My Mother’s Memory Loss, and Mine

My cat, Harriet, is curled up on the TV console when I walk into the living room. She blinks at me, slowly. Cats blinking at you is supposed to be a sign of affection. I blink back.

“Look at you on the . . .”

I trail off. What is she sitting on? A cabinet? A shelf? It takes me about five seconds to remember the word.

“Console,” I finally say.

I feel embarrassed. I’m conversing with my cat! But, more important, I couldn’t recall the word “console.”

This has been going on for a couple of years. And I’m forgetting not just words but simple tasks. Sometimes I forget to lock my car. Sometimes I leave my keys in the front door.

In the summer of 2023, I forgot my toiletry bag in an airport hotel in Rome. During that same trip to Europe, I left a vibrator in a Paris hotel and had to ask a friend to retrieve it for me. (It was a very good vibrator and she is a very good friend.) During my next trip to Europe, in 2024, I left a sweatshirt in the same hotel. God knows what the hotel manager thought of me.

My mother lost her mind, about ten years ago, and I worry that mine is going, too.

My mother never took great care of herself, so I wasn’t exactly surprised when, in her early seventies, she suffered a series of mini strokes. After that, her cognitive abilities started to slip. At first, it was just an absent-mindedness that I chalked up to age rather than impairment. No one was that concerned. My mother still read a lot, for one thing: thick, dense books about American history, race, gender, and religion. She wasn’t getting locked out of the house or letting bills pile up. She could write and mail a check, all in her impeccable cursive handwriting.

Then, by the time she was in her late seventies, she began to forget things that had just been said, not just facts from the more distant past. Medications went ignored. I began to worry about her driving. Eventually, in the spring of 2019, her primary-care physician suggested a neuropsychological test. My mom complained about the test—it was long and it was complicated, she told me, after I picked her up at a medical office in Sacramento.

A week later, we got the results: a diagnosis of “mild cognitive impairment.” This, we were told, could be a precursor to a more serious condition, like dementia. My mom didn’t seem to fully take in the news. I didn’t know if this was because she was stubborn or depressed—maybe both—or whether it was a symptom of M.C.I. itself.

Then, in December of 2020, my mom fell and broke her wrist. She contracted COVID in the E.R., and became delirious and aggressive. She didn’t appear to understand that she was sick, or that anyone was trying to help her. Even after the infection had passed, things didn’t seem much better. So, in February of 2021, I toured a few assisted-living facilities and moved my mom and her cat into one, in a studio unit on the ground floor.

The emergence of my mom’s dementia coincided neatly—or not so neatly—with my becoming worried about my own mental state. I was forgetting events from the past, and the names of people I’d met a few times. I felt unmotivated and easily distracted, and this was concerning professionally. I had a full-time job, plus a book to write. I wasn’t doing well with either. And my work was helping me pay for my mother’s care.

It made sense that my cognition would be challenged by all the logistics of getting my mother’s affairs in order and of navigating the medical and eldercare industries. But I’ve always prided myself on being able to multitask, and to do it well, and I wasn’t feeling as if I was doing anything well.

At first, I tried to reassure myself that my struggles were COVID-related. Everyone seemed to be suffering from cloudy thinking during the pandemic, whether or not they’d actually had COVID. I also knew that memory loss can be caused by perimenopause. I was in my late forties and had a few other symptoms—mostly night sweats—which suggested that I was indeed having midlife hormonal swings. (In 2023, I had a hysterectomy, but the surgeon left my ovaries intact, which meant that I did not enter surgical menopause.)