If you know the heartache of taking care of a loved one who has dementia, you understand the trauma that  forgetfulness brings.

It follows then that if you’re like me and  you have been or are still a caregiver to someone who has dementia you question your own memory when you forget the simplest things. You go into another room for something but can’t remember what it was. Maybe you “lose” your car keys almost every day. Turns out losing your car keys is normal when you’re on the shady side of sixty. It’s when you don’t know what the car keys are for that you may have a problem. 

“If [a person] is aware of their memory problems, they do not have Alzheimer’s,” according to French Professor Bruno Dubois, Director of the Institute of Memory and Alzheimer’s Disease at La Pitié-Salpetriere, Paris. There you go. If you’re over sixty and concerned  about your forgetfulness, don’t worry, you’re OK. You’ll remember what you forgot later. 

Statistics show that half of people sixty or older  have symptoms that can be attributed to age rather than disease. Do you forget the name of a good friend you’ve known for years? That’s normal.  Often, in conversations with friends or family, I forget a word and fall back on “thingummyjig,” then let someone else fill in the blank. I used to know the botanical names as well as common names of plants, including one of my favorites…it’s yellow…sometimes pink…oh yes, primrose! Do you forget the titles of a movies or the actors who starred as I do often? I remember “Top Gun” but can never remember the name of the lead actor. Even now I searched Google for the answer: Tom Cruise, who could forget Tom Cruise?

Scatterbrained behavior is a consequence of normal aging. That’s what differentiates age-reduced forgetfulness from dementia. Dementia robs us of the ability to remember misplaced information at all. Early on in my husband Peter’s long haul through dementia, he knew his once sharp engineer’s mind was deteriorating. He’d sigh and say, “I don’t know what I don’t know.” 

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Linked below is a post from my blog “Dementia isn’t funny. Caregiver Judith Clarke looks for laughs every day.” From 2014 until Peter’s death in 2021 I wrote more than 200 posts with an eye to reaching other caregivers who were in the same boat as I was. I re-read those posts now and then for inspiration for this new blog. This link from June 6, 2016 grabbed my attention recently: https://juditheclarkecares.com/2016/06/09/partitions-to-infinity/