Mind Games

Mind Games
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 15, 2015

I stood uneasily in the cavernous carpark, marooned in a concrete mausoleum. I steered my trolley left and right around grids of pillars and bays. No boxy black station wagon announced itself with the press of my key; no tail lights winked their happiness to see me. I had lost my car in the supermarket carpark. Separation anxiety set in.

After several more minutes of rising panic, I went into hyperdrive. ‘This can’t be happening,’ I chided myself. ‘How could I forget where I parked my car?’

I replayed my arrival an hour earlier: I’d driven off the street, down the ramp, turned left and lucked a space close to the escalator. My brain seized upon ‘escalator.’ That’s it! There are two them in this shopping centre: one at each end of the carpark. I was circling the wrong escalator.

I strode to the far end of the building. There – in exactly the spot I’d pictured – was my station wagon, rear end on display, nose to the wall. I felt a wave of relief. I loaded my groceries into the boot and drove up the exit ramp to breach the daylight. But a nagging sense of unease stayed with me all afternoon.

Is this how a mind starts slipping away? One lapse of concentration in an underground carpark and my memory had failed me. Had I reached that stage in life when forgetting becomes more important than remembering?

I grew up thinking mindlessness was an automatic condition of old age. Dementia stole my grandmother in her 80s; two uncles in their 70s. In recent years, Alzheimer’s has all but erased the sweetness of a favourite aunt. In our family, forgetting is a red flag.

In her 80th year, Mum’s memory has suddenly become an unreliable companion. Some days, forgetting becomes all-consuming. She is repeatedly distracted by the whereabouts of her keys, her wallet, her phone. Last Wednesday, I answered her mayday call and joined the search for her missing keys. We discovered them in the garden, plonked on the lid of the recycling bin.

“Now I remember!” she said. “It’s rubbish day. I had to unlock the side gate to bring the bins in.”

‘It’s no big deal, Ma,’ I said, noting her exasperation. “At least they weren’t in the bin!” She relaxed and gave me a hug. (In our house, keys favour the top shelf of the fridge, the laundry bench and the window sill above the loo.)

I worry Mum’s fickle memory will sabotage her fierce independence. Already, she’s painfully aware of the small gaps appearing in her daily routines.

“Do I need to take these pills here?” she wonders aloud as she make me a cup of tea. “What are these white ones for anyway?”

She tells me how on bad days, tiredness dims her mind and makes her conversation flabby and repetitive. She describes her frustration when mid-sentence, a word sits just out of reach, refusing to come when called for.

“That’s when I’ll say something stupid,” she says, “trying to cover up my embarrassment.”

“It happens to everybody,” I reassure her. I’m already an expert at clumsy word spillage.

I notice Mum is now clinging to her diary. It’s her antidote to forgetting: a painstakingly transcribed almanac of appointments and errands, birthdays and passwords. Her diary is stuffed with letters and receipts – life’s paperwork, held together with an elastic-band.

“Just a minute,” she’ll say down the phone, when I suggest we meet for lunch. “Let me write that down.” Remembering has become hard work but forgetting has not slowed her down.

She’s still the gadabout she’s always been. Her life is a whirlwind of coffees and dinners and concerts. Her evening constitutional is a seven kilometre bike ride, or an hour’s walk along the beach. She catches the train to every Eagles home game. Afterwards, hoarse from barracking, she’ll take herself off to dinner ‘somewhere nice.’ She’d walk home in the dark if we’d let her.

Now and then, we sit together in a windowless waiting room, hoping a doctor will give her pockmarked memory a name. “Nothing wrong here,” they’ll say, inspecting the report from her latest scan. “Age-related memory loss, we call it. Getting old’s no fun, is it?”

“Better than the alternative,” she shoots back, enjoying her joke.

Last week, as she waltzed in our back door to join us for dinner, I asked if she’d remembered to put her bins out.

She smiled and settled herself onto a stool.

“Nope,” she said. “Remind me again when I leave.” She leant over and whispered to my youngsters. “At least I’ve never forgotten where I parked my car.” The kids snickered.

“Pretty funny for a Tuesday night, aren’t you Ma,” I said, dishing out the casserole. And then I faltered, spoon in mid-air. “It is Tuesday, right?”