by Polly Nell Jones (© 2025)

Found it.  My hairbrush.  In the freezer.  It provoked a chuckle when I reached for the gelato and saw curly white frozen hair creating a delicate ethereal sculpture among the freezer burned veggie packages.  It was so pretty I almost forgot to take it out.  But after the amusement it made me pause, take things more seriously.

Yes, I had forgotten how to get home from the bank but the phone map thing worked.  There were the odd items in my grocery order: collagen powder (I must have read some beauty tip), tikka masala (was it inspired by that Bollywood movie I watched?), family pack paper plates (I don’t even use paper napkins!), value pack of crispy battered fish portions (what was I thinking?).  I began to carefully monitor how I ordered, like Santa’s list.  Checking it twice.  Everything began to have a trip wire to alert me of a “hair brush incident.”  I began to feel like a fugitive dodging this invisible pursuer who played annoying tricks on me. Gaslighting?

Since Chuck died Charlene (we called her Charlie) has been solicitous and sweet but she has her own life out on the left coast.  Oakland.  I’m not sure what she does with tech but she is successful and very busy.  How are you doing?  Busy.  Super Busy.   I’m not sure that it’s code for “too busy to come back east to visit” or “too busy to have you come out here.”  She has lots of money but no time.  No family of her own either.   She calls on Sunday like clockwork.  I have the time blocked boldly on a calendar I use ritually x-ing out each day to keep up to speed.  I’ve jotted notes in case she asks a question about what I did on such and such a day.  Does she suspect?  When that question in my mind arises it makes me wonder about paranoia.  Is this a symptom?  What would I be doing that is suspicious?  I’m good at covering up.  But I’m afraid that my lifelong skills at obfuscation are no longer useful to me.  Did I like my job?  Was I happily married?   Was I comfortable being a mother?  Did I ever want to be a mother?  What is the point of asking these questions anyway?

Now they bubble up in the early morning hours of awakeness.  It’s ironic that for the first time I’m pondering these existential questions but the mind, my mind, no longer tracks.  You know how a musician “lays down tracks” in a studio – I used to work in a radio station so I heard things like that – my “tracks” no longer produce sound, or in this case, memory.  When the question is posed the track is silent.

Charlie and I have always gotten along.  Neither of us are drama queens.  As a result I have no idea who she is nor she me.  Now I need to try to explain that the person who has inhabited me, perhaps not the one she even knows, is failing. For a moment I feel deep regret but then I guess I forget.  And in the end, do we really know ourselves?  And if we do, we still die.

At my annual physical I casually mentioned the hairbrush incident, offhandedly with a laugh. I noticed the young doctor didn’t join in the mirth of the moment.  I sat there, my bare legs dangling on the edge of the examining table (it has been decades since I’ve had to use the stirrups for that exam) looking down at my thin skin stretched more like a membrane on my bony tibias, noticing my cracked toenails.  She asked lots of questions which she typed into a laptop.  She replaced the old-timer who I had seen for decades.  He carried a clipboard and knew me inside and out.  Literally.  But people retire and move on.

“I’d like to set up a diagnostic cognitive exam so we can explore these, umm, glitches.  Does that sound good?”

Of course I agreed.  It only made sense.  I was fully aware of what might be happening and the one thing Chuck and I agreed on, and we didn’t agree on much, was that we didn’t want to be a burden to the family.  We had made all the arrangements, given Charlie the various powers to pay our bills and the authority to respect our wishes and not to be kept in a vegetative state.  The thought of it makes me cringe.  Vegetative state.

We don’t need to discuss the test.  I forgot the first appointment. Then I got angry at the insulting questions  as if they were deliberately trying to trip me up with instructions to remember things without allowing me to write them down.  Talking about “biomarkers” was very upsetting.

There were mornings when I thought I would be going to work at the radio station where disc jockeys put together sound mosaics during their shifts to create moods with their voices, some soothing (those who enjoyed working in the depths of night when the station was all but empty), others lively.  Their booth was filled with records and albums categorized in a library around them. They knew how to segue those moods of a downbeat into another entirely different sound with the same idea.  Like canonical hours in a monastery. Imagine the miracle of a box on the table bringing the world into your house, connecting us to a larger place while displacing our small localized world with that of something more important.  Here was something empowering our lives by confiding in us about events beyond our insignificant existence, including us in “the latest” and opening the door not only to the restless few who were born chaffing at the bit to see distant shores, but also to the rest of us who had a vague notion of dissatisfaction with the daily toil.  And then my job came in.  The advertising.

I didn’t have anything to do with the art of radio but like everything, money is necessary to make it happen.  My desk functioned as command central for the airwaves of the call letters.  It wasn’t me that said “we sold air.” A nice sales lady said that.  I can’t remember her name but I can remember her “look.”  Olive oil.  Sun.  Water.  Warmth.  Jewish.  I don’t know what this means anymore but that word pops into my head.  It must be a hair color?  Is it a language?  A place?  And I know that I took this invisible time that she sold in advertising and I put it on a schedule that interrupted carefully constructed music flow with suggestions for getting a car wash at thus and such a place, purchasing gifts at this mall, putting money in that bank.  I determined minute by minute what went out over the air and it was called traffic.

When I was younger I kept a dream journal.  You know those trends in life you take up for a year or two?  You don’t think that a life can be broken down into “periods” like a timeline in a history book, but if you live long enough you can.  Teen, newly wed, class mom, aerobics, marathon training, ceramics, bowling, bridge.   Recording my dreams made me wonder, where do dreams go? 

What I’m trying to explain is that in the middle of the night you wake up from a vivid dream.  You have been in a jungle with large leathery leaves brushing your shoulders and suddenly you are face to face with a huge snake and pow! you are awake with a vivid recollection of each scale on the creature’s slithering body, of the forked tongue that flickers in and out of its mouth and the unblinking eyes of deep black staring at you.  It is so real.  Your heart is pounding.  You fall back asleep and in the morning you wake up knowing you had a vivid dream but you can’t for the life of you remember what it was.  So where did it go?

This is how I feel.  Except that the dream I can’t remember is my life.  Who I am.  I’m functioning normally but the blank spaces are getting larger.  The place where the dream goes that I can’t access is growing.

After a morning spent looking for shoes that I already had on my feet I got the idea to kill myself.  There was no morbidity involved.  Just a simple acceptance of the fact that I had the dreaded “thing” we all fear.  I knew it before the doctor called and asked me to bring someone with me to the follow-up appointment as if I needed a witness to hear what was so evident.  How insulting.  After a lifetime of control (I dictated the radio traffic!  I set the dinner time!  I organized vacations! I logged my periods!) hearing a diagnosis and query about family since I had gone alone, the future devastated me.

The fact is, I am dying.  Such a ridiculous statement!  We all are but this is different.  The person Charlie knows as her mother will die but live on as a duplicate who will not know her own daughter.  What kind of person will emerge?  Vanity makes me shudder at the visual of me sitting, slumping, staring blankly into space instead of whirring around busy, busy, busy.  Ego makes me outraged.  

I had a dream last night.  There was a long trestle table with a nautilus shell carved with the likeness of my childhood dog, a mutt named Ruff.  Next to that was a tortoise shell bowl filled with pomegranate seeds.  I reached out to try one and they dissolved into crimson juice pooling on the table.  I lay in bed happy I remembered the dream and then wondered why that one and not the others?

My family has a history of being addled in old age.  Senility.  A common thing and tolerated as they became fixtures in the house sitting on plastic.  Drooling a bit.  Mumbling, smiling for no reason.  We weren’t so in tune with hydration so perhaps they died of dehydration as much as anything.  Who knows?  But they didn’t linger so long.  I will no doubt fester in the place where I’ve purchased my slot.  My bin I call it.  They call it memory care but there are no memories.

During a Sunday call I casually dropped in the results of my tests to Charlie.  I had carefully scripted it so there was no confusion of the cognitive and physical declines.  I had recorded with bullet points the “incidents.”  I told her about the young doctor letting me know that rather than plateau which I had asked her about,  the condition would accelerate.

“But Mom you are in such great shape!” Charlie protested, vocalizing the same argument I had been making with myself.  “Are you sure?”

“Yes.  I can’t deny that the gas was turned off last month because I forgot to pay the bill.  I can’t deny that I’ve lost weight because I literally forget to eat.  I have to set three alarms to make sure I get out of bed.  I could go on.”

“Why haven’t you told me?  I’m coming out.”

So just like that she was able to fly to see me.  Work from my home.  I was still lucid enough to register the irony.

Don’t worry about me I told her when she arrived.  I won’t know anything.  But then I wondered what if I do?

In the gradual drift away from coherency, friends probably wonder why I haven’t called.  Why my cards didn’t arrive per usual at the holiday time.  Why I haven’t been to the sewing group.  The first time I wet my pants in public the gals quietly wiped the chair and walked me to the car.  “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?”  “Text when you get home.”  And when I didn’t and they called, I asked why were they calling and where we had been?  

Then I’m back.  But it gets less and less.  The large lists and the calendar on the kitchen counter don’t help me so much as confuse me and remind me that something has changed.  Charlie is taking care of the details I’ve neglected or forgotten about.   We agree.  It’s time.  

We packed the suitcase of clothes I wanted.  I chose not to take any keepsakes.  “Let’s keep this simple.” Charlie would be going through all the detritus of my life, her Dad’s, our life together.  The junk drawer, the cards I couldn’t bear to throw away.  Pretty stamps. Dried up rubber bands.  Old photographs meant to be labeled but now simply smiling faces staring out from the Rocky Mountain National Park welcome sign, snow capped peaks in the background, me with an unidentified man obviously dressed for summer weather.  Snow capped peaks in summer.  That hasn’t happened for awhile.  Who is that man she’ll wonder but the story of it will be lost forever.  

The thought kept occurring to me, “in the nick of time, in the nick of time” as I cut a piece of butter to make a cup of tea.  What nick of time?  Like the wake of a ship begins strong with frothy foam and a wide path, it eventually fades and is absorbed into the wide sea.  That’s how it felt. My life engulfed.

I told Charlie about my plan and she agreed to execute it.  So the letter was sent out right after entered my bin.

Dear Friends,

This is to announce that Nancy, the girl, woman, old lady you have all known is dead.   You may have noticed I’ve “not been myself” lately.  The past few years actually.  If I have offended you with rudeness I apologize.  The dreaded condition we all fear, wondering if forgetfulness is the beginning of something worse, has arrived.  In my case anyway.  Thankfully Chuck is not here to witness my decline.  Charlie is my stalwart and will need some loving kindness from you all.  I am counting on that.  

By the time you receive this I will be in my final living space, a personal “bin for dementia demise.”  I can hear the groans and “don’t give up” “atta girl” pep talks.  But just because I’m physically ticking doesn’t mean my spirit is still there.  It’s a strange strange place to be my friends, knowing that the world I used to inhabit is no longer accessible. You will be happy to know that Nancy died peacefully with Charlie at her side. I will admit to you that Charlie has composed this letter at my request.  I bought a notebook after it became apparent to me something was happening.  She is cobbling together these words from thoughts I’ve been jotting down as the world has been slipping away. But you know I always have a plan and here it is.

I am inviting you to my wake.  Trust me, I’m excited to host a party I don’t have to attend.   I’ve set aside some money and Charlie will be sending invitations and a date.  It’s my funeral you see because I’ve died and it’s important for you to have a celebration of life on my behalf. Charlie has organized the appropriate “fun photos” of my life’s highlights.

Drink and be merry!  There will be lots of booze.  Dress casual.  Laugh about the good times we’ve shared, the trips, the walks, the books, the cries, the food, the drink, the non-drink, the diets, the bad hair, the love.

I have invited a new person who looks just like me.  You might mistake her for Nancy. For the record, I have never liked that name which may have contributed to the pricklier side of her nature. This is Nancy’s celebration of a life that has passed on.   You can grieve or be relieved but just know that when you see a stranger who looks like Nancy introduce yourself because she doesn’t know anyone.  Good news.  You can be anyone you want with her.  Here’s another fun fact, she will be all new to you too.  There will be no guilt if you don’t visit her.  She doesn’t care.  But if you do, bring chocolate.  Read her poetry.  Take her out on the grounds to watch squirrels.  I think this new person will be easy to amuse unlike her doppelganger.

This stranger in our midst has arrived at my funeral in the first phase of an adventure.  She might be confused and Charlie has promised to take her back to her safe place if the prospect of embarrassment emerges.  Charlie has agreed to reinvent herself with this new relationship which might be quite fun for her!  No longer a daughter per se, she can tell me any crazy thing.  Imagine being able to reinvent yourself!  Maybe this is the greatest gift of all.  I have agreed to listen to whatever she wants to tell me, fact or fiction.  I hope I can respond but, again, no guilt, no expectations.   

What a wonderful life I’ve lived!   Such a privilege to know you all.  Of course I apologize for this ignominious exit without the proper good-bye but truth be told, I’ve been grasping each moment of clarity.  I can feel the sigh of relief some of you are feeling knowing that you’ve known and watched and remained silent, hoping it’s just a phase. 

But for me my friends it’s real.  So I am writing to say good-bye.  And this stranger who looks like me?  She is on a journey of discovery that she may or may not be able to share.  In any case she’s available to hear your stories and promises not to tell any secrets. Please gossip.

So when you see the person who looks like Nancy, remind yourself she has died and introduce yourself to Chloe.