Seeping memories...

I’ve always taken my good memory for granted. I was an exceptional student who didn’t have to spend time trying to comprehend or memorize anything. All through my childhood, I devised games with rhymes and words which I think helped my retention power immensely. I remember getting this book of dinosaurs one day and my excitement at the lovely pictures in it – I must have been nine or so. The names were long and involved – not your average tyrannosaurus, brontosaurus or stegosaurus – so in order to remember them I made up a song with all the names – I did that to tackle almost anything I wanted to memorize and I loved collecting words as if they were precious stones.

It may be because of this then that I was disturbed after watching a portion of a movie yesterday. The movie was about a well read and intelligent man’s road to self-destruction because of Alzheimer’s syndrome. I won’t go into the details of the movie because I saw only twenty minutes of it but that was painful enough. I have read about this issue in books of fiction as well as in newspaper and online articles but actually seeing a portrayal was shocking. The family’s suffering was horrific. The patient himself was completely unaware (or at least only intermittently aware) of what was happening to him and he remembered only his childhood days and very little of anything else. So he was in fact mostly happy. The family on the other hand was coping with a nightmarish situation in which the primary breadwinner and the pivot of their life was unable to contribute in any way. The children lost their father and the wife lost her husband. Even death seemed preferable to seeing the merciless disintegration of a human being memory by memory.

I shudder to think of what it would be like to have a brain that is leaking memories– where nagging thoughts are vaguely eating at you but you cannot catch them – or worse, where there are a few lucid moments when you know exactly what is happening and yet are powerless to stop it.