When my grandmother was in her late 80s she used to do this thing where she’d stopp the conversation we were in and say, “Let’s try to figure out where this conversation started?”
Like archeologists, we’d trace the conversation backwards to figure out its origins. My grandmother Thelma was not a complicated person. Originally from Denmark, she was raised on the great plains of the midwest, mostly in North Dakota where her father owned a creamery.
Thelma majored in home economics in college and married my grandfather during World War II. She had one child and became pregnant with another just before her husband went to war. She lived with her parents and raised those two girls until her husband came home.
Eventually my grandmother would have one more child, a son. Thelma and her husband Lester lived mostly in North Dakota, but they also had other great adventures. After my uncle went to college, my grandfather worked as a doctor in Nicaragua and brought Thelma along where they lived for several months in very rural, rugged conditions.
Lester died in his early sixties and after his death, my grandmother traveled all over the world with friends. She lived happily alone for over twenty years and when she was eight-six, she fell in love and remarried.
The new love of my grandmother’s life was a democrat and my lifelong republican grandmother, so smitten with everything about her new mate, found herself seeing the world in a new a different way. When she was almost ninety, my grandmother voted for Barak Obama.
Despite my grandmother’s rich life history, our conversations were often very simple. We’d talk about what each of us had done that day or that week, what we’d had for lunch or breakfast, stories about friends or family. Our conversations were never about politics or literature or deep emotional feelings.
“Let’s see,” my grandmother would say, “before we were talking about how fun it was to go to the new Chicos at the mall, we were talking about Gladys’s new red jacket.”
Then I would chime in with something I remembered, “I think before that we were talking about my flight to Phoenix.”
“Is that right?,” Grandma would say? “I think before Gladys we talked our old apartment in San Diego and then your flight to Phoenix.”
It would go on and on like this for several minutes until we’d deconstructed our conversation back to its birth. I used to find it incredibly endearing and very entertaining. I always thought is was just a quirk of my silly grandma.
But lately, observing my own changing mental recall and clarity, I wonder if Grandma was fighting against memory loss. I am fifty-five now and though I am blessed with excellent health, both physically and mentally, I am at the age where words stick in my brain, knocking around a bit longer until I finally get them out.
I find myself searching for a piece of a story, thoughts ricocheting back and forth until I can finally catch one and find its place. This lack of easy recall can be stressful and worrisome. I imagine myself having to quit my job or sell my house because I can’t track all the details of my life.
Sometimes I’ll remember a really great snippet of a conversation and share it with my partner. “I was talking about how sad it is that the first thing people look at with a new job is not quality of life but the salary,” I told her the other day. The essence of a really great conversation I’d had recently swirled around me like a cyclone but I struggled to remember who I’d been talking to.
I had to stop and retrace the conversation in my head — why was I talking about new jobs, who was I with recently that I’d be having a conversation like this with, what social settings had I been in over the last several days?
Finally, I remembered the original conversation with my partner’s cousin and niece at a big family meal the week before. I felt a wash of relief. Though it took me longer, I could still get the entire memory back.
It made me think a lot about my grandmother in her later years. Was her conversation backtracking her way of grounding herself? Did the process of tracing her mental steps reassure her that she was okay?
Thelma’s second husband died several years into their marriage, leaving her a widow for the second time. But my grandmother, social til the end, thrived for a few more years, still physically and mentally sharp. It was in her last year of life that Thelma declined and her memory started to leave her. She lived to be 96.
My brain is definitely changing. Sometimes it feels like I am watching the shifts in real time. I do what I can to manage the inevitable deterioration. Every morning I do Wordle, the NYT mini-crossword, and Connections. I take care of my physical body with a healthy diet and daily exercise.
But I know that I cannot control all of the changes. I think about my grandmother in her pale pink twinset and pearls, perfectly coiffed silver hair, and always a hint of blush and fuchsia lipstick. Maybe my memory of her comes to me now as a teacher.
“It’s okay,” my grandmother is telling me. “Your brain is changing, but you’ll be okay.” I wonder if Grandma stressed about her changing memory too. I wonder if she was even aware of what she was doing when she time travelled back with each conversation. Maybe that was her Wordle. I’ll never know. What I do know is that I’m grateful for this memory of my grandmother and for the ancestral guidance it offers as I move through the aging process myself.