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?”

Forget Me Not

Forget Me Not
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 15, 2014

Something about her was different. She looked smaller than I remembered. The hunch of her shoulders had become more pronounced. Gone was her trademark copper rinse, her hair now blowsy and grey. “Auntie G!” I called, spotting her several trolley lengths away in Coles. She was holding open a freezer door, studying a shelf of frozen peas, but didn’t react. I parallel parked my trolley and leaned over. “Auntie G!” I repeated, touching her lightly on the shoulder.

She jerked around and stared at me. “It’s Rosi,” I said, sensing her confusion. Perhaps I’d frightened her? She gave me a wan smile but no glimmer of recognition. I began to feel uncomfortable. What should I do next?

“Do you need a hand?”

“I can’t find the icecream.”

“Oh, that’s on the other side. I can never find it either.” She brightened and nodded when I said “I’ll show you where it is, shall I?”

Cupping her elbow, I gently steered her round the corner, stopping beside the icecream cabinet. She looked relieved.

I’d always had a soft spot for Auntie G because she’d produced my favourite girl cousin, Elizabeth, who was 36 days younger than me.

Sleeping over at Lizzie’s house, I found the noise of her riotous family overwhelming. As an only child, I was secretly thrilled (and occasionally terrified) to witness Auntie G berating her disobedient tribe.

Their house had a backyard swimming pool, a glamorous addition to any 1970s childhood. On a summer afternoon, we kids played Marco Polo and Pool Ponies and practiced our underwater handstands until our fingertips puckered and the soles of our feet pruned. Auntie G leant over the balcony and dropped down a couple of fraying towels. We lay on them, tummies down, dry-roasting on the hot bricks. She’d send out a plate of her coconut macaroons, left over from a dinner party the night before.

Now, aged 78, my Aunty G has dementia. She’s newly diagnosed and still in denial. Her family struggles to manage her decline. She defends her memory lapses with angry outbursts, slipping into the personality of someone else. But Auntie G is not yet in need of care. The good days still outnumber the bad.

Two years ago, I came across Auntie G in the centre of a busy road in West Leederville. She’d abandoned her cream Camry in the middle of an intersection and was standing aimlessly beside it. Drivers were dog-legging around her, windows wound down to sticky-beak at this surburban oddity. I pulled over and got out of my car.

“Oh! Thank goodness you found me!” she said anxiously. “I can’t seem to find Lizzie’s house.”

“You can see it from here,” I said, pointing back down the hill. I wondered how my aunt could have driven past it.

She thanked me and climbed back into her car, swung it around and coasted down the hill. I watched her park outside her daughter’s house. I drove home feeling alarmed.

It was not my first glimpse into mental frailty. My uncle Don, Mum’s only sibling, succumbed to dementia after a career as a concert pianist, academic and mathematician.

The tragedy of his retirement was the swift unravelling of his mind. First he lost the ability to pick left from right, distinguish between cup and kettle and recognise a dollar coin in his wallet. Then it erased his encyclopaedic memory of Schubert sonatas and Brahms concertos until he could no longer play two- finger Chopsticks or sing along to Three Blind Mice.

To watch him, at 76, regress to a childlike state was frightening, but there were lovely moments. His disease bonded him to my two youngest children. He never tired of their knock-knock jokes, cackling at their made-up punchlines. He gleefully joined in their games of hide and seek, bolting for the same empty wardrobe every time. Like them, he startled at loud noises and needed help cutting up his dinner.

The end came quickly and cruelly, four months after a traumatic move into a nursing home.

On occasion, I contemplate my own future. What if my genes, too, are predisposed to intellectual decay? I remind myself it’s normal to be constantly searching for your specs. As I stand in the laundry (what was it I came in here for?) I feel uneasy. Is this how it starts? The foggy brain? Conversations that falter as I try to force an elusive word to crystallise in my mind. The embarrassing pause as I yet again forget the new soccer coach’s name.

Last Monday, as I dashed around the supermarket, I spotted Auntie G again. She was filling a paper bag with potatoes. She waved at me across the fruit crates. “The mangos look nice!” she called. I bought two on her say-so.