It’s 8:30 pm on August 15th, 2021. I’m outside. Slowly watching the sun go down.
We had my in-laws over, so my wife is rightly exhausted and has gone upstairs to bed.
I just overheard my daughter, who is just 30 feet away from me on an outdoor lounger saying, “yeah, but have you seen the movie?” to one of her friends online on her MacBook Air. I have absolutely no clue who or what she is referring to.
So, what?
I just earlier picked up my iPhone and one of its notifications was “Photos”.
It said “On this day 14 years ago. 15th August 2007”. It was a photo of me. Just. Me. `
Zero memory.
It was taken just over one year before we had our now 13 year old. It’s a photo of me in a restaurant (looking much larger, like all my pre-March 2014 photos), trying to eat a green olive (I hate olives), so I’m guessing maybe a trip to Italy.
But it’s a guess. I remember a trip around Italy, Tuscany, etc. I also remember going to Sonoma Valley, staying in some fantastic rental before the kids were born, on the way to Las Vegas with my wife’s parents.
If you put me on the spot, I’d struggle to say where the below photo was taken. It’s Italy, somewhere in Italy. I can look it up later using the Photos app on a Mac, I suppose.
I don’t know if this is a result of my autoimmune encephalitis event from March 2014, which put me into a one month coma and probably wiped out parts of my memory, one which has left me with intractable epilepsy and all of the anti-seizure drugs I take as a result. It’s probably a combination of all three.
Not recognizing, looking at random pages and troves of old footage, is hard. It leaves you feeling completely shredded. My iPhone does it to me daily… yes, daily. I suppose in some ways, it’s good; hopefully, of course, because the end goal is that they do bring back hoards of good memories.
Luckily my memory gaps appear to be just that: gaps now in our new digital world. Weirdly, prior to the advent of the digital camera or smartphone, my memory is pretty intact. It is strangely impacted shortly after the demise of hard photos or faxes, when we didn’t have social media or Flickr Photos.
So, weirdly my memories from some pre-digital, long time ago, are mostly intact. School, stuff after that, marriage, engagement, the great trips, and things before having kids. But there is a weird block, which increases gradually to March 2014. When it comes to recent stuff, I need a great degree of concentration on my part, and my wife also helps.
Which is lucky.
It’s quite amazing because I have no issues working (as in actually working… doing my job). It took me a short while, but work is just now… well, easy.
But, I just cannot remember simple things, for example, at home, like “Ok, where did I leave my camera again?”
Not uncommon for someone at my age?
But it’s uncommon if I’m looking at the camera. Sometimes, like anyone, it will be “Oh, here’s my camera!”
But sometimes it will be me looking at the camera. I know what it does, and maybe the name begins with “c,” but I cannot say the name. So I’ll say, “Hi, it’s here. The thing we use to take photos!” (Immediate distraction: “And hey, it’s in great condition!!”)
Or, in another scenario, in the morning, my kids will make breakfast themselves. Great. That, in theory, is an easy one but I’ll look at the toaster and say “Hey, just throw your bread to heat it in this bread heater.”
Because while I’m looking at a toaster in front of me and I know what it does, I cannot verbalize what to call it. It’s like I see (hey, there’s a toaster!) but then cannot say “toaster”. I don’t know what the thing’s name is in front of me. So… “Just heat you’re bread in there for a few minutes.” That’s my escape.
I sometimes think I’m a narcissist because all I can remember is the stuff about me. I find it hard sometimes to take in all the reminders and detail of everything else unless I need to because my memory cannot handle it all. That brings me to a level of narcissism which I don’t like.
But just seeing that photo tonight on my iPhone and my daughter at the same time saying, and me hearing, “Have you seen the movie?”
Well, I guess I wish I had.
Chris Garrod, December 2021