Free Healthy Brain, Happy Life by Wendy Suzuki Page B

medial temporal lobes. But I had spent no time thinking about how precious my own memories were to me. What memories were they? In a flash, the memories that came to mind were about studying; doing lab work; and earning degrees, prizes, and grants. I realized that my recent memories were all about science.
    But I also had all sorts of memories about being a child, growing up in California with my parents and brother. If I concentrated, a slideshow of these moments began to unfold inside my head. Wasn’t Thomas Keller right? Aren’t our memories our most precious possession?
    MEMORY LOSS AT HOME
    While overt damage to the brain leading to amnesia is relatively rare, the brain regions damaged in those patients are also damaged in patients suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. One January a few months after that Thomas Keller article had been published, I got a call from my mother. She told me that Dad wasn’t feeling well and that he told her he couldn’t remember how to get to the convenience store where he had been going to get his coffee for the last thirty plus years. Quite suddenly, my father’s memory had evaporated.
    I’m not a neurologist, but I knew my father’s symptoms were not just the forgetfulness that comes with age, when the brain’s memory centers begin to gradually slow down. I jumped into action and through my colleagues at Stanford, I got my dad an appointment with a top-notch neurologist. I flew out to go to the appointment with my parents. I was there when my father was given a diagnosis of general dementia.
    I can’t even put into words how helpless I felt. I was considered an expert on the brain areas important for memory, and yet I was completely and utterly powerless to do anything to help my dad. What was all my education good for if I couldn’t help my own father? It was devastating.
    I decided that even if I couldn’t cure his memory problem, I would find a way to help him. In the process, I helped my mother and myself as well.
    Before that fateful January, I had been on a mission (much like Thomas Keller) to improve and enrich my own relationship with both my parents. While we were never estranged, we were not close either. For many years, my parents and I spoke only once every few months. We had gotten into a habit of not speaking regularly. On my end, I was too busy trying to attain my dream of earning tenure as a professor of neuroscience. On their end, I think my parents just accepted the sparse communication as part of the package of having a daughter with the kind of high-powered academic career that had been expected of her.
    But as I entered my forties, I decided that I wanted to close the distance between us. I first started by making a point to call every week, a change that they both embraced. So, I was already talking to Dad more regularly before and after his memory problem appeared. And after the diagnosis, Dad was still Dad: he had the same sweetness and sense of humor, loved to ask me if I had seen any good Broadway shows, and always loved to hear about the new restaurants in New York. He just couldn’t remember what he had for lunch that day or who was at the family gathering last week.
    But memory can also work in mysterious ways. Sometime after Dad’s diagnosis, I decided I wanted to try to change another one of our family traditions. While my Japanese American family was unwaveringly polite and always friendly, one thing we were not was affectionate. I like to tell people to think of us like a Japanese American version of Downton Abbey without the accent, the servants, or the real estate.
    While there was no question that my mom and dad loved my brother and me, the reality was that we never said it. That just wasn’t done in the culture of our family. After we learned that my father had dementia, I realized that I wanted to start saying those three words, to both of my parents. I guess I wanted (or needed) them both to know that I did love them.
    But