that indicated that I was indeed experiencing midlife hormonal changes. (In 2023 I had hysterectomybut the surgeon left my ovaries intact, which meant I did not go through surgical menopause.)
