I can’t remember anything. Yesterday, I was writing and forgot how to spell THE.  T-H-E.  Not the words nauseous or bureaucratic (which I always forget) but THE.  These moments are frightening and make me want to pound my skull against the wall screaming, “WHAT ____ HELL?”  I joke with my friends that I am like a 1980’s computer with no memory and a big back end.  I have hundreds of business cards and numbers on scraps of paper from people I don’t remember meeting, I bought a sympathy card and couldn’t remember who died and worst of all, I received a wedding invitation from someone I didn’t know.  Or couldn’t remember.  I googled, I researched, I even called my detective friend who looked through his database and still, nothing rang a bell.  I considered going to the wedding to see if I recognized the couple.  In the end, I decided I simply sent the response card admitting I didn’t actually know who they were.  Amazingly, they didn’t respond.

My friends are kind about my memory loss. They say,  “You’re just distracted, with grief, stress and single parenting” or “It’s a side effect of medical menopause, aging and we all have he same thing”   This might be true  but it feels like crap when I can’t find someone’s name.  There is a firefighter friend who named his son after my deceased husband.  He is sweet and friendly and hugs me hard when he sees me at Fire Department functions.  Not only can I not remember his name but I can’t recall his wife’s name or anything we have ever talked about.  I scroll through the Irish names most the firefighters have: Dennis, Kevin, Sean and Brian but eventually I find it impossible to pretend I know and say the inevitable. “I’m so sorry, but I’m completely blanking on your name.”

After my husband died on 9-11, the slogan that appeared everywhere was “Never Forget”.  When I first saw the bumper stickers and t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan, I was moved, touched that the world would remember my husband and all the souls that perished that day.  Now, as an aging widow going through menopause, it feels like a taunt, a challenge I simply can’t do.

When I shared this with my sister, she insisted my memory had always been bad.   She reminded me of the joke I made after Aidan was born.   I insisted that it wasn’t the placenta that was removed after I gave my birth, but my brain.  It is true but I like to think it was a symptom of fatigue that made me forget to click my son into his stroller until someone walking past me said,  “Miss, your dragging your son.”   “Don’t you remember I bough you that book?” my sister said making her point.

“No.”

“It was called It’s Hard to Make a Difference when you Can’t find your Keys. “

“Oh yeah….Where is that book?”

The truth is I don’t remember when I couldn’t remember.

My best friend suggested that perhaps my memory loss was due to smoking pot in high school.  She reminded me of our last reunion,  how I was genuinely stunned by the stories people told me.  It was if they were talking about someone else.   One guy with smoky gray hair and a beer belly sidled up to me, choking me in a tight embrace.

“MARIAN! You look great!  I was just thinking about that day we went to Sheep’s meadow and played Frisbee with Leslie and then we roller skated all the way down to the ferry! ”

I nodded and pretended to remember the awesome day in Central Park we spent together but I couldn’t even remember who he was.  “Did I sleep with you?”  I want to ask, but of course, don’t.

What’s saved me from complete dementia is the invention of Google.  I no longer have to sit with my brow furrowed, scrolling through my foggy memory banks asking ,“Who was that actress from that movie about that thing?”  Without Google, I would truly be lost.  I went on a date with a guy and together we Googled fifteen times. We had to.

I am trying not to panic about my memory loss and focus on the positive sides of forgetting.   Sitting in traffic, funerals, long lines and bad performance art quickly become distant memories.  Returning to a place I have visited is like seeing it for the first time and I am always finding clothes in my closet that I forgot I had.

That’s not to say I don’t remember things.   I do.  In fact, I am downright nostalgic.  When I talk to my son about college its as if someone has smeared Vaseline on the lens of my mind.   Was it really that fun?  I am one ass cheek into a rocking chair with a pipe talking about the good ol’ days when there was no internet, cell phones and only thirteen channels.  “We had only one video game called Pong or table tennis.  You would hit a square digital “ball” and it would take ten minutes to make it to the other side of the screen.”

I’d like to think my memory loss is a function of my brilliant mind having so many brilliant thoughts it doesn’t have room for silly things like how to spell “the” or the name of my dead husband’s friends.  The reality is, whether its menopause, pot smoking or simple absent-mindedness, there is no amount of Ginkgo that will bring those memories back.  My past has erased itself or as Shakespeare so eloquently said, “My dull brain was wrought with things forgotten.” Wait. Was that Shakespeare?  I don’t remember. I better Google it.