We forget things anyway

Human memory is extremely limited and capricious anyway: why does the more accelerated loss of it in later life matter?  And more intriguingly, out of the vast oceans of detail that we forget, what makes us retain the particular droplets of information that we do?

UHU 611H.  The registration number of the first car I ever owned, a blue Mini Traveller.  I suppose your first car is always special so it may not be surprising that I can't recall the registration numbers of any cars I've had since, even the one I parted with less than a year ago.  35140, later with a six in front: a phone number from twenty years back.  Don't know why that one should stick when I can't remember others both before and since.

92228.  My mum and dad's old Co-op divi number; 64334, our next door neighbour's.  Must be more than forty years since I could have made any use of that information, but it's stuck there, taking up memory space I'd rather use for something else.

Odd lines from shows I've been in.  I played the king in a Sunday School sketch, with the girl next door as queen.   We'll have been around seven years old.  We had a row, because the king wanted crumpets for his tea and the queen wanted muffins.  Somehow mediation took place and we said the last line jubliantly together "muffins and crumpets both for tea".  A lesson in compromise.  Why do I remember that particular dramatic triumph and no others from that period?  I was always a performer, and chapel life provides many opportunities for cute little show-offs to do their party pieces.  But it's that one item that lingers, like a fragment of wreckage floating on the sea, the rest of the vessel drowned.

Buried memories that suddenly spring to the surface with startling clarity.  I didn't consciously know that the Blackberry Farm books had been around in my childhood and that my mum must have read them too me, but they seemed like the sort of thing our little daughter would enjoy so we bought a couple.  I was reading one of the stories at bedtime, then wham!  I turned the page and not only was there Robin the Postman eyeing her, he was eyeing ME - not as a grown man but as a pre-school child back in Grotsville.  I was re-living a memory I didn't know I still had.

You accumulate a store of basic "general knowledge" - dates of kings, the capital of this, longest river in Peru - which enables you to impress on quiz nights, if the right questions come up.  But it is in fact "trivia" and a few years back there was quite a market for books stuffed full of momentarily fascinating but utterly useless information - and even advertised as such.  As you reach the time of life when retaining information that you really do need - passwords, PIN numbers, names of colleagues' wives and children - can be quite a challenge, you wonder why you spent so much time earlier on accumulating superfluous data.

Some facts seem so basic that it seems fair to assume that a person who can't recall them isn't, for whatever reason, all right.  Battle of Hastings, 1066, first woman Prime Minister, capital of France.  For pity's sake, everyone knows when the second world war was, especially if they fought in it.  But when the occupational therapist did her memory and cognition test on Dad, he couldn't say.  Any more than, a few weeks later when another clinic did the test again, he knew who the US President was who'd been assassinated in 1963.  For those who were alive at the time, it was one of those "you could say exactly where you were when you heard" moments - like 9/11, or the car crash that killed Princess Diana.  I've actually been to Arlington and stood on the plaza at Kennedy's memorial, weeping over its potency to recall what it meant to have the privilege of being young in the 1960's.  That Dad couldn't recall these things was a mark against him, so to speak, a clear indicator of more than ordinarily failing memory.  But stepping back, the wider question occurs to me: why does it matter that we can recall certain facts regarded as "key", when we forget so many others?  And who says which facts are "key" anyway?

Dementia is about so much more than losing your memory.  What bothers me about Dad is not that he fogets facts, but that he's losing basic life skills, isn't on top of his life, and he doesn't realise.  That's the scary thing.