A Bout of Amnesia

On a Monday night in April 2021, my sister texted me: “Have you talked to mom?”

It felt unsettling. If it were good news (“Have you talked to mom? She won the lottery!”), my sister would have said so. I ran through my mental checklist to see if there were any reasons I should have spoken with my mom. Had I forgotten Mother’s Day? Is it her birthday? My birthday? Once I concluded that I hadn’t (again) been derelict in my duties as Attentive Adult Son, I realized something must be very wrong.

Whether it’s through nature or nurture, my parents share a deep, New England desire to project that. everything is fine, there’s nothing to worry about. My mother will sometimes delay the relaying of bad information until the situation has stabilized or been resolved. My father, a glazier who installed glass storefronts for over a decade, developed a sense of stoicism as a tool in his trade. He is reluctant to seek treatment or disclose his professional walk-it off-itude. AnyA medical condition. He may try to tolerate discomfort for as long and hope it goes away.

So every few years my father ends up gritting his teeth until, for example, a migraine becomes so powerful that he can’t sit up or his thumb fails to stop bleeding after a vegetable-chopping incident. My mother then takes him to the hospital when his energy is exhausted. After that, he updates me and my sister once things settle down. I was aware that such a possibility existed and called my mother. It is oftenBy the way.

She had earlier that day told me by phone that my father had moved some framed photos from the shelf where they were for years to a different spot in the family area. Twenty minutes later, he asked my mother why the pictures weren’t in their usual place.

He recognized her and knew the location of their home. However, it seemed that his brain had lost the past few months and much of the preceding year. He repeatedly expressed concern that he had forgotten his sister’s birthday, which he hadn’t missed at all (but I had … whoops).

My dad was again unable to refuse a trip into the hospital so my mom took him. He was puzzled by the face masks being worn at the E.R.

He did not seem to be able to express his confusion in a coherent manner. wake-up-sheeple anti-mask tone. When he was asked a series of memory assessment questions, he couldn’t identify the day of the week, but he did know that Joe Biden was the sitting president.

All I could do was worry. I wanted to drive my car from my Brooklyn apartment to the Boston Hospital, but I was unable to do so. what? Because I wasn’t yet fully vaccinated (curse my relative youth and good health!My presence would have been more of an inconvenience to my parents than a comfort. The hospital wouldn’t have even allowed me inside. I became a supernova of anxiety due to my acute concern and the ambient coronavirus stress.

My family had been more cautious than most during the pandemic. Which is to say: When my father checked into the hospital, I hadn’t seen my parents in nearly a year and a half, and it had not occurred to me that some OtherThey could be struck with medical misfortune.

I’d been caught with my guard down. I felt the strain of terror one experiences when confronted with the fact that a loved one’s brain might be (to use a clinical term) dunzo. It’s hard not to assume the worst; and the worst, in this case, seemed unspeakably bad. I was too nervous to even offer hypotheses about my dad’s condition to my wife, as if theorizing out loud would alchemize my fear into reality.

That night I slept, but mostly didn’t, cellphone clutched to my chest with the ringer volume cranked all the way up. Two hundred miles away, my mom, sitting awake in a chair in the hospital room, didn’t have reception. Because of Covid protocols, she wasn’t allowed to go into the hallway where I could reach her if needed. But of course she didn’t tell me that.

The next morning, the doctors returned with test results. My dad was suffering amnesia, which I associate with 20th-century television shows. Someone is hit on the head with a coconut, and they forget their name. I wondered if doctors had tried to hit my father with a second coconut. This was Gilligan’s treatment.

My father was particularly in the throes. transient global amnesiaA condition that sounds like you are so rich you forget where you own property. (“Is the summer house on Turks … or Caicos?) In reality, transient global amnesia is a form of short-term memory loss that comes on quickly and completely (hence the “global”) and disappears within a day or two (i.e., transient).

The doctors told us that once a bout of transient global amnesia passes, it isn’t expected to recur, but they don’t really know what causes it. They believe the two conditions might be related because they sometimes appear simultaneously with a severe migraine.

All of this was relayed by my mother via text messages. Everything felt worse due to the distance that was made impossible by circumstances. I later read that transient global amnesia can also occur simultaneously with a powerful orgasm, and if that’s true, kudos to my parents, I guess!

Around lunchtime on Tuesday, my father’s memory returned all at once. Technically, his strategy to simply wait out a malady was a success.

My mom knew that he was fully back when he asked whether they’d been Covid-tested at the hospital. He didn’t remember anything from his blackout. Wow,He said that as he filled in details about the previous day. Wow, wow!. She still cringes when I bring up my father’s lost night. She still feels the exhaustion and uncertainty so easily, so immediately.

My dad thinks that the whole thing is hilarious. Why wouldn’t he laugh? He wasn’t really there, so he never knew there was anything to worry about.

In some ways, he was more present than I was. Even though I was physically distant, I felt mentally present. I was stuck in limbo between my second and first vaccine doses. This made difficult questions even more difficult. How should we protect those we love from the painful truths? How can we be there? For the people we love when we can’t be there With them? Where do we put our anxiety when there’s no obvious outlet? The pandemic heightened this stress but didn’t create it. There will always be some circumstances. We can only be as close as the people we love.

The reasons my mom doesn’t want me to worry are the same reasons I always will.

Episode is a weekly column exploring a moment in a writer’s life. Josh Gondelman has worked as a writer for “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” and more recently as head writer and executive producer of “Desus & Mero.” His stand-up comedy special, “People Pleaser,” is available to stream.