She slammed the bottle of purple ink on the desk, her eyes daggers behind thick glasses. “Put. Your. Names. On. Your. Papers, Class!” she said through gritted teeth. She gave everyone an F even though there were three or four of us prissy-pants who had done as she wanted!

I panicked a week ago when I realized that except for the introductory post my name didn’t appear anywhere on this new site. You’d think after a lifetime writing papers, reports, articles, advertising copy, columns, books and blogs I wouldn’t forget to include my name. I  spent most of a Sunday afternoon trying to come up with a way to introduce myself, after the fact, without being too obvious. 

The roadblocks that WordPress presents to a person of a certain age—just turned 84, for instance—stopped me cold. I whined to daughter Leslie that day, even as I told her my brain was too numb to spend any more time trying to solve the current problem. I asked if she would put her best thinking cap on and come up with some ideas for subtitles that would incorporate my name. By the following morning she’d emailed ten possibilities. That gave me the shove I needed and although I didn’t use any of them, together we came up with a solution. A subtitle/byline that sums up what I do:  “Judith Clarke writes, laughs, persists.”  Tada-a-a. 

Now those five words don’t seem to have much to do with this blog’s mission: encourage those who are going through what I’ve already gone through but, in fact, it does. Writing is my medium, my method, i.e. I laughed at myself for being so silly as to have forgotten my “byline.” I believe laughter is a salve for pain. I believe in laughing. I persist because I’m stubborn, I persist because I want to carry on. That’s a simplistic example, true, but you get my drift.

Carrying on after losing a loved one to dementia or to any other cause is not easy. There are no instructions, no primer, no maps to show the way through. It’s a grind slowed by layers of self doubt. There are bad days and good. Slowly, very slowly, the good days come to the fore, the bad days retreat.

In these months since Peter’s death I’ve accepted that I can’t seem to remember names any more—names of  people, things, movies, books.  A byproduct of years of caregiving or me sliding into dementia myself? probably neither.

Most of my friends say the same of themselves. We laugh together. And all of us lose our glasses and our phones—in our houses—every day. We have extra pairs of glasses, but only one phone each. I often find my black phone on the black kitchen counter. The only reason I still have a land line is so I can call my cell when I’ve lost it.

My daughters reassure me about my forgetfulness. We can’t remember things either, Mom, they say. The idea of them being as forgetful at their young ages as I am at mine is laughable too.

“They laughed much harder than the memory was funny because it felt
good to laugh.” Shannon Hale