Side effect #342

As I lay in bed this morning, just this side of awake, a task that I have not yet done came drifting into my consciousness.  That's not an uncommon event in my life, by any means, and it made me realize again that there are so very many side effects of losing Ramsy.  This one: memory lapses.

During the year that Ramsy was in treatment, all kinds of details and events and even relationships became peripheral.  This was natural and typical, I believe; when you suddenly have to organize crucial medical/financial/insurance details/appointments/paperwork and keep them organized, other things have to fall away.  After he died, there were all kinds of other new details/processes/experiences to deal with, and other things continued to fall away.  Your short-term memory only has so much space, apparently, and, like the PVR on our tv, will automatically delete other stuff to make room for the new stuff.

The distressing thing for me about this is that, although it's completely understandable and normal, it turns out that I actually have no control over which things my brain deletes.  One of those things is people's names, even the names of people I've known well for years.  I still experience moments of panic when I run into this person or that and realize that there is just a big empty spot where their name should be in my memory.  And if I'm pretty sure that, say, their name starts with an "L", I'm usually wrong.

Another weird thing my brain does is to fail to connect the dots between stored bits of information.  I will arrange to be in two different places at the same time, not because I forget about either appointment, but because my brain declines to take into account the fact that it takes more than four and a half seconds to drive from one place to the other.  Or another example: I do not forget personal stuff that my friends tell me - that is, when it comes up again in conversation, the information is not a surprise to me, or I recall that I did in fact know this at an earlier time, but I will have absolutely failed to think of it in the intervening time.

That really bothers me.  Partly because it's so annoying to have to say over and over, "I'm sorry, I'm going to be late," partly because it's disturbing to recognize that to some extent I am not in control of my own mind, and partly because in our home, people and relationships have been our focus and our actual work for 20 years and it upsets me that I would neglect to check in with people about important stuff in their lives.

I know that many people will say, "Don't be so hard on yourself during this stage," and I think that I am remembering to be kind to myself, to remember that this is a long and arduous process.  It's just a new process for me, and the twists and turns and complications continue both to surprise and to fascinate.  I think I just want to make a note of this for myself and for others: this, too, sucks - but it's ok.