Feeling Anxious When I Struggle to Recall Memories

• There is a long history of memory loss in my family.
• In 2017, my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and I started experiencing forgetfulness in 2020.
• When my memory loss becomes severe, I recite my name and the current day of the week out loud.

My husband used to affectionately call me “Rain Main.” I had an exceptional ability to recall random dates, remember birthdays and phone numbers from my middle-school crushes, and calculate the total cost of a basketful of groceries just by looking at them.

My father was not the first in our family to experience a gradual loss of memory. It affected his grandmother, his mother, his brother, and others before him.

In the summer of 1984, when I turned 13, my father and aunt decided to move my grandparents into town. This decision was made after my grandmother began wandering aimlessly during both day and night, sometimes even in barefoot and topless in the freezing cold of the Midwest. The first time she wandered onto the highway, a kind person stopped, rescued her, and guided her back home like she was a lost animal.

My paternal uncle’s cognitive decline started less than ten years before my father’s. He, too, began to wander.

The first signs of my father possibly having Alzheimer’s appeared in 2017. One summer afternoon, my mother found him standing on the front porch with garden tools in hand, but his mind was blank about the task he had walked outside to do.

I began experiencing forgetfulness

My own forgetfulness started in the spring of 2020. I had moments when I couldn’t remember where I had parked my car or what day of the week it was. At first, I attributed my forgetfulness to being overwhelmed with graduate school at my age, lack of sleep, or even menopause.

Then, while teaching, I started having episodes where words would suddenly disappear from my thoughts, leaving a gap in my speech. I would find myself asking friends mid-conversation, “Did I just ask you that?”

I mentioned these lapses to both my rheumatologist and therapist. They reassured me that it was due to stress, possibly brain fog from menopause, or the result of chronic inflammation in my body.

The anxiety caused by my forgetfulness is at its worst during the night. I often wander around the house, going back and forth between my bed and the couch. I play word games on my cellphone, like Scrabble and Word Stacks, late into the night to try and sharpen my dulled memory.

For example, how many words can I spell using the letters V O I D E N? Void, Vine, Vino, Din, Dine, Dive, Ion, Dove, Done, End, Nod, Id. I check the website allscrabblewords.com to see how many words I missed. The site lists 55 words for that combination of letters, but I only found 12.

So far, I have not undergone any testing, such as genetic bloodwork to check for presenilin mutations or an MRI to examine the presence of beta-amyloid protein buildup in my hippocampus.

On my worst days, my forgetfulness has escalated to leaving faucets running and burners on in the kitchen. In moments of panic, I recite my date of birth, home address, and the current day of the week to myself. I think about my children and their future children, wondering if they will also experience the same forgetting. I recall places I’ve been and want to visit again, the scent of hyacinths in my grandmother’s flower garden, and memories of my father carrying me around the living room when we were both younger.

I realize that all these memories are connected like constellations, forming clusters of brightness tied to one another, within my family.