Did I Take My Meds?
Memory and the tangled web it weaves
It’s 10 a.m. I’m standing at the center island in my kitchen making breakfast, yogurt with fruit and nuts. My mind is on a fast train to nowhere, filled with thoughts, all the things I hope to get done today.
I scramble around, put the yogurt back in the fridge, pull out a bottle of prescription meds from a drawer. I press down on the bottle cap, always reminded of an SNL parody of a commercial for an arthritis medication, Triopenin, that’s virtually impossible to open.
My husband walks in, starts a conversation that takes me from my train of thought and leaves me in a quandary when he leaves the kitchen.
Did I take my meds?
As someone resistant to prescription medications, anytime I’m faced with a health issue, I go for the alternative approach. Acupuncture. Chiropractic. Natural supplements. Dr. Google, who lures me to websites chock full of dietary recommendations that will help, if not cure, what ails me.
I do yoga and cardio work regularly.
I maintain a healthy weight.
I meditate. Sometimes I even sink into moments when my monkey mind and contracted body give way to true surrender.
I drink wine.
All of which serves me well, until there comes a day when the sway of modern medicine places me full swing into the risk assessment game. However I may see myself in terms of fitness becomes just one of many factors that turn me into a demographic.
Say it enough times — acceptance is transcendence — and the message is bound to take hold. It becomes a mantra.
It ameliorates any cynicism that creeps in when life doesn’t quite unfold the way you thought it would. It’s balance I want most, metaphorically and otherwise.
The ongoing challenge is a state of presence, an awakening to the reality that nothing is fixed. Everything changes. The body ages. Yesterday becomes today, which becomes tomorrow. In a flash.
Did I take my meds?
Friends laugh, oh, yeah, I’ve been there. Some attribute it to that thing we call a senior moment. When the subject of memory comes up in Gloria Steinem’s recent conversation with Julia Louis-Dreyfus on her Wiser Than Me podcast, her response is every bit as good as gold: “I’m at the age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.”
And here’s the poet Maggie Smith, in her exquisite memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, trying to recall details of a miscarriage. She’d been told to collect any fetal material that might have passed with the blood.
“I have no idea what I did with it,” she writes. “I don’t remember if I took it to the doctor, threw it out, or flushed it down the toilet. I can remember the dress I wore to my eighth birthday party — beige with tiny blue flowers, a bib collar with a thin blue ribbon tied into a bow, long sleeves with ruffles at the wrists — but I don’t remember what I did with the fetal material from my second miscarriage. The mind is mysterious. A master of sleight of hand.”
She’s only in her 40s when she writes these words but they have such resonance for me, in my 70s. The more I learn about how the aging brain processes memories, the more I appreciate the truth of its neuroplasticity measured against the hard realities of diminished memory of any scale.
Did I take my meds?
New routines take time to settle into and 99.5 percent of the time I’m pretty sure I took the pills, like clockwork, which doesn’t necessarily ease a nagging anxiety that has me, again, reaching out to Dr. Google. Oh what a wicked web I’m caught in. If I can’t get the answer I want most, at least I get a reassuring reminder that we all miss a dose of something. Sometimes. And it’s rarely ever a catastrophe.
Get to a certain age and you’ve earned the right to make light of momentary memory lapses, hoping against hope never to be faced with devastating memory issues. If you witnessed the debacle in which a frail-looking Joe Biden painfully lost his way while the psychopath Trump rallied on, once the shock of it all passed, maybe you felt triggered, a twinge of vulnerability. This is no joke here. Could that ever be me?
When my father could no longer live on his own, my brother and I had to put him into a nursing home. He had two questions for me whenever I visited. Years later it’s those questions that stay with me.
Do you know where my keys are?
How long is your mother gone? I miss her.
My turn for a question. How much different might he have been cognitively if he hadn’t stopped doing the crossword puzzles he did almost compulsively in the familiarity and comfort of what used to be his home?
The last time I saw my mother-in-law several months back, I experienced a certain joy when she said my name despite her encroaching dementia. She was 98 when she passed away two weeks ago. She was still pretty lucid just a few years ago.
Did I take my meds?
There are enough strategies for taking the question out of the equation but the one that works best, at the ripe age of 74, is the simplest: pause and pay attention. Maybe that will change one day, or maybe the steady practice of mindfulness and meditation will take hold in a way that fosters, even strengthens, a mindset of awareness and presence.
During that last visit with my mother-in-law, I couldn’t help noticing that she hummed to herself. She didn’t really engage in conversation and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know the havoc wreaked by pandemic lockdown on elderly people. She lived in a retirement community. Gone were the communal activities and meals with other residents, the conversations that kept stimulating neuronal and synaptic activity.
Use it or lose it? Nature and nurture are a formidable duo. It now appears that cognitive decline isn’t so much a matter of neurons dying as it is the elimination of weak synapses in the brain’s pruning mechanism. Put “pruning” in the same sentence as the brain in analyzing results of a recent study and you have my interest. All that tidying up and something so profound in its implications surfaces: because of impaired connectivity between neurons, “they’re not able to talk to each other as effectively.”
Hearing my mother-in-law hum moved me. There’s a soothing quality to humming, a comfort it carries, sound reverberating through the body. Settled in her wheelchair staring at nothing and everything, she was the picture of someone with no place to go but where she was.
Reflecting on that image of her has me running through a stream of memories and thoughts until a song pops into my head. John Coltrane did wonders with the melody, Billie Holiday made the lyrics her own. And it’s her voice I hear as the catchy refrain — It’s easy to remember and so hard to forget — traps me in an endless loop of humming.
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