Free The Memory Artists by Jeffrey Moore Page B

same question and they’re tired of repeating themselves. And often you repeat something not because you’ve forgotten it, but because you can’t remember whether you said it or merely thought it.
    Sometimes you just want to find a place to hide, a place to cry. What does an elephant do when its time has come? It walks alone into the jungle. Sometimes that’s what I feel like doing, assuming I could ever find a jungle.
    Mild cognitive impairment, which is what I have, is the first sign of Alzheimer’s. I’m in a no-woman’s land, in a strange place where I’m no longer the self-assured and knowledgeable person I once was. A history teacher, for God’s sake!
    But I’m not mad yet either -- I can still think, I can still reason. What annoys me is the way Émile is starting to bypass me, giving all the details about my case, and all the eye contact, to my son. It’s infuriating. I’m going to say something to him next time. If I remember. I’d better write it on my hand.
    13 February 2001. Fugaces labuntur anni. 12 How in heaven did I remember that, from my distant schooldays? I want to go back so badly, back to Aberdeen. I remember things that happened to me there better than things that happened here two weeks ago! Will Noel go with me, I wonder?
    God, how I miss the things I used to have, the little things we take for granted. To be able to make small talk, to joke, to remember people’s names, to read a book or watch a movie without getting lost. To walk or drive without getting lost!
    I can’t find my car keys, which has happened lots of times before, of course, but this time it feels different. This time I don’t think it’s a case of misplacing them, of not remembering where I left them. This time I have a feeling they’ve been stolen.
    If Noel took them away, I must have really got lost, really gone far astray ... The mother who used to wonder where her son was now has a son who wonders where his mother is.
    15 February. I wake up and my brain doesn’t seem to be wired right. I feel like looking in the Yellow Pages for a good electrician, one who knows what he’s doing, who won’t throw up his hands at the mess. ‘I can rewire it if you like, Mrs. Burun,’ he’d probably say, ‘or you can just wait for the fire.’ And then I start to panic, and get more muddled, and then pull the covers back over me and go back to sleep.
    18 February. Noel and I were going through a box of mementos today and he showed me a card he made me years ago for Mother’s Day. It used the letters of MOTHER to make a poem or rhyme. I can’t find it now and I can’t remember what it said, but it was lovely. I’ve spent the past few hours, with pencil and eraser, writing an updated version. Here it is:
    M is for the miseries of Menopause,
    O is for the road to Oblivion,
    T is for the Tailspin of ageing,
    H is for the feeling of Helplessness,
    E is for the feeling of Emptiness,
    R is for my Rage over losing my Role of M O T H E R.
    20 February. ‘The future is not something I’m dying to get to,’ I remember Noel saying when he was six or seven (and I laughed, seeing the dark humour). Now, I feel the opposite: the future is not something I’m in any hurry to get to. The future is not what it used to be.
    The buy-out I signed allowed me to teach part time, which I’ve wanted for years, but I now know I’ll never be able to do that. I feel like I’ve spent my life climbing the rungs of a slide.
    22 February. Alzheimerland is a foreign country. Time doesn’t move the same way here, calendars are fuzzy, the days and months shuffled like cards in a deck. And space is different too -- the land seems to wobble, the signposts shift. You stumble through mud or sand, through mines and traps. And it’s hard to talk to people here, to speak their language. It’s so hard to get used to -- it’s not like where I grew up.
    Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you went in? Entering the FORGETTERY, I used to call it. Or