I should’ve known it was coming for me — the fog, the forgetting, the cognitive impairment. My father, his brother, their mother, their grandmother all had it... I just didn’t expect how it would come for me.
At 54, it seems my forgetting is linked to a neurodegenerative disease. But even before my own memory and language issues began, I’d written about and wondered what my own neurological inheritance might be.
In 1981, I spent several afternoons in the peacefully lamp-lit office of an elderly, retired professor and child psychologist and underwent a variety of aptitude tests and personality assessments. It turned out I was a “highly sensitive” 5th grader with the vocabulary of a high school senior.
While most of the kids in my Midwestern neighborhood rode their bikes, played flag football and Frogger, I was tucked away reading book after book. When I ran out of books, I’d spend entire afternoons seated cross-legged on the floor, poring over the pages of a set of hand-me-down Encyclopedia Britannicas. I dog-eared pages. I made notes in the margins on the Dalai Lama, the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 that registered a 9.2 on the Richter scale, and gladiolus — one of August’s (my) birth flowers that my paternal grandmother grew in her 4-H award-winning garden.
