On Saturday night, I went to take off my eye make-up and got a couple of those flat cotton pads you use to remove your nail polish.
GUESS WHAT COMES NEXT!
Correct! I absentmindedly reached for the nail polish remover instead of the make-up remover, dampened the pad with it, and rubbed it on my eyelid. I smelled my mistake immediately.
What followed after a bloodcurdling scream was a dramatic episode of eye washing, attended by my poor husband who stood ready to drive to the ER while I whined, “It won’t matter if I’m already blind.” I didn’t want to open my eye to find out, until rinsing my eyelid a few hundred times. Then I poured distilled water in my eye for around 15 minutes. In the end, I was deeply shaken but still fully sighted.
Now I know that I can’t be trusted to do anything involving household products, matches, medications, what else? I’ve known for a while that my hands don’t always know what they’re doing, and I might throw away something valuable if the other hand is holding a used paper towel. It’s gone beyond the state of “not present.” My brain is somewhere else entirely, and often the somewhere else is literally oblivion.
Naturally I feel scared of what’s to come. I went to take that little online test to screen for senility and scored one point less than a couple of years ago. I googled dementia and Alzheimer’s and learned that you need a whole work-up to get a diagnosis. The drugs you’re taking, your levels of vitamin B-something, depression, all these things could be affecting your cognition.
The meds I take can all affect memory, and my sleep deprivation is no joke either. Deep down though, I’m pretty sure I’m losing my mind.
When I can’t use words, it’s going to be unbearable, unless I forget that I love words. I guess that could work out. But surely I’ll know if I can’t think of common nouns or the names of my loved ones. The other day, I couldn’t remember Anderson Cooper’s name. It took forever to retrieve it. Right now I can remember Steve Mnuchin and Mike Pompeo, but I just forgot the name of Rev Al Sharpton. Do I need these names, one might ask, and the answer is yes! I need to remember everything I know!
If only we could selectively control our memory files, deleting Taylor Swift stuff to make room for new passwords. I want to hang on to all adjectives! Laying in bed this morning (unless it’s lying in bed, I CAN’T REMEMBER) I couldn’t think of the word “transcend”. It’s not as dire as putting nail polish remover on your eye but still, it’s upsetting.
Many years ago, I predicted the advent of nursing homes for baby-boomers, where music of the 60s would be piped in all day long. There would be a chain of these facilities called “Summer of Love”, where residents would know all the lyrics of every Dylan and Beatles song, even if they couldn’t recall their own names. Just as every cynical joke about the future has now become a grim reality, there are already nursing homes and elderly day-care centers that try to create a bygone era for the comfort of the residents. They use facades of 50s diners or 40’s gas stations, and set up fake little bus benches for people to congregate around. To me, this is gas-lighting, but to the companies behind this business model, it’s a useful way to control behavior.
Now that it’s just around the corner for me, please don’t put me somewhere where they play Eric Clapton or the Eagles! In fact, once my hair stops looking good, I’d like someone to kill me, swiftly and humanely, with a heavy frying pan.
Do any of you have a bottom line for “quality of life” or do you look forward to hiking well into your 90s, bragging about your Boniva and reverse mortgages?
Isn’t weed supposed to diminish one’s memory? I feel like I used to know this.
No interest in living into my 90s, none. I’ve seen, heard and felt enough to happily say I don’t need to wish for that. I’m currently doing exhaustive arithmetic to figure out when my credit cards will be paid off and when I can schedule a neck and eye lift. That should get me through the next ten years. After that, I’m spending all the money I have left on things that make me happy — Art, jewelry, travel and then move in with one if my nieces and let her think for me. Hopefully my expiration date soon follows.
Be careful sister!
Also: just imagine how nice it will be to forget 9/11 for once. Even if just for a mere moment not to be feeling with all the strength of all the feelings that one day and the events which caused us to swear to never forget and to relive the moment over and over and over and over again, just for the first few hours we did this, and then reviewed again for the next few days, seeing and thatower that I now know resembles a Chick-Fil-A freedom fry, and then just played that shit on a loop forever in our plastic sheeting and duct tape sealed undisclosed locations and we vowed to never forget and to become a nightmarish nation where everyone has PTSD. Think of all the amazing shit there is out there to not know that you ever knew about. Let’s do all of the drugs and dismantle the highways. Let’s pray that those tanks in the capitol get used for some real ass shit that kicks Ivanka’s coronation off into high gear. All this fascist dictator foreplay has gone on too long. Let’s go back to when claiming that indulging in a vice was the only way to make sure the terrorists didn’t win, back when we were naive enough to believe or at least whole enough to know the importance of claiming to believe that the terrorist hadn’t won.
Or imagine how fun it will be to forget what the 4th of July is and you can experience it anew and wholly unexpected alongside your dog.
ah Sister Wolf we are all in this slow descent together. And don’t discount that muscle memory will often take over and make us do seemingly stupid things. The older you are the more muscle memory you have, and lets face it, we are tired as fuck.
Love ya
I have trouble remembering the name of that chap in my shaving mirror every morning. “Don’t give me a clue”, I say to him, “It will come to me in a minute!”
I woke from a dream this a.m. I had been dreaming of the Rat Pack and could think of all the names but Joey Bishop….and my heart was pounding….and I was in a panic….then I tried to calm down and go through the alphabet….got to “J” and I had it! And it mattered…???? How many people in this world know about the Rat Pack? Sigh. I had sudden deafness in my left ear 14 years ago….sudden blindness in my right eye four years ago. All I need is a good limp. Probably not a politically correct statement. Oh, well…..
One time I brushed my teeth with the Ben Gay that was sitting on the counter near the toothpaste. I didn’t realize until my mouth got real hot and suds were frothing out of my mouth. Of course, I freaked out. I was in my 20s then. So, it happens!!
I feel ya, sister. I’m so distracted by the state of things in the outer world that it’s ruining my (previously) rich inner-life. So, then I try to distract myself even further by indulging in things that cloud my so-called, overrated rational mind. I’ve followed you for years. I look back to when you would post clips about hair; fashion; your life—and I long for those days. In memory they remind me of happier, simpler times. You’ve suffered too much tragedy. Anyone with a brain feels crazy now. And no to any kind of “home.” I wish you everything good. XO