The Unforgettable

When I was a kid, I enjoyed playing the geo-match game with my grandpa because he knows all the capitals of provinces or countries I have heard of. I still remember that awkward moment when he asked me, “what is the capital city of Qinghai province?” I confused it with Gansu province, saying “Lanzhou,” and then he laughed and corrected me, saying it is Xining. From a child’s perspective, I think my grandpa knows everything in the world because hey he even traveled to Ningxia, a distant province far from my hometown city.

I remember that it was always a midsummer night. We did not yet have air-conditioning but fans. I could hear the cicada chirping under the window lattice.

Now, we have air-conditioning four seasons in a year, and I understand why cicadas keep chirping in the summer. I study and live in a country that is way far away from my hometown city, compared to Ningxia. But when I try to talk to my grandpa again or play the old-time geo-match game, he can now hardly follow my words or even simply understand what I just said. I tell myself that is due to the Internet lagging. But no, I cannot be convinced: it is amnesia, Alzheimer’s, which is cruelly taking away my grandpa’s memories and soul as time goes by.

I don’t even know whether he can recognize me or not when I go back home next time. I don’t even know if my steps of getting home can ever compete with his speed of forgetting things.

Alzheimer’s has been haunting my grandpa’s life for years, but it was discovered as a jump scare. At first, I thought it was just common signs of elderly people rather than a disease — my grandpa started forgetting to check the mailbox in front of our courtyard and found it hard to recall what we’d eaten for lunch. I always play the joke with my parents, “I am too old to memorize my childhood things.” My grandpa hates such jokes and turns mad whenever we mention amnesia, but none of us in my family ever pays attention to such “signs.” All of this sounds just normal.

However, when things repeat too frequently, we might smell the abnormality. After I read about Alzheimer’s for the first time in my high school’s physiology textbook, I suddenly realized that all the abnormal normality — his more frequent amnesia, burst madness, and capricious anger — fit entirely the symptoms of Alzheimer’s described in the book. The doctor’s diagnosis confirmed my guess: it is Alzheimer’s and cerebellar atrophy, not just signs of getting old.

I then began to observe and, of course, as the doctor repeatedly prodded, to record his daily actions and symptoms of amnesia. Over the monthly logging, I ultimately realized how drastically he lost his short-term memory. He forgot my uncle’s good news that was just told on the phone. He falsely accused my grandma of “hiding” his favorite socks. He was angry about my decision to go to high school abroad — actually I was planning to go to college abroad, and the person who was supposed to go to high school was my little cousin. And sometimes, he even got confused on the way home.

My mum always says, to her I am always a kid. It is a beloved metaphor but also reflects my grandpa’s Alzheimer’s condition. His memories about other family members and me were paused at a decades-ago moment, during which time I was a kid. It is another midsummer night; right after dinner, I said goodnight to him. He reacted dully with a sluggish smile, and he asked me, “do I need to pick you up from the South Lake after school tomorrow?”

South Lake was the house my parents and I lived in about ten years ago. And the next day was a Sunday.

I said no, not as usual that other family members and I corrected his mistakes. But still, that moment had been shocking me for years. I cannot mimic his mindsets and inner activities because I can never imagine how a person could ever fail to recall what he or she just ate for breakfast but never forget the granddaughter’s childhood habits.

Indeed, I can never imagine such a thing until I suffer from similar symptoms because of Alzheimer’s or encephalanalosis. Moreover, I can clearly feel the boiling-frog process that the ruthless disease has been taking the grandpa I am familiar with away from my memory. The shocking findings then impacted my college application. I chose neurosciences and journalism as my intended majors because one’s ultimate goal is to solve my grandpa’s issues medically, and the other is to record people’s history within multimedia formats and to alternatively prolong the expiration date of people’s memory in physical methods.

Now, due to the pandemic, I cannot go back home before graduation. The only communication between my grandpa and me is my weekly video call with my parents. Sometimes, if they visit my grandpa, I will have the chance to see him from the few-inch-wide cell phone screen. Unfortunately, since his symptom of Alzheimer’s is irreversible and being severer, he is now hardly able to concentrate his attention on the small screen. He could no longer play my favorite geo-match game with me. The only thing I can do now is to check if he is all good and say hi. From time to time, as the nostalgia visits me at midnight, I ask myself if my dearest grandpa still remembers this granddaughter thousands of miles away. Another little voice then comes to my mind, saying, “he will definitely not forget you because you are always the ten-ish-year-old girl who gets confused in the geo-match games and needs pick-up after school.”

Yes, that’s because he forgets everything about his current life but love.