I flash back to the days when we first realized my mother was developing dementia, and to those later days, in the nursing home, when she no longer recognized us. She couldn’t eat by herself anymore and sat in a daze in the hallway, staring nowhere in particular.  Is this what is happening to me, too?

Every day, it seems, I stump myself, beginning a sentence and getting stuck on a word. Oh, I know the word—it’s hiding there right beneath the surface—but it ducks and disappears, playing tag with me, and I can’t retrieve it.  I am an embarrassment to myself.

I once told my meditation group about an educational and informative web talk I’d watched on the topic “Self or No Self.” Is our notion of self just a construct, a way of identifying something that really does not exist, or is it something substantial?  What happens to the self when we die? I was the only one of our group who had tuned in to the program and wanted to share the experiences and findings of the speakers, each coming from a different perspective: one was a neuroscientist, one a practicing Buddhist, and the third—oh, no, I forgot!  In the middle of transmitting what I had gleaned from the program, my words failed me—not just the words, the learning got lost, too.  I couldn’t remember what I wanted to say.

Numerous times I have checked to see that I have everything with me as I leave my apartment. I lock the door, and once I am down the hall by the elevator suddenly realize I don’t have my purse, my phone, or the bag of clothing I was going to drop off on my way out.

And what about the names of people mentioned to me by my younger sister? “Remember Jerry Gilmour?  You know – from Ottawa – down at the Centre?”  But I no longer remember Jerry What’s-it.  His name is vaguely familiar, but I don’t remember his face or the incident that my sister is talking about.  “You don’t remember Jerry?” I feel humiliated.  Stupid.  Less than I am expected to be. Less than I expect myself to be.

Are these just “senior moments” or significant markers on my journey to a world of unknowns and silence?  Are they symptoms of normal aging or a serious plunge into oblivion?

At the retirement group I attend, we discuss various aspects of aging. At one meeting, we talked about dementia, and I raised my fears.

“What will happen if one of us, maybe me, is overtaken by dementia?  How will our group handle that?  How will the person afflicted handle that?”

“Well, you just couldn’t be here anymore,” one woman immediately replied.  “How could you be here if you couldn’t carry on an intelligent conversation?”

  She said it like it was a foregone conclusion, the natural consequence of my being deemed demented.  I was shocked and angry at her pronouncement.  How could she be so smug and simplistic?  How could she arrive at her response so quickly, so heartlessly?  Does a person with encroaching dementia have no feelings?  No brain at all?  I felt dismissed, cast aside.

Who does she think she is?  Maybe she will be the first in the group to become demented!  Maybe she will be the one thrown out without so much as a gesture of care.  I half-heartedly hoped that it would be her!  Except, I knew. We would not throw her out. I would speak up. Others, too.  If she felt she belonged with us, whether or not she made sense of the proceedings, why would we ask her to leave?  Don’t we care for our fellow travelers on this unknown road? Don’t we feel compassion for each other when tragedy strikes?  So many in the group speak about friends with cancer, friends dying, friends requiring serious surgeries; we comfort each other, talk it through. We are there to give support. Is dementia any different?

Would I be happy with someone in the group who couldn’t contribute or might be disruptive? Who could not pay attention or share ideas?  Would I feel compassion then? Could I be so inclusive?

I hope so.

But who am I kidding?  It isn’t someone else that I think this will happen to.  It is me.  I am the one who worries me. Why, just a couple of weeks ago I drove my car to my exercise class, parked on the street, and after class waited for my cousin to pick me up for lunch and a bit of shopping. She arrived precisely at 10:45 a.m., prompt and organized as always. Off we went.  After some great conversation over a lovely lunch and the purchase of a couple of super bargains, my cousin drove me home.

That night, at 10:30 p.m., I was sitting at the computer, thinking about what I had to do the next morning. I checked in my day minder and saw that I had a doctor’s appointment at 9 a.m.  Great!, I thought. I really need to get the results of that liver testing. So, I’ll head there about 8:40 a.m., drive to—oh, my God, my car! How will I drive anywhere? It’s back at my exercise class, sitting on the street! At least I hope it is!

Panic set in faster than my brain could charge. I can’t think, I can’t think. What should I do? It’s too late to call anyone tonight. I struggled to jump past all this agitation and  calm my mind. I took a deep, soothing breath.

I know! I’ll email my cousin.  Maybe she’s still up and she’ll know what to do.

Luck was with me. She called right back and calmed me down, eased my worry. “I’ll pick you up at 8 a.m. and we’ll go to check on the car. If it’s where you left it, no problem. You can go straight to the doctor’s. If it’s not, I’ll take you to the doctor’s and we can figure out what to do after that.” I was so relieved. I could feel the perturbation swooshing from my nerves like the downward gush of a drain unclogging.

How could I have forgotten my car? A person doesn’t forget a great big object like a car!  Maybe their wallet, their cane, even their phone—but a car? It isn’t small enough to just slip the mind! Well, it is. And it did.

Fortunately, the car was there the next morning. I got off easy—this time. My cousin and I agree to meet again the next week, same time, same place. Jokingly, I say, “OK, pick me up at 10:45 a.m. I’ll be the one with a string tied around my neck.”

At the top of the garage ramp, I think, I’d better hurry if I’m going to get to the dentist on time. The dentist! That’s where I’m going! Well then, I need to turn right.

Being Different

by Ada Glustein

  “Duke sauntered across the schoolyard, dragging his feet in the dirt. When he got to the fence on the other side, he slowly turned around, as if afraid of what he might or might not see. I waved. He stared back.” The heart-catching stories in Ada Glustein’s memoir, Being Different, tell a universal story about feeling different and longing to belong. She recounts tales of growing up in a Jewish immigrant family during and following World War II, and the experiences that stand out during her school days, not knowing how to fit in to the world beyond home. She reflects on her years of teaching diverse children who also experienced life as “different.” With her deep understanding of the importance of belonging, as seen through her own eyes and through the eyes of the children she encounters, she finds her own sense of belonging through helping those children find theirs. Ada’s stories are told with humor and pathos: spilling the wine at her family’s Passover seder; slamming down her books when provoked by one of her Masters at teacher’s college; barely holding in her laughter at the antics of the woman who is housing her during her teaching practicum in a rural school; realizing that she has not included the right flesh color for one of her students to make his self-portrait; clutching three barefoot children outside in a blizzard, while waiting for the alarm bells to stop ringing; and, befriending the class bully to help her know that she, too, is an accepted and valued class member. These stories remind us to embrace the visible and the invisible differences we all share as human beings on this planet. Available from Amazon.

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