I Don't Remember, I Don't Recall

Peter Gabriel, Dementia and Memory's Ties to Aging, Genetics, Technology and Mental/Physical Health

Joi, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

THE IMPORTANCE OF TAKING NOTES

If it weren’t for the Notes app on my iPhone, I don’t think I’d be able to write these weekly musical musings on earworms and life. Ideas pop in my head at random intervals and if I don’t jot them down within seconds, they are gone, dissolved into the sea of forgotten things which surrounds us all. 

Some writers believe that ideas that enter the sea of forgotten things were never meant to be remembered. That the important ones will stick around or come back to wave hi at just the right time. To those writers I say: Go ahead and believe your little fairy tale. I’ll be over here, frantically jotting it all down in my Notes app. 

And this goes for way more than just story and blog ideas. 

If it weren’t for my phone, I probably wouldn’t be able to do much of anything at all.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

If I don’t make a digital grocery list before I leave the house, I’ll enter the supermarket and wander the aisles aimlessly, trying to recall what I’d intended to purchase. Sure I could write the list on a piece of paper, but the possibility that I’d either misplace it, leave it at home or not be able to read my own handwriting becomes a definite probability.

When I’m out on a dog walk and see a neighbor approaching with their dog, even if it’s someone I’m pretty sure I’ve had multiple conversations with, I will suddenly forget their name, their dog’s name and question whether I’d actually met them before. 

To combat this leaky name-brain, I have started adding dog/people names into my phone’s contacts list, with a searchable description for type of dog including unique markings on both canine and person. I quickly ask Siri to search my contacts for anyone that matches the description and hope she can answer before I reach the neighbor. This method is perhaps 25 percent successful. Often I end up assuming I’m meeting said dog/human for the first time, so when I ask, “Is your dog friendly?” they might give me the side eye and say something along the lines of: “Um, yeah, Lucy and Bernie have had several play dates.” And then I’ll awkwardly mumble something about being on medication or how I’m still half asleep. 

It’s hard to say how much of my foggy memory is due to natural aging, genetics, or years of relying on technology for once simple memory tasks.

It’s likely a combo of all three.

Photo by Alexandra Lowenthal on Unsplash

AGING

Without admitting how old I am, I will say that I am on the downslope of the physical body years. My parts and systems are definitely running slower than they used to. But I keep myself in relative good health. I exercise. I do yoga. I try to meditate. I am a pescatarian and try to avoid most processed foods. I limit sugar and dairy.

I take supplements that are supposed to support brain and organ health. Ginkgo biloba, turmeric-ginger, beet root, isoquercetin. 

I put coconut oil in my morning coffee. There is growing evidence that coconut or MCT oil helps regulate blood sugar and stimulate metabolism.

I listen to podcasts of smart people talking to other smart people about smart things in hopes that their smartness is contagious. I wrote about one of these podcasts a few weeks ago.

I do crossword puzzles. I write. I listen to and play music. All things that are listed as recommended brain-boosting activities. In terms of being pro-active in limiting the factors leading to Alzheimer’s, I’m doing the work.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

GENETICS

I do all this because dementia runs in my family. 

My 84 year-old father either has senility big-time or has early onset dementia. He repeats the same stories over and over, multiple times a day. He gets lost driving to places he’s been to a hundred times. Normally the most social person I’ve ever known, he has lately stopped seeing many of his friends. Though this is partly due to COVID and social distancing, I believe it’s also because he realizes his mental faculties are not what they once were and he doesn’t want his friends to notice. He refuses to talk to me about it, even when I bring it up in the gentlest of ways.

I am currently taking care of his sister, my 80 year old aunt, whom I helped move into assisted living last summer. Her decline has been much sharper than my father’s. She began showing worsening symptoms — forgetting where she parked her car, multiple fender benders, not remembering to take her medications, paranoia — the year before the pandemic. Within that year she lost her license, had her car sold, required a live-in caregiver and I became her durable power of attorney.

Watching her lose her ability to take care of herself has been heartbreaking. Growing up, my aunt was fiercely independent, building a solid bookkeeping career as a single woman without a college degree in the 1960s and 70s. Like me, she chose not to have kids (I was a surrogate son to her in many ways) showing me that a person can have a happy life without needing to follow societal norms. 

Thankfully, with vaccines finally available in 2021, it became safe to move her into assisted living.

Her dementia is not yet at the point where she needs to be watched 24-7, but it’s only a matter of time. Hopefully a long time. When I drive down from Oakland to visit (a 6 hour drive), she loves to introduce me to all the other residents. “This is my nephew, Steve,” she announces with a prideful smile. She never tells me the names of any of the other folks, but that is perfectly fine. Most of them don’t know each other’s names either. 

“Oh, your aunt talks about you all the time!” Shirley says to me in her lovely Welsh accent, grabbing my hands and sandwiching them between hers. I have met Shirley, and most of the residents at Hillcrest a few times, but it doesn’t matter. “Meeting” them again is always a joy. 

One aspect of dementia that perhaps makes the loss of so much memory and ability to care for oneself a little more bearable, is that everything old seems new again. Even if the “old” was only a day or two ago, the childlike wonder that I witness in so many of the residents at Hillcrest, when they tell me stories about their imagined lovers and important jobs they have to dash off to, buffers the edges off the fear I get when I worry about potentially losing my own memory and faculties to dementia or Alzheimer’s. 

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

TECHNOLOGY 

I used to know at least twenty phone numbers by heart. And at least that many addresses. I drove cross-country by myself in the mid 90s with only a road atlas and my general good sense of where I was going. 

Today, if I didn’t have to put my phone and address on government and medical forms I’d probably have to scour my brain to remember where I live and how to reach me. In fact, there have been times while I was filling out paperwork and I needed to add my wife’s phone number and birthdate and had to double check her info on my iPhone.

Most of us no longer have to physically dial a phone number anymore. If it’s not saved as a preset, we can simply ask Siri/Google/Alexa to “Call Mom - landline.” 

For fear of becoming one of those cranky “back in my day” curmudgeons, I will try and not blame technology for what seems like a global memory shortage. Maybe it’s just me who forgets the name of someone the second I’m introduced to them. Maybe it’s just me who walks into the bathroom, opens a drawer and stares blankly at the contents, wondering which of the items he meant to retrieve. Maybe it’s only me who drives two exits past his destination before he remembers why he’d gotten into the car in the first place. 

Can I blame Steve Jobs? Jeff Bezos? Sergey Brin?

Do 25 year-olds do this too? Are we losing the ability to remember basic information simply from having it all at our fingertips?

Are we destined to hide our collective heads in the cloud, perpetually searching for our stored memories?

And what does the great Peter Gabriel have to say about all this?

I DON’T REMEMBER

I don’t remember, I don’t recall

I got no memory of anything at all

I don’t remember, I don’t recall

I got no memory of anything, anything at all

These lyrics—the chorus, and the source of my recent earworm—taken alone don’t say all that much about what this foreboding song (on Gabriel’s third self-titled album, often referred to as “Melty Face”) is about. 

The first verse, though, gives the listener a better idea of the darker, more dystopic sonic picture that Gabriel is painting. 

I got no means to show identification

I got no papers show you what I am

You’ll have to take me just the way that you find me

What’s gone is gone and I do not give a damn

Is it about a person who wakes up with amnesia? Has the narrator been captured by the authorities in a fascist regime and has intentionally erased all links to his prior life? 

Like with a number of Gabriel songs, his lyrics tend to leave room for interpretation. He’s more interested in engaging with his listeners’ bodies as much as their minds. 

The creeping bass-line, played by Tony Levin (using the Chapman Stick, which has a wide fretboard and eight, 10, or 12 strings) can be felt deep in the gut, causing an unnerving queasiness. The guitars, played by Robert Fripp (of King Crimson fame) and Dave Gregory (of XTC) sound, alternately, like stabbing guttural riffs and single note crescendoing screams. To me they sound like additional voices here, creating a chorus of sorts with Gabriel’s scratchy, dramatic tones. And drummer Jerry Marotta’s cymbal-free rhythms sound militaristic in their simple and insistent charge. 

Tony Levin playing the Chapman stick

I distinctly remember this song being used in the film Birdy, the great Alan Parker film from 1984 starring Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage. The soundtrack, composed by Peter Gabriel, also incorporated several songs from his back catalog. 

In the present day portion of the film, Matthew Modine’s character is locked away in a dingy mental hospital, unwilling or maybe unable to speak and only moves his body in ways that mimic birds, which he used to study and keep at his home as a kid and high-school student. His younger self identified with birds to such an extent, that he was single-mindedly determined to figure out a way to fly himself.

When he and his best friend (Cage) go off to war in Vietnam, Cage returns home with physical wounds but Modine’s wounds are psychological. 

“I Don’t Remember,” as used in the film, symbolizes Modine’s anguish at witnessing unbearable violence and destruction; he has to shut himself off entirely so that he doesn’t have to remember the horrors of war. So he reverts back to his bird-like self. 

If you haven’t seen Birdy, it really holds up almost 40 years later. And Peter Gabriel’s music, cinematic in its own right, perfectly matches the emotional journeys the two main characters go through, from kids goofing off in the early 1960s to being drafted and sent to fight a war neither of them is prepared for. 

(Note: I just did further research into this and “I Don’t Remember” is not listed in the film’s soundtrack. I’m leaving this in as it’s 2am and also it fits the theme of the piece.)

Can we fear losing our memory while at the same time wishing to forget the most painful moments of our lives? Where do those dichotomous lines intersect? Is it possible that by pushing away the memories we want to forget we are damaging and altering the memories we want to keep? 

I have been taking steps to proactively diminish the potentiality of developing dementia. But I am realizing that I need to focus on my mental health as much as my physical health. 

Perhaps if we are able to process our traumatic memories by facing them (in a supportive, therapeutic environment) instead of avoiding them, it will not only help us move forward, but also serve to prevent future health concerns (like dementia) when we get older too.