Not to Twilight, but to Midnight : Lost words, forgotten memories; then the thief that is Alzheimer’s takes even the consciousness of the life that once was.

There have been lots of articles recently about our aging brains. Experts offer advice on how to keep the mind sharp, but I resent their notion of “use it or lose it.” They make it seem we are to blame for mental decay. Sadly, many use and still lose.

Some of the smartest, most active people I’ve known suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. In her 60s, my secretary of many years gave up her beloved typewriter and entered the computer age. In her free time, she audited literature classes, went for walks and sold her art at craft fairs. Yet she descended quickly into dementia and today lies in bed unknowing and almost unknowable. In spite of decades of rigorous intellectual exercise, two Caltech professors are afflicted with Alzheimer’s. Many of us know friends and relatives who did everything possible to stay mentally agile, and yet (to alter Hamlet’s words) memory no longer holds a seat in their distracted globes.

To lose our memories is to lose ourselves--all those experiences and relationships that make us who we are. Alzheimer’s is a thief who grows bolder as the months pass. At first, he pilfers petty sums. Names. The right word. Then, slyly, he starts to steal more. The way home. How to do familiar tasks. Ultimately, he plunders identity and, turning from robber to abductor, snatches from the family one of its own.

President Reagan showed courage when he revealed his Alzheimer’s. But he errs by calling it “the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life.” His words make it sound like a pleasant twilight stroll. In truth, it’s a terrifying plunge into the void of midnight.

Lately, my mother has become confused and can’t recall certain things. Does she have Alzheimer’s? I’m not sure. Our family can’t bear to attach that label to her. But we do know she’s beginning to drink from Lethe, that slow and silent stream in Hades. My mother still remembers that she can’t remember. But what will it be like if she forgets that she forgets? What happens when memory is no longer the warder of the brain and even the consciousness of loss vanishes?

For Christmas, I went to my sister’s in Montana, as did my mother, Carlye, and my father, Joy. The house teemed with kids, cats, goats, geese, parrots, peacocks, rabbits and nine dogs. Although my sister and her husband are used to the tumult, my parents and I were a bit rattled. There were moments when my mother looked lost and dazed. If my father left the room, she immediately asked, “Where is Joy?” She repeated this inquiry so often that eventually it ceased to be a question about my father’s whereabouts and became an inquiry into the nature of happiness.

My mother was a high school English teacher who loved her students and her subject. Although she retired some years ago, she continued to study. She belonged to a play-reading group, took French lessons and, at 75, learned how to dive. Now, she is close to 80, and the activity has failed to hold back the darkness.

Mothers and daughters create ways to be close even when apart. My mother and I used to memorize the same poems. One of the last lyrics we learned by heart was Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird,” which ends, “The question that he frames in all but words/Is what to make of a diminished thing.” I never thought the diminished thing would be my mother’s memory.

On Christmas afternoon, I sit outside with my mother in the last of the sun. We talk for a while. I recite the first line of “The Oven Bird.” My mother seems puzzled. I finish the sonnet. “That’s beautiful,” she says. “Who wrote it?” “Frost,” I tell her. “Yes,” she says, “that’s why it’s getting so cold.” Words shift their places and meanings, almost as in a poem, but with a deep sadness running through the lines.

When I return from the holidays, I have terrible dreams. In one, I grab my mother by her thin shoulders and shake her violently, trying to make her head snap into its old order. “I know the poems are in there,” I shout at her. “I’ll force them out.” In the morning, I’m miserable. I want to forget the nightmare, but I can’t. I call my mother for reassurance. She recognizes me instantly and there’s so much love in the touch of her voice. I frame the question every child needs to ask. “Mama,” I say, “you won’t ever forget me, will you?” “Never,” she answers, “never.” And I believe her because I have to.