Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, and hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with a will of it’s own. You think you have a memory; but it has you. John Irving; From “A Prayer For Owen Meany”
My family was sitting at dinner in the apartment my grandparents rented in a seniors’ building in Leaside (a borough of Toronto). They had to give up their house a few years before because my grandfather started “having difficulties”. As we sat over the roast and veggies that my grandmother had cooked so beautifully, my grandfather stood, excused himself from the table, and walked into the washroom. Seconds later, he stormed out, his suspenders hanging down his legs. He went directly to my grandmother and exclaimed, “Alice, how is a body to achieve any privacy in there,” pointing at the washroom, “with all of those damned people in the tub?”
My grandmother, being a woman of discretion and great love for my grandfather, gently led him to the couch, sat him down and asked him what he had seen. “All those damned people!”, he repeated, rhyming off the names of the crowd in the bathtub; all had been dead for years, some for decades.
I was sixteen years old at the time, and had no idea what was going on. I knew he had become forgetful, but could still tell some amazing tales. The sadness lay in seeing this proud, wonderful man I loved like life itself reduced to a fretting, confused, pitiable old man — this broke my heart.
This was the first time I met the monster.
Waiting silently, waiting for the moment in conversation when I believe I have the word, phrase, idea – the perfect reply … that’s when I feel the greasy fingers wrest the thought away from my grasp, my mind … “oh God, is it happening to me, could this be what I have to look forward to?”
I have spent much of my life in search of the answers to questions, read scores of books, listened to a library of music, and watched countless films. I have traveled many places on this wondrous Earth, and have stored reels of mental film footage. My mind has been my best friend,I could count on it always, that is until I turned fifty.
I can’t honestly say that I spend all of my waking hours worrying about the fact of my genetics, but I would be a liar to not admit that it crosses my mind on occasion, especially when I’m having what we today call a “middle-aged brain fart”. We all tend to worry about losing that which we hold as our dearest possession – our memories.
So I write to keep my mind sharp, to keep this marvellous friend from turning to a pile of sludge. I also write … because I can, which thrills me no end, for this ability, this desire to share the written word has only recently come back to me after a very long absence. I used to write reams of stories (for my own pleasure, or for school assignments), but hit a point many years ago where I felt I had nothing to say, and so fell into a state of silence. This could well have had something to do with the incident with my grandfather – a shock of this magnitude can cause any number of responses in a young mind not the least being a feeling of disillusionment given the intensity of emotions involved when seeing a person you care for being torn apart one synapse at a time. In thinking back on it at now is it any wonder at all that I chose to go silent in a literary sense, it may have been me thinking in my way, to not give any quarter to the unspeakable monster – Dementia, or as it was called then: senility, there was so little known of the actuality, the loss in brain mass that occurs, the buildup of plaque on the synapses, all leading to an eventual and total breakdown in the connectedness of a person with reality.
I believe now, at the ripe old age of fiftyseven, that I again have things to say. I believe that the ability to share the written word is sacred; sacred as in it should be considered a privilege to have the ability to write, and therefore not something to be taken lightly. I guess this is the crux of it; I have a deep concern that I will lose the ability to write – so I write on.
I write to keep my mind constantly in touch with the word, and the world, with friends around this great sphere called Earth, to keep sharing my love in a way that is easy for all to understand, so I know in my own way I am screaming, “ I will not go gently into that dark night …”.
In remembrance of the one man I truly cherished in life, I cannot … will not rollover and give in, there are far to many more memories to gather, a “grandchild” of my own in January, my Lexie, who is my best friend as well as the love of my life, we haven’t scratched the surface yet of things yet-to-do.
So the monster that is my memory will simply have to wait, there is just to much more I wish to achieve, store in my mind, and share with my friends and loves.
So do not wait on me, monster … you shall have a long and arduous task to take me sooner as opposed to later … much later.
Glenn D. Clarke/August 2009
We go through times in our life
