I am in a state of mind when I am losing things. Put down my glasses and I don’t find them again. I am having to use Anna’s. Yesterday I was going to a meeting with social services and health about the support we are getting. I could not find a form, outlining the ‘care plan’. I searched for two hours but I still can’t find it, staring me in the face probably. Perhaps I can’t bear to look at it.
At work, if I lost an important document like that, I would be worried. We talk about losing our mind. Anna wrote about how her unfaithful brain left her, as she said. ‘Maybe it left itself behind with my briefcase, full of a career built on thinking, and forgotten on an underground train.’
I have a simple theory about losing things, that it happens when your mind has had enough. I remember some years ago getting up very early in the morning to go to an important meeting outside of London. I had everything ready, kissed Anna as she slept, and went to go out the front door. No car keys. I looked, at first urgently and then with increasing panic, trying to remember where I might have put them down, what clothes I had been wearing, etc. . I woke Anna and together we searched. Finally I ran off down the road to catch a bus to the station – I arrived at my meeting, two minutes late. When I git home that evening, I found the keys: they were on a hook by the front door, exactly where they should have been. I reflected on this madness, and thought that if I was that agitated it was better that I did not drive. Who knows, I might have had an accident. The failure of my mind may have saved me that day.
But the failure of Anna’s mind – what is that saving her? She goes round in circles, literally, round and round the room, trying to complete a thought. ‘It’s all from the garden’. She means she had not liked a vegetarian dish the carer had prepared. That we can understand, but now she is struggling with something else … ‘You know, we were talking about it!’ We were talking about all kinds of things, clothes, friends. I make a guess, I make a list of guesses. Her frustration is acute. ‘You know, you know!’ But I don’’t. The thought is lost without a thinker.