Senior Living: As we age, it’s OK if a few things fade away

My memory often fails me. But sometimes it hits me over the head.

That one-two punch — forgetting and then without warning, remembering — occurred recently. It was about 5 a.m. and I was reading a magazine on my phone in the darkness of my bedroom.

I had been awake for about an hour but it was too early to rise, so I was catching up on a variety of articles when suddenly it occurred to me: I had forgotten the birthday of a dear friend that happened about a month earlier.

I don’t know why the date came to me, just then, just there. I groaned inwardly and stared out into the nothingness. How? Why?

If it was the first time that had happened, I could have dismissed it as an anomaly. But the birthdays of even my besties and the grandchildren are becoming harder to remember, and don’t tell me to plug them into my phone’s calendar.

Then I would have to remember to look at the calendar on my phone, another not-altogether-certain event.

At 65, I feel too young to drone on about my fading memory, but I’m not sure what else to do about it.

Like so many markers of age — statins, an awareness of Madonna — coming to grips with some amount of memory loss requires a shift in thinking. It requires a shift in perspective.

For many years, particularly the child-rearing and career-building years (scheduled simultaneously through an egregious lack of planning) there was no problem with neglecting to remember. In fact, the problem was remembering too much.

Vaccination schedules, hot dog days, tender fears and aversions all streamed without interruption alongside daily, sometimes hourly, work deadlines and oil changes and, yes, birthdays complete with cake.

That was just the present. The past also had to be accounted for and recalled, including the context for all relationships and/or news stories, plus every thoughtless comment delivered and received from high school on upwards — all necessary to cram into the brain in order to avert some future crisis. Keeping things safe into perpetuity seemed imperative.

During those years, the words of Bob Seger in his poignant tune Against the Wind often battled their way to the surface. “Deadlines and commitments, what to leave in, what to leave out” were on permanent repeat in my brain. Everything was left in. Nothing was left out.

But now, things are dropping out, hindered neither by their import nor the taking of fish oil capsules. A beloved friend’s special day, a concert I really wanted to see but forgot was coming to town until it had left. A statistic about immigration that proved what a mess everything is in; sorry, can’t recall it. Just the other day, someone reminded me how much my mother used to love to skate. Until that moment I had forgotten that, but then it came back. She wore men’s skates. Pitched forward, she circled the edges of the outdoor rink in our neighbourhood with her hands gripped behind her like a speedskater. Now that it’s back, I’d like to put that memory somewhere it could be reliably retrieved. But where?

A couple of years ago, I went on a mission to collect memories of my brother, who died 40 years ago when he was 20. I did this because he had almost entirely left my memory and I didn’t want that. A few people kindly responded to my queries with their memories, which were new and fresh to me and much appreciated. But the most useful comment was from an older woman who told me to stop worrying about it, because it wasn’t up to me to remember every single thing about him. He lived in other people’s hearts, too. I was able to let the responsibility for his memory go.

I am trying to bring this perspective to birthdays and other less memorable events such as leaving the list behind when getting groceries. Hopefully someone else will step up with birthday wishes, or a can of corn, and guess what, some people don’t even care if their birthday is recalled or the soup is missing an ingredient.

At 5 a.m. from the cosy cave of my bed, I wrote my friend a note of apology on the phone that had let me down on his birthday. I told him that he still meant the world to me, even if I forgot his special day. He wrote back something comforting, can’t remember exactly what. It’s OK. I’m finally learning what to leave out.

— Liane Faulder writes the Life in the 60s column. [email protected]