Keeper of Her Memories: Friendship in the Shadow of Dementia

There are friendships that teach you things when you’re young — how to share crayons, how to keep secrets, how to be loyal even when you’re mad. And then there are friendships that teach you things decades later, lessons you never expected to need. Jean’s best friend since kindergarten is teaching her the limits of her patience now. Yesterday she called Jean fifteen time, and had she answered each call, they would have been as fresh to Nancy as the first. Dementia has taken her memory, but not her need for connection. Jean got a little short with her on one of those calls — but Nancy didn’t remember it. Maybe that’s the grace and mercy in all of this...AI

I call Nancy my best friend since kindergarten, where we bonded over the sandbox. It was a large wooden box up on legs, filled with beach sand and assorted toys for the boys to build roads and moats for the sandcastles we girls made. Water was involved, and so were boxes and tin cans—our architectural building tools—and we had a cardboard drawbridge. Kindergarten in the ‘40s was nothing like it is today. It was more like daycare: story time, play time, and learning how to get along. If we learned anything academic, it didn’t register in my memory bank.

Nancy lived around the corner, and we walked to and from school every day from kindergarten through high school graduation — except for a two‑week period when we weren’t speaking. Try as I might, I can’t remember what we were fighting about. If I hadn’t destroyed most of my diaries when I moved into my continuum care community, I could have looked it up. I was a regular Laura Ingalls back in my teens, only instead of writing about frontier life I chronicled the movies we saw, the records we bought, the boys who looked our way, and other silly fluff no one would care about even if those diaries had survived two hundred years.

Nancy doesn’t remember that fight, let alone what caused it. She has dementia now, and if she calls her sons and nieces as often as she calls me, I feel sorry for them. Yesterday she called me fifteen times — not her record. I usually answer once a day and we talk for 12 to 17 minutes. But yesterday I broke my own rule and answered a second time. I wish I hadn’t.

We had just hung up from a half‑hour conversation where I told her about a Mahjong class I was teaching that afternoon. I thought the extra‑long chat might keep her from repeat dialing while I was teaching. It didn’t. When I answered the second time, I let my annoyance show as I told her my class was starting in a few minutes. “Oh, what class is that?” she asked. "We’ll talk tomorrow," I replied then hung up without saying goodbye. 

The next day she was her normal cheerful self, asking how my day was going. I didn’t bother apologizing — she wouldn’t have remembered me hanging up on her any more than she remembers our teenage fight. It’s funny how memory works as people settle deeper into Dementia Village. Nancy can still talk recipes and cooking, one of my least favorite topics. But she was always my go‑to person for anything resembling entertaining. She spent most of her adult life creating fabulous menus and dinner parties in Washington, D.C. Her husband was an economics adviser who worked in the White House when the Democrats were in office and at the Brookings Institution when they weren’t. She loved china and linens and had seven or eight complete sets of dishes to prove it. I, on the other hand, fell apart at the thought of planning a party. And I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I planned a party — assuming I had lost two of my digits chopping cucumbers.

Now that she’s been moved to an Assisted Living facility, she often tells me she feels better after she talks to me. I don’t tell her she leaves me exhausted. We’ve been friends too long for that kind of honesty. Even my brother, when I saw him a couple of times a week down in our Memory Care building, didn’t wear me out like Nancy’s calls do. And they both sang the same songs: the Oh, How I Want to go Home blues and the I don’t Belong Here! protest march.

I also never told her about the time she flew from D.C. to Michigan after Don died and I had to run out and buy a stack of linen napkins to match my collection of antique diner dishes because I knew she thought paper napkins were beyond tacky. She would have died of cardiac arrest if she knew — gasp! — that sometimes I even used paper towels. She wanted to see me with her own eyes to know I was okay. That’s the kind of friend she was.

We were opposites in many ways. Don and I were blue‑collar; Nancy and her husband were white‑collar. They had children; we didn’t. She ignored politics completely; I loved talking about them. She loved to shop; I was allergic to the the upscale stores we'd go when she was in town. But our roots bound us together. And despite the miles between us, we could always sense when the other was stressed and needed a phone call.

I’ve been lucky to have two best friends in my life. One I met in kindergarten, and we were two peas in a pod until she married and moved out of state. For a couple of years, I resented her husband for taking her away. I missed having a best friend until Don came along and took on that role. Now, looking back, I wonder if Nancy and I had lived in the same city all these years, how that might have affected our marriages or friendship. We taught each other how to be loyal best friends, and we transferred that skill to our spouses. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think it’s possible to have two best friends at the same time. And a spouse will usually — rightly so — come first because you’re building a life together.

On the other hand, none of us can be everything to everyone. And as we age, our roles change. A spouse becomes a caregiver. A child or niece becomes our decision‑maker. A friend, like me, becomes a shoulder to cry on when the “mean children” won’t let you go back home. I’m also the only person still alive who knew Nancy during her first twenty‑five years on earth. By default, I’m the only one left who can help her reach back into those years. Searching for those memories in the dark corners of my mind so I can ask, “Do you remember the time…” might exhaust me, but it also makes me feel useful. I accept that new role with both sadness and pride that I still know where the drawbridge went in that old kindergarten sandbox. ©

Photo: The two of us, circa late 1950s. 

The Serendipity of Crossing Paths — Then and Now

Follow Jean as she reflects on how a viral quote about destiny and connection unexpectedly intertwined with a moment from her own past. What began as a simple search for proper attribution — the kind of rabbit hole she falls into with Olympic‑level skill — turned into a walk that reminded her how the roads we choose, and even the ones we avoid, sometimes lead us straight to the people and moments that shaped us the most. In this piece, she follows that thread of serendipity all the way to a dusty construction site and a quiet, unexpected smile… AL

There’s a lovely viral quote going around that I now know is attributed to a blogger named Darius Roman. It goes like this:

In English they say, “I’m lucky to have you.” In poetry they say, “Out of all the people the world has created, of all the roads I could have taken, and all the lives I could have lived, some miracle of timing allowed my story to cross paths with yours.”

If you know me, you’ve already guessed I went down the proverbial rabbit hole to figure out who authored those words. I hate it when people don’t give proper credit to things they copy from one place and paste into their own corner of cyberspace. Even an “author unknown” is preferable to letting people assume the author is the person sharing quotes like this. If you do that, stop it.

After following several false leads, my good old friend Google AI finally found the target of my sleuthing. It describes Darius Roman as “a contemporary internet poet who achieved viral popularity on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. He is best known for his modern, romantic rewrites of common phrases.” Blah, blah, blah — whose “writing relies on accessible language (does that mean he doesn’t use big words?), grand romantic imagery, and themes of destiny, fate, and connection over sheer luck.” I swear, sometimes these AL bios sound like they were written by someone who got paid by the adjective.

The first time I read the quote, I hand‑copied it off my computer screen and carried it around with me on one of my daily walks around campus, trying to decide if I could turn it into a blog post. I do that sometimes for inspiration. Finally I gave up trying to figure out why this quote resonated so strongly with me and asked AI that question — and this was the answer:

Why It Resonates • Contrast: It starts with a simple, everyday phrase and upgrades it into deep gratitude. • Scale: It contrasts the vastness of the universe with a single, specific meeting. • Timing: It frames love not just as a choice, but as a rare accident of time.

Well, of course it does. I could have told you that… if I had sat in a corner from here to next week. Instead, I outsourced the thinking to AL, which at my age feels like a perfectly reasonable life choice.

Back to the walk: I took a route I rarely go on because it means spending a block in close proximity to a large construction zone. It was after dinner, so I assumed the workers had all gone home and it would be quiet enough to hear my own thoughts. I was wrong. A street sweeper was going back and forth, cleaning dirt off the future parking lot, moving around pallets of construction material, scaffolding, and other machinery. I set the brakes on my rollator and sat down to watch him work. Nothing says “wild night out” like parking your rollator to watch heavy machinery.

I had more than a passing interest in the machine across the street. My husband owned a street sweeper before his massive stroke and he used it to clean large malls and a multi‑plex theater around town. He even had a contract to clean the streets in a small nearby town. The sweeper I was watching, though, was 35 years newer than the one my husband had before the turn of the century. Don would have loved the fact that the newer one has water jets underneath that dampens the dirt before the gutter broom spins debris to the center broom that, in turn, spins it into the collection hopper. Street sweeping back in his day was dusty business — but he loved it. He loved big machinery, the bigger the better.

One of the blessings or curses — it can change from day to day — of getting old is that memory triggers come at you when you least expect them. Some days it’s sweet nostalgia, and other days it’s ‘why did my brain save that?’ It was like looking at a snapshot from the past when the man across the street stopped his work to raise a coffee cup to his lips while letting another vehicle go by. I’d seen my husband do the very same thing hundreds of times while he sat high in a street sweeper or front end loader seat.

It also occurred to me that I was experiencing a moment of serendipity. Had I taken my usual route around the lake, I wouldn’t have crossed paths with a memory trigger that brought a smile to my face. And I wouldn’t have been reminded of the simple truth behind Darius Roman’s sentiment — that out of all the people in the world and all the roads any of us might travel, sometimes a small miracle of timing lets our story intersect with someone who changes everything. ©

                                                         How do street sweepers work?

 

If you like Political Humor you might enjoy this AL created video about Trump's claiming to change the name of Lake Ontario. The creator has a Facebook page called Canadian Resistance Army and all of its videos make me laugh. 

On related political note: Google is no longer my good friend. Google Maps changed the name Lake Ontario to Lake America on their map and Mapquest didn't (at least not as of today). Boycott on for me.

The Bed I Make, the Dreams I Keep

There are seasons in life when the smallest habits — a made bed, a cup of coffee, a quiet morning — reveal bigger truths we didn’t know we were ready to face. Lately, Jean’s early‑morning routines have been bumping up against the deeper, older parts of her heart, the ones that still remember what it meant to belong to someone. And sometimes all it takes is a dream to remind her that grief has its own timetable… AI

It’s 7:30 AM. I’m sitting here with a cup of steaming-hot coffee, a load of clothes in the washer, and my bed is made. Who is this morning person I’m turning into? I’m on a 120‑day streak since I started using my Bi‑Pap machine — not only getting up like I’ve got a job to go to, but also making my bed. Before, there were many (if not most) times when my bed wouldn’t get made between laundry days. I’ve fallen into a routine that is both boring and pridefully pleasing at the same time.

Have you ever heard the commencement speech by retired Admiral William H. McRaven about changing the world by starting each day with your made bed? The core lessons in the speech, according to AI, are:

• First task: Making your bed means you finish the first task of your day right away.

• Small pride: This tiny win gives you a small sense of pride.

• Daily momentum: It pushes you to do one more task, then another, and another.

• Little things: It shows that the small things in life matter.

• Comfort at night: If you have a bad day, you return home to a bed you made, which gives you hope for tomorrow.

I first heard that speech back in 2014 when it went viral after he delivered it at the University of Texas. Although I didn’t implement the advice back then, I never forgot it. As someone in the YouTube comment section wrote: “Why don’t we have men like him running for president?” He really is an inspirational speaker.

Before it slips away, I need to write about the dream that woke me up at 7:00 this morning with tears in my eyes — because dreams like this are coming at me way too often to ignore whatever message is trying to surface.

In the dream, I had let myself into the cracker‑box of a house my husband lived in before we were married. I was gathering up his laundry to take home and wash when he came in with a pleasant young woman and her 10‑ or 12‑year‑old son. Don didn’t anything, but she was a regular chatterbox, telling me how happy she was to meet me and how I didn’t need to take his laundry anymore — she could do it. In the dream I was thinking, Oh my God, he’s moved on!

And that’s when I woke up, but I didn’t get up right away. I laid there thinking...until I had to pee, if you must know.

Don died fourteen years ago, and yet apparently I’m still emotionally attached. At least I’m not teary‑eyed at the lunch or dinner table the way a couple of my fellow residents are when the subject of dead spouses comes up. But maybe I should be, because I still seem to have unfinished business in the mourning department. He was My Person, as the young people say, the best friend I’ve ever had. And just once I’d like to dream about him where he’s happy to see me again. But no — in my dreams he’s always just out of reach, vaguely there, walking away, or I’m searching for him.

Back before the turn of the century I kept a dream diary because didn’t everyone back then dive into dream analysis? I quit when my dad was in the early stages of dementia and couldn’t tell the difference between his nighttime dreams and reality. That scared me, because my dreams were pretty wild back then — filled with colorful or arty‑farty escapades. If you’ve seen the Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come, you’ll get the picture. I spent several years learning how to transfer my night dreams to my conscious mind that now I can’t not do it.

So this morning I visited an online dictionary of dream symbolism and looked up “laundry.” It said: “Cleaning your clothes in your dream symbolizes your image in your life. You are trying to portray yourself in a different light where you feel more accepted. If you are organizing your laundry, this represents what you are trying to do with your thoughts and characteristics in your life.”

That explanation makes sense, but it also begs the question: does it matter that the laundry wasn’t mine, but his? That it was dirty laundry, not clean?

Another part of the dictionary says it’s extremely common to dream about someone we miss because we often have trouble expressing those same feelings in our waking life. That’s me. Stiff upper lip. I can do anything if I set my mind to it. After all, I got through 12½ years of caregiving a severely disabled husband and rebuilding our lives into something that gave him the best quality of life under the circumstances.

But the past is past. Or is it?

And maybe that’s what the dream was trying to tell me — not that I’m “done” with grief, or that I’ve reached some tidy stage of acceptance, but that I’m allowed to live the life I have now without feeling guilty that it’s easier and in a place that is both beautiful and safe. I know plenty of seniors who don’t get this kind of comfort or stability, and that knowledge sits heavy sometimes, like I’m benefiting from a trade I never wanted to make.

Maybe the real work isn’t saying goodbye to My Person — maybe it’s learning how to carry him forward while still letting myself enjoy the small, daily pleasures without feeling guilt. I may never get there. But the dreams keep pushing me as if to say, it’s okay to keep trying. ©