Remembering When
What if Alzheimer's someday robs my husband of our memories?
"I haven't been myself lately," says Mama Vargas, my mother-in-law. My husband, John, and I are at our kitchen table with his parents.
"I purposely fight with her," says my father-in-law. "She knows what she's saying when she's angry."
"What's 'saying'?" she asks.
"Saying," he says with a teacher's patience. "When you speak."
"I don't know," she says, embarrassed. "My mind. It's wrong."
At her next doctor's appointment, she'll be diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. She's 66, and she and my father-in-law -- who are both doctors -- have run the same practice for decades. "I can't remember the patients' names," she tells me.
Life is about moments -- the blessed, the tragic, the sidesplitting, the poignant. Our lives are framed by them, and each one of us has an assemblage of memories that could be edited together, set to music, and watched like a movie.
My marriage is a series of moments. There are the big ones, of course -- like when I first talked to John in a college math class or how his lip quivered as I walked down the aisle to marry him. But it's the quiet ones that I savor -- like when he lets me warm my cold feet on his legs or when we once kissed in the passenger pickup area at Logan, puffy white flakes falling around us. Or how we knocked down a wall in our first house with a hammer (not a sledgehammer) or when he wrote me a song on the guitar (and admitted that he'd done so on the toilet) or how he once called me and told me to look out my office window; he was on the sidewalk, doing karate kicks.
And I will always remember the day that his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, because that is the moment when we really grew up. I came home from work and he looked at me like a stunned deer, and when I hugged him, I could feel him shrinking in my arms. "I need to be home," he said.
Memories comfort us. They make us who we are. Without a connection to who we were, we'd feel lost, which must be exactly how Mama Vargas feels. We want her so badly to remember us, and often she does, but we know we won't always be that lucky. John was on the phone with her recently when I heard him say, "No, Mom. It's John. No, John." I knew what he didn't want to say: It's me. Your oldest son.
John once told me: "I want to make memories with you." It was a funny thing for a guy to say, but I know what he meant. He wanted me in his life, and he wanted to remember all of it. Maybe that's why I've been so scared. Whether you find a lump in your breast or a friend is involved in an accident, everyone has a moment when he or she realizes that bad things don't just happen to other people.
John could someday get Alzheimer's. I hold my breath as I type those words. My father-in-law is losing his wife. Only she's not dying, her mind is, and with that, all of their memories will fade to black. What if someday I have to remind John about the time he did karate kicks outside my office or we kissed at Logan in the snow. Those aren't my memories. They're our memories. And when he says, "Honey, can you get the [pause] thing?" it scares me when he can't remember the word: Is he already forgetting?
There is nothing wrong with John. He's as solid as a tree trunk (and I'll please him now by mentioning that his biceps are pretty solid, too). And while his mother's illness has injected a glitch in the cinematic reel of our life, it's also opened our eyes. Memories are a privilege -- every day we get to choose whether we want to remember something. And when you know someone who no longer has a choice, when those moments are slipping away, it reminds you of how much there is to lose.
We started keeping a memory book, John and I. It's a cloth book that we keep on our bedside table and where we'll record a note about a fun day we had or a silly moment. Maybe it's human not to write the sad stuff. But it's our way of keeping a record. Now, even if one of us forgets, there will always be those voices, our voices, on the page speaking out to us.
Brooke Lea Foster is a former editor at the Globe Magazine. Send comments to coupling@globe.com. 