Photo: Old Photographs
By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.” Cormac McCarthy’s words. Lord knows I’d like to forget some things, namely certain people I’ve known. Memory is a blessing and a curse but we are nothing without it.
The Good — Mention Anthony Shoals and its shoals lilies, osprey, and bald eagles come alive. I hear its rapids. I don’t need Dad’s old 16 mm film to see vanilla ice cream oozing from the lid of our first electric ice cream churn. I hear its grinding, crunching whine. See the grayed, salted ice too. I see what I’m remembering. Hear it too, like a scene from a documentary. Only thing missing is fragrance.
The Bad — McCarthy again. “The truth is what happened. It ain’t what come out of somebody’s mouth.” It disappoints me when others don’t recall special moments as I do. You’ve talked with someone over some shared experience and noticed how wrong they get things. Maybe truth is like a rainbow. No two people see the same rainbow. It’s a physics thing. Memory loss is physical and it baffles everybody. That brings me to German psychiatrist Dr. Alois Alzheimer.
In 1901, he began treating Auguste Deter, a 51-year-old woman who suffered memory loss, hallucinations, and paranoia. At first, experts considered this a rare condition, “presenile” dementia, afflicting younger people. In the 1960s and 1970s neurologists confirmed it was common senile dementia, a leading cause of death worldwide.
I won’t get into gathering, encoding, storing, and retrieving, the hippocampus, cortex, synaptic connections, neurotransmitters, and all that. Truth is these days, however we remember, memory haunts us. I’ll be talking and think “Didn’t I just say that?” A needle of dread pricks me. Someone will repeat the same thing within five minutes. Then I fear for him or her.
The Ugly — We have reason to be afraid. As of 2026, some 7.4 million Americans 65 and older live with Alzheimer’s. The lifetime risk for Alzheimer’s at age 45 is one in five for women and one in 10 for men. One in three older adults dies with Alzheimer’s or another dementia. It kills more than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined.
The Sad — There’s stats and there’s reality. Stats pale in comparison to seeing a loved one suffer dementia, a subset of Alzheimer’s. As time passes, people aren’t always who they were. Vladimir Nabokov alluded to memory’s power, Speak, Memory. Some memories inevitably fade, then quieten. The era of Alzheimer’s and dementia haunts us and two sorrowful quotes come to bear here.
“There isn’t any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn’t fade out at last.” — Juan Rulfo.
“And as the years have passed . . . the sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too [often] needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute, like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.” —Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
I have a friend. At first her comments now and then didn’t add up. She’d forget where she lived. Outsiders often miss these changes. There is something worse than death. Watching the light fade from a loved one’s eyes, the slow-motion heartbreak they call the long goodbye.
There is no training for the life experience known for confusion, bewilderment, and loss of memory. For those of you with a loved one going through memory loss, I wish you both the best. As we all go, I read that a new wave of blood tests might detect our Alzheimer’s risk early in the game. Would you want to know? I wouldn’t. It’d be like carrying a load of bricks. A weight I can do without.