My sister Nicole texted me a voice note the other day saying, “Do you know this song? It goes something like (singing) I am the carpenter, bum bum BUM bum bummmm. Obviously not carpenter, but something like that. The singer sounds like Jim Morrison, but it’s not him.”
I know it, I texted back, but can’t think of it at the moment. I’ll figure it out! I assured her I would stay analog, and not cheat.
I walked around humming this song fragment to myself. The first part was definitely right: I am....what? Not carpenter. She was right, though, it was close.
There was a time I would’ve turned to my laptop, but now I see this as a way to show that my brain still has it. Maybe an antidote to all those times in a week where I try to tell someone about a movie, and say things like, “I can’t remember what it’s called, but it has that guy from that other show. The show with the people in it.”
“Mahi mahi!” my dad once blurted, in the middle of a family dinner, stopping the conversation.
“Okay…” my sister Nicole said.
“That was the fish I was trying to think of the other day, remember? The other name for dolphin fish.”
“Not really, but congratulations,” my sister Kat said.
My dad sat quietly with a little relieved smile on his face, like someone had removed a thorn from his foot.
I pictured this forgotten fish name as a rainbow spinner in his brain, like when my laptop gets bogged down on a task. It’s hard for my kids to understand, as they’re less familiar with the feeling of the mind suddenly surfacing a forgotten word after a period of struggle. It’s one of the unexpected pleasures of life’s second half. Like pulling Excalibur from the stone.
I have a particular fear of dementia. After watching both parents succumb to it, I ordered a DNA test, and unsurprisingly, I’m genetically predisposed. I have the second worst possible profile, which I guess is both good and bad news. This immediately turned me into a sucker for weird supplements and a relentless seeker of anti-dementia lifestyle modifications. Desperation makes for an easy mark.
And so, at the tail end of COVID, I became one of those annoying people who cold plunges and wears a heart rate monitor during HIIT workouts, tracking zones and heart rate variability, measuring sleep quality. Luckily all of that derailed quickly, as it turns out that the joyless tracking of everything only seemed to send my numbers spiraling ever further downward. So I stopped looking.
Back in college, when I was an avowed atheist, I had a friendly debate with a Christian pal. So tell me, I said to him: when there’s a brain injury, or dementia, the personality—the consciousness itself—changes. How can you explain that?
Well, he said, maybe it’s kind of like light coming through a window. The window might be damaged, and the light may be reflected differently, or even obscured, but that doesn’t change the light itself. The light is pure, no matter what.
I remained unconvinced, but I’ve often thought of his analogy. Of course, getting older, life and loss humble you. My one-time atheism has been a casualty of this great, inevitable humbling.
After atheism, I became a die-hard agnostic, as radically convinced as I was about my prior atheism. If anyone claimed any sort of metaphysical certainty, I felt this to be just as foolish as I suddenly thought atheism to be. How can you possibly claim to know anything for sure, I thought?
With further and further humbling, I don’t feel the slightest bit of certainty around even that. My general feeling is, who am I to say? Maybe someone else is certain and correct. I can’t possibly know. I feel like I’m part of something bigger and connected, and I have no idea how any of it works. All of that is comforting to me.
When my mom was in memory care with dementia, she mostly spoke in a very fluid but unintelligible flow that the nurses called “word salad.” Once, during a long stream of gibberish, I just hung my head and said, “Oh mom, I don’t know what to do.”
I’d hoped to finally talk about things I’d left unsaid, but I’d waited too long.
“Look at all you’ve done already,” she said, smiling. This was the first sentence that had made any sense all visit. Every so often, she’d have these Yoda-like moments where a little snippet of wisdom would arise out of nowhere.
She’d slip in and out of lucidity during our time together, and I’d sit with her, trying to make sense of the flow, waiting for a moment or two of coherence. One visit the following week, she seemed quite with it, so while the window was open, I thought I’d try to say some things.
She’d been so troubled as a young mom. She was so loving, and at other times, so unimaginably violent. There was so much unsaid about this. I’d simply left home as soon as I could, and we’d left all of this sadness and trouble unmentioned, for decades.
“It must’ve been hard for you when I left Los Angeles,” I said.
“Very,” she said, her voice quiet.
“I’m sorry for leaving, and living so far away,” I said. She didn’t say anything, just had another huge bite of the danish she was eating, flakes of glaze now on her lips.
“And you know I forgive you, right?” I said.
“Mmm,” she said, chewing.
“Can we forgive each other, for everything?”
She looked up at me, chewing this big bite, holding her finger up like she had something important to say. Finally, after swallowing with great effort, she cleared her throat while I awaited her answer.
“Did you ever make any cokes?” she said.
I laughed. “I’m sorry, Mom, I don’t know what that means.”
“I don’t know either,” she said, and we both laughed for a good while.
“Oh Mom, your whole mouth is covered in danish!” I said.
“Is that so!” she said, like this was a happy surprise. She didn’t move. The messiness would’ve killed her, as neat and proper as she’d been in the before-times. I reached over and took a cocktail napkin from her tray, and gently brushed her lips clean.
“There you go,” I said.
“There you go!” she said back, like we’d both arrived at the same answer.
My memory is still solid, for now. So much so that my family refuses to play Trivial Pursuit with me. I may forget what movie I just saw, but when it comes to pointless facts, I run the table. “It’s not fair,” my teens say, flopping back onto the couch. “Why do you even know these kinds of things?!”
“Side benefit of hypervigilance,” I tell them, but they’re too annoyed to hear me.
In the meantime, I’ve kept some of the practices from my anti-dementia binge. I take fish oil supplements, eat lots of fermented foods, and continue to cold plunge. I’ve meditated for most of my adult life, and still do. I do these things in a different way now, though: more out of enjoyment than to achieve or avoid anything.
There are all these optimizer bros trying to live to 150, or upload their consciousness to the cloud, or whatever. I don’t want any of that. I just want to remember Emma and the kids, and live for a good long while without burdening them too much, ideally knowing for as long as possible who everyone is, and what we all mean to each other.
My friend Eliza visits her mom in a memory care unit just down the road from us. I pulled up in our ambulance on an EMS call there a few weeks back and spotted the two of them in the building’s front garden, sitting together in the sun. In the before-times, Eliza’s mom was apparently quite a dour person, and now, Eliza tells me, “She is just a delight.” While her mom is certainly more confused, she is somehow lighter and happier.
I still like thinking about the light through the window. I’m often inclined to think of consciousness emerging from a collection of neural processes, but maybe there is something behind it, like some kind of light that illuminates everything. It sure feels that way sometimes. I feel it now, thinking of the good moments I had in those final weeks with my mom. I imagine it, too, as the loving parts of Eliza’s mom now shining through.
There has been a pleasing aspect of forgetfulness. As these years slip by, my late parents drifting further from me, I remember far more loving moments than hurtful, unhappy ones. My memory seems to be turning toward the light, for whatever reason.
It hits me while I’m walking the dogs, the song my sister asked about. It feels like solving a little equation. The rainbow spinner stops, and the answer arrives: Passenger, I think. “I am the passenger.” I text Nicole: It’s Passenger, by Iggy Pop!
I slip my earbuds in, and listen.
Oh, the passenger
He rides and he rides
He looks through his window
What does he see?
He sees the sign and hollow sky
He sees the stars come out tonight
He sees the city’s ripped backsides
He sees the winding ocean drive
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
Simply brilliant. Like life itself. Thank you, Rob.
I love the idea that light always comes in no matter what.