For a long time, I used to fear losing my memory. I have to confess that it still agitates me to this day.
As a child, to fight this apprehension, which was constant and infiltrated my every idle moment, I made lists, wrote extensive diaries and - in my bed, before sleep - recounted everything I had done that day. Back then, I had no idea where this feeling came from. Not that I would have had the self-awareness to do so, but I would never have thought to question this anxiety, as it seemed to me to be the most natural thing in the world to me. If anything, I was confused as to why others did not share my consternation.
I feel my obsession may have stemmed from some primal fear that I could not possibly have articulated at that age: did I fear that I would lose all of the good things in my life if I did not constantly recall them? That to not be thinking of them would mean that they would be lost forever? Or was it that if I didn’t hold onto my memories, I myself would disappear?
Well, whatever the cause of my fixation, instead of fading into the background with the years, as most childhood worries tend to do, by the time I became an adult, I had seen enough to tell me my fears were not unfounded. If anything, this dread redoubled its efforts and took a full hold of me.
The main driver for this was my dawning realisation of the realities of ageing. I knew that, along with my body wrinkling and becoming infirm, my memory would eventually leave me; I desperately did not want to become what I had seen my grandparents become - what I eventually saw my parents become: empty vessels whose dementia created a constant anxiety that could never be placated.
More than merely losing my memory, the thought that when I was an old man, relentless anxieties would haunt me - never allowing me to relax or know peace - would awaken me in the middle of the night.
Mr Worthy, you have visitors.
And these predecessors of mine, the “source” of my adult worries, what became of them?
Well, first, for the sake of completeness, I must tell you that my paternal grandfather died before I was born; gone before he could even be remembered. He was my first taste of death and the unknowable void that followed. As a child, I would stare at his sun-weathered photographic portrait that adorned our vestibule and wonder.
My curiosity remained unanswered, until the day I finally became brave enough to ask,
“Papa, was Grandfather dead in this photo?”
Which caused much mirth in my family and, much to my chagrin, became an anecdote to be trotted out whenever they reminisced over him.
Years later, I discovered that family photos in the Victorian era would sometimes contain the corpse of a recently deceased relative, dressed in their finery, propped up next to their kin for one final depiction. Perhaps they did this out of an unwillingness to let go of their loved ones, or perhaps the novelty of the technology meant this was their first and only chance to capture their family in its completeness.
Whatever the reason, this fact makes my family’s laughter all the more galling.
No, no one’s laughing at you. Don’t worry
My Grandmother Madeline was the next of my relations to die. In the misty memory of my youth, she is a blurry haze of rose water and unwanted embraces before she crystalises in my mind’s eye as the confused old woman she became in my adolescent years. Then, unsure as to when and where she was, she obsessed over a sum of money which was so paltry as to be laughable, but in her mind remained sizeable. The sum, as we were often reminded, was two-hundred-and-thirty pounds and the dispute was with a paternal cousin. She feared she had been robbed of it and would say as reliably as a skipping record,
“It’s not right, he has swindled me and it is imperative we get it back!”
and
“We must act now or he will keep it forever!”
On and on.
My mother attempted to protect me from this talk, vainly trying to give me only Grandmother Madeline’s good days, but I could always see the worry behind her eyes. Mother would be forever on guard against the stopping mid-sentence, the non-sequitur, the freight train speeding inevitably towards its destination of the sum of money that had been taken from her. No matter what efforts she put in, it was impossible to derail my Grandmother Madeline’s talk from its destination of the two-hundred-and-thirty pounds and its supposed theft.
As much as I pitied my Grandmother Madeline - and worried for my mother - I feared for myself the most. How would it be for me? WouId I eventually become trapped 50-years-ago in an all-consuming worry? Would I exist in a living hell conjured from my own faded memories?
I can still see her, frail and wrinkled, but now she complains of a different amount of money, a different family member, before she is led away to another room.
He’s having a good day today.
How are you?
After Grandmother Madeleine’s decline, and the forced admission that he could no longer care for her himself, my maternal Grandfather, a proud man, fretted constantly that they were going to take him away to a home. He was terrified that they would sell his house, the very home he had toiled his whole life to purchase and maintain, and that we must never allow this to happen.
The most vexing part was that he continued in his attempts to extract these promises from us even after we had made his worst nightmares come to fruition. We had placed him in a retirement home, with its all-pervading odour of beef stew and antisepticised effluence, and had used the proceeds from the sale of his house - his very home - to pay for his care.
Some days we admitted our sin. On these days, when we were honest and confessed to our transgressions, he did not become angry but even more scared and confused; the end result was that this man with papery skin, who had once been my grandfather, would weep like a child.
On other days, we denied that we had put him in a home and changed the subject.
Eventually, we took to telling him that he was enjoying a holiday; that this was a break from his everyday cares and worries.
“Why are there so many old people here?” he would ask.
Sometimes we would laugh.
Sometimes we would inform him that, actually, he was aboard a cruise ship and he was aware how fond retirees were of cruises. If he ever wondered why the room was not swaying back and forth, or where the sea was, we did not know as he never felt the need to ask.
And somehow, the indelible odour of that home has never left my nostrils.
Shall we go and see the birds then? You always like the birds.
My Grandma-ma was a perfectly healthy women - in both mind and body - until her 91st year in which she died peacefully in her sleep, so does not concern us here.
It’s nice weather for this time of year.
The most painful experience of all was for me to be a bystander as dementia ravaged my mother’s once brilliant mind. A meticulous woman who ran her life like clockwork, seemingly taking the sorrows of life on the chin like a professional pugilist, she too became a prisoner of her delusions in the end.
And it pains me to say that I became the cause of her sorrows and never the solution to them.
Namely, my mother was always looking for me.
I would tell her I was here.
I would say, “Here I am.”
That I was fine.
That she was not to worry.
That I am here.
Then the pressure would relent for a moment. I would pray that she had abandoned her search for me, that she would realise she had reached her target, that her cherished child was indeed with her… until she would again ask where he – I - was.
And, no matter how much I steeled myself, every time my heart would shatter into a thousand pieces.
In all of the times we enacted this farce, I was never able change the script, to placate her by shifting her attention elsewhere. My pride wouldn’t let me.
Each time she asked, “Where is Mark?”
I would have to tell her,
“Maman, I am here!
Can’t you see?
I am here!”
Yes, you are here.
You’re not going to disappear.
Then, at last, to my father, split from my mother for so long we could hardly believe that they had ever been together. Shortly before his death, he lost his faculties rapidly and depressingly. He became confused and was suffused with anxiety over having lost something, anything; his house keys; his wallet; his automobile.
Anything of value that could be recalled at that moment, he would fear to have been lost and it was vital that, right then, right that second, it be retrieved. I could never tell him the sole thing he had ever actually lost was his mind. And that was never coming back.
However, this time fate was merciful. Rather rapidly, he went from a permanent state of anxiety to a blank nothingness. All that remained of him were the functions of his body and then not even those.
Dust.
…
I have been taught a painful lesson watching time ravage the memory of my loved ones and so have spent my life fearing that I too would become stuck in the past, lost in memories of money or possessions or family that were already gone.
I decided to try and relax. I needed to know that if - when - I lost my faculties, I would not be like them. I would not become an anxious wreck, searching for a lost place, searching for a lost time.
Come back inside.
No, no, you won’t be like them.
Don’t worry. Don’t worry, Mr Worthy.
For a long time, I used to fear losing my memory.