“Time Passages”
“All round the day was going down slow…”
Am I motivated by the sun or unmotivated by gray skies? Whichever, it HIT this week, and I am a few days late with my blog. I am trying to blog regularly…want to be consistent…but then the procrastinator side of me just wants to duke it out with my responsible side, and there you go. Place no bets. So it’s a Monday instead of a Friday that the blog is coming out. Gotta watch that Readers, gotta hold myself accountable…or not. Meh. I’m retired (wink). So here we go. Do you recognize these lyrics? Thanks to my brother, they have been on a replay loop in my head for the last few weeks.
“It was late in December, the sky turned to snow
All round the day was going down slow
Night like a river beginning to flow
I felt the beat of my mind go
Drifting into time passages
Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight
Well I’m not the kind to live in the past
The years run too short and the days too fast
The things you lean on are the things that don’t last
Well it’s just now and then my line gets cast into these
Time passages
There’s something back here that you left behind
Oh time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight
Hear the echoes and feel yourself starting to turn
Don’t know why you should feel
That there’s something to learn
It’s just a game that you play
Well the picture is changing
Now you’re part of a crowd
They’re laughing at something
And the music’s loud
A girl comes towards you
You once used to know
You reach out your hand
But you’re all alone, in these
Time passages
I know you’re in there, you’re just out of sight
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight”
“Hear the echoes and feel yourself starting to turn…”
My brother has been extolling the concert virtues of Al Stewart. At 77, Stewart in concert sounds just like Stewart in his early thirties, when he released Time Passages. I chose this song as an example because it is my absolute favorite Al Stewart song. And as I begin my journey into the second half of my sixties, the words speak to me in ways that were impossible in 1978 when I was just breaking into my twenties.
“Well I'm not the kind to live in the past…”
I am at a juncture in my life when maybe I am the kind to live in the past. Well, not actually “live” there, but I spend an awful lot of time visiting. The act of recalling details such as years, dates, my state of mind at the time, and honing in on significant milestones and childhood memories reassures me that my retrieval is intact. All is well. As my grandmother used to say, “I’ll be fine, Linda, as long as I’ve got my brains.” How true, Gram—wise words.
At the time she shared that wisdom with me, my grandmother could not have known that her eldest son would “lose his brains” and die of Alzheimer’s at 85 — roughly the same age as his own father died suffering from dementia. I use the term “dementia” because I don’t remember people getting an Alzheimer’s diagnosis in the early 80’s. But perhaps I wasn’t paying attention. I sure am paying attention now.
“There's something back here that you left behind…”
So what’s going on with this compelling need to visit the past, to reminisce, to recall, to steep some portion of every day in nostalgia? Some parts of it are just plain personal gratitude. When you’ve been around for decades you’ve lived a lot of life and have made a lot of memories. Some of it is inspiration for writing. I like to sprinkle memoir-esque vignettes throughout my writing (thank you, Ally Berthiaume for your coaching and The Writing Bar). But most of all, it’s family, past and present, that compels me to exercise my memory as much as I can. And I understand that these memories are as much about my brain and its miraculous activities as they are about living, capturing, and retrieving the past.
“The things we lean on that don’t last…”
My brother and I lean on our memories to connect. That is our love language. That is our sibling bond. We try to talk on the phone weekly. If one of us doesn’t pick up, we’ll leave messages on voicemail prefaced by, “I wanted to tell you something I remembered before I forget.” The content of that voice message has such high stakes for us both. As I mentioned, we lost people we loved to dementia. We lived the heartbreaking “long goodbye” with my dad for more years than we were willing to admit. When he started to lose both short and long-term memory, he would struggle to piece together who we were and why we inserted ourselves into whatever waking bad dream he lived each day. Most painfully, we all struggled as he forgot how to do the things that we take for granted. I used to ask him what year it was and his answer was always the same: 1974. I wondered what happened in 1974 that the year was stuck and retrieved each time? When I would say, “Nope, Dad, it’s later,” he might get up to 1979 before I would tell him it was 2000 something. That number made no sense to him. He’d just look at me with those blank eyes, then turn away. My brother spent so much time with my father when they worked together over the years. He’d know the significance of 1974. I should leave him a voicemail and ask, before I forget.
“I know you're in there, you're just out of sight…”
Neither my brother nor I know if we have the Alzheimer’s apolipoprotein gene (ApoE4). With both a grandfather and father with Alzheimer’s, there’s a good chance. But no, we don’t need to know. Because here’s what my brother and I already know:
BLEAK: “Studies of family history say that if you have a close relative who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease—the most common form of dementia in older adults—your risk increases by about 30%. This is a relative risk increase, meaning a 30% hike in your existing risk. If you are age 65, the risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer's is 2% per year, although this also means a 98% chance per year of not developing Alzheimer's. In absolute numbers, a 2% annual risk means that two out of 100 65-year-olds will develop dementia every year. Family history raises the 2% annual risk by about 30%, to 2.6% per year.” Harvard Health
BLEAKER: “ 1 in 10 Americans over age 65 is living with dementia and another 22%of seniors experience mild cognitive impairment, and another 22% of seniors experience mild cognitive impairment, which is one of the initial signs of that more serious cognition challenges might be on the way.” Jama Neurology Study via EatingWell.
KIND OF HOPEFUL: “My grandmother knew what she was talking about. It’s all about brain health. There is so much you can do to slow down the onset of Alzheimer’s, maybe even prevent it (my daily “maybe” prayer) through diet, exercise, watching blood pressure, glucose, and cholesterol numbers, staying away from too much alcohol (well, all of it actually), eating whole, minimally-processed foods, and good carbs, taking key supplements, keeping excess weight off, using your brain to keep learning…the internet is FULL of good, sound advice.” Linda (me)
“Don't know why you should feel…that there's something to learn…”
I have done some reading lately that has put this whole “memory is more than just remembering” vibe on the front burner and it makes me more determined than ever to take on any threats to my own memory. The first is a fascinating new novel by one of my favorite British authors, Claire Fuller. First I should say that I am obsessed with pandemic-error fiction, and this book, The Memory of Animals, is an exceptionally fascinating fictionalized take on a pandemic. In part of the plot, the main character, Neffy, gains access to some experimental technology that allows her to vividly relive some critical memories while trying to make sense of so many things that have moved far beyond making sense. I have to be careful here of spoilers, but The Memory of Animals time travel technology functions pretty much exactly like cognitive scientists have described how the brain engages in “mental time travel” using memory:
“In everyday life, when you have an experience, your brain constructs this rich neural code representing the details of that experience. Later, if you think back to that experience, the brain attempts to reactivate that neural representation,” Polyn explained in an email to The Huffington Post. “Mental time travel is when the brain does a really good job reactivating that past state, which can feel like you are actually revisiting the experience, in your mind’s eye. ”
“Drifting into time passages…”
This mental time travel is accomplished through episodic memory, which is defined as “the ability to learn, store, and retrieve information about unique personal experiences that occur in daily life.” We can, indeed, briefly and with some degree of control, live in the past without any fancy technology. In The Memory of Animals, Neffy uses the technology to seek out the person she was in these memories to better understand the person she is, and shape the person she will become. Um, it turns out that isn’t actually fiction:
“..through mental time travel, episodic memory can also directly transport us into past, to the person that lived through our previous experiences, and into the future, to the person we are yet to become.”
“Well the picture is changing…”
Well, so what? The aging woman in me wants to tell you all that it is never too soon or too late to protect your brain’s functioning, folks. Shout it from the rooftops to everyone in your life. The work on Alzheimer’s is evolving and shifting, and while there is still no cure, there is progress in understanding how to both prevent and delay. Both Addis and Polyn point out that this deeper understanding of how the brain produces memories has huge implications in Alzheimer’s research. Polyn, again, in Gregoire’s Huffpost story: “If we can understand what different brain regions are doing during healthy memory retrieval, that can give us great insight into what’s going wrong when memory is damaged. It may also help us develop better tests for early detection of memory disorders, and give us ideas for how to better treat people with these disorders." I will continue to work daily in this phase of my life to protect my brain, to share memories with the people I made them with as often as I can, and to make new memories that hopefully I will be recalling and sharing well into my nineties. And Al Stewart, I love your song, but there was one line you got wrong: “You're all NOT alone in these time passages ….” There, fixed it for you.
