THE ART OF AGING

Genetically predisposed to forgetting, like scheduled spring cleaning in my mind.

Besides insects and waves that could bury me, I have one long-abiding, instinctive fear: losing my memory.

The images I carry of my maternal grandmother from childhood––all artificially tinged turquoise, her favorite shade of blue and therefore the color of all the walls in the Florida house, her dishware, and most of her jewelry––are warm and loud with her words. A talker, and funny in the way that I’m sure is the reason I think all women are funnier than men,

and Yahtzee, and a talent for finding perfect shells on any beach, and still insisting on taking them all home with her even though every room in her house is already overflowing with years of collection. Because of this, a reliably sandy purse,

red wine, not white, crying for joy easily and in front of anyone, frantic behind the wheel, commercial Broadway musicals like Phantom of the Opera and Wicked, thousand-piece puzzles,

perpetually unhappy about her weight, which I struggled to understand as a child but learned to imitate after years spent witnessing the small, gendered self-cruelties, 

and even with five middle-aged children carries the leftover terror of being a young mother, like a phantom limb.

progressive mental deterioration that can occur in middle or old age, due to generalized degeneration of the brain

Now I see something of prayer, when, at the end of each day, she takes the calendar down from its hook, opens each kitchen drawer to find a pen, and asks my grandfather what they did today. 

Besides my house catching fire while I sleep, I have one unreasonably present fear: losing my memory.

I’m twenty, my mother turned fifty-one a month ago, and my grandmother is seventy-seven now. Twenty and terrified of getting older for all the usual reasons, but also one more. My friends and I used to gather at night and smoke ourselves away from ourselves, playacting adulthood and also running from it. Now, living at home once more, I can rarely locate the desire to be anything but lucid. Maybe it’s proximity to the first signs of slippage in my mother, the . Sometimes I think the only measure of growing up is the degree to which you recognize your parents as fallible and probably even cruel. Sometimes I think the only measure of growing up is deciding to forgive them.

a person may function independently. He or she may still drive, work and be part of social activities. Despite this, the person may feel as if he or she is having memory lapses

For the past few years, my phone conversations with my grandmother have been at best awkward, at worst disturbing. How could so much interiority just be lost? Where does it go? She doesn’t know the day of the week, or where she might ever find a pen again, but I wonder what else her brain has already excised. 

How’s the weather sweetheart? Yes, us too. And your mom and Jon are happy? Well good. Good. What are you doing in school? Oh that’s right. Well you know we are still proud of you. And the weather isn’t too bad up there? That’s nice. So what are you learning in class? Oh yes, that’s right. How are your mom and Jon? OK. Yes, miss you too. Yes, love you too.

damage appears to take place in the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex, parts of the brain essential in forming memories. As more neurons die, additional parts of the brain are affected and begin to shrink 

My mother, a peculiar force, a single mom for most of our lives with the self-righteousness and resilience to match, now requires alarms on her phone to remember meetings and meals, to feed the dogs and take her meds. More unsettling to acknowledge is the shift in her personality, as irrationality seeps into her sharp wit. 

Besides never finding my soulmate or even a passable imitation, I have one deepest fear: losing my memory. Among the things I inherited from my matriarchal lineage (love of performance, awful body image, forthright laughter, depression, a tendency towards melodrama) this birthright is the one I’d give up first. 

Some things skip a generation. When my mother talks about my grandmother talking about her own mother––all of us, a Russian doll of daughters––she remembers anger. My grandmother couldn’t bear her mom’s confusion, all the blank stares and repeated questions, and I tend toward this resentment too. By the end of high school, I would sit in the kitchen at my friend’s house and marvel at all the things her mom could remember and supervise: appointments, assignments, needs, wants. My mother wears her pain differently––instead, she deflates a little more with each trip to Florida, forced to negotiate losing the woman who raised her. Losing her measurably and sequentially; losing her unsparingly. 

My grandfather is steadfast. Lovingly, patiently (loudly, because he’s losing his hearing: an eye for an eye), he sits down next to my grandmother every night and recounts how they took me the beach in the morning, how Lisa and Joe called, how we played Rummy, how she cooked lasagna for dinner. In neat shorthand, she copies what he tells her into the calendar square.

significant personality changes may take place. Loss of the ability to respond to their environment, to carry on a conversation and, eventually, to control movement

So. If biology doesn’t fail, my fate is the gradual dissolution of self, with no slowing down and no emergency brake. Genetically predisposed to forgetting, like scheduled spring cleaning in my mind. Gentle wiping of the hard drive. Or maybe it will be violent––a kind of psychological rape. Or, if I’m lucky, relinquishing my powers of remembrance will be a grateful, autumnal act, that feels just as consoling and easy as freezing to death. I imagine state capitals will go first, followed soon after by names of favorite teachers, 

plots of beloved books, 

Beatles lyrics, 

the address of my childhood home, 

and, if I have my own children, their birthdays, then names, then faces,

until everything has fallen away, dead leaves off dead trees, and I forget that I’ve forgotten anything at all.

AUTHOR: Emma Eaton is a rising sophomore on personal leave from Brown. Until her return, she’s studying rollerskating and how to take care of herself.

ARTIST: Sijia Wang