Midlife Memory

Memory is such a fickle friend. My mom, in her early 70’s, worries about hers. She worries that things & people are disappearing from her internal scrapbook. I don’t worry about my memory blinking off, but it’s certainly trying out some new midlife tricks.

For example, I walked in the bathroom at work yesterday as a woman was leaving. She passed me, and I suddenly got a whiff of something…what was that? I know that that smell…Breck shampoo? I hadn’t smelled that since I was a kid! The Breck smell made me remember the green wooden cupboard above my grandma’s clawfoot tub, where she kept the Breck, Prell, and Tame Creme Rinse. And that made me remember playing mermaid with swim goggles and a turkey baster in the tub. And that made me remember the big square kitchen next to the bathroom, and the smell of potroast cooking. And that made me remember my grandma’s stained aprons. And that made me remember her coming to get me out of the tub, wrapping me in a big towel, and giving me a sugar cube to suck on. And that made me miss my grandma. And that made me cry just a little.

This entire memory tsunami rolled through in mere seconds and left me standing there, pretending I had something in my eye, a weepy idiot. Midlife memories can do that—flip emotional (and even physical) switches to hyper-ON. And as I get older, certain things fade—dates, numbers, names—while other things become almost too clear—smells, sounds, textures, impressions, regrets, losses, joys. It’s as if my brain is tossing out the facts, but stirring my responses to those facts into a concentrated sensory stew. Hearing the Monkees “Daydream Believer” makes me stop wherever I am and do the Jerk. That sorta thing. And with the details disappearing, I have to keep lists to help me remember things I must remember.

Maybe it’s a gift that as we age we can still feel our lives, but we aren’t bogged down in detail anymore. Maybe fading memory is perfectly-timed—a necessary step in the delicate process of letting go, which can take some of us decades. Ray says I just need more spirulina. I’ll write that on my list so I don’t forget. Now where did I put that list…