Absent stroke it happens slowly and you get used to it step by inexorable step. Yes, if one becomes truly senile, that’s an existential crisis. if your shit is together enough to have one. Your dog probably can’t have such a crisis; it isn’t smart enough to notice and never will be.
Or at least that’s the comforting story I tell myself as I watch the vigor of youth slowly fade away.
I should mention that her long term memory is so far unaffected. But short term is shot. Still, she has managed to keep in mind that I have a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday.
After spending years teasing my husband because he writes everything down, I’ve started doing it myself, and the cellphone is a godsend. I always kept a grocery list on the refrigerator. Originally, it was a magnetic notepad, and I’d tear the page off when I headed to the store, but I switched to using a whiteboard and taking a picture of it. When I get to the store, I open the image in Photo Editor and cross off the items as I pick them up.
My Wife and I are both 62. I’m a GIS programmer, my wife a real estate appraiser. So lots of numbers for both of us. But we use different logic tools in our jobs.
I’m not slowing down mentally (well, maybe a bit), but the world is speeding up. Knowing that I’ll be retiring in a few years, I’m trying to not get too involved in big projects. Others need to step up. I’ll help of course.
I’ve a friend that came back to work after she retired. Now she seems stuck. And another that worked until he didn’t show up. The wellness check had predictable results.
But back to mental acuity. And retirement. My wife and I play a lot of chess and or cribbage almost every night. I can feel that it helps keep me sharp. My job requires spatial analysis. So does chess. My Wife’s job is more number orientated, she does better in cribbage. I do better in chess.
And what’s great is that when we retire, and likely become more homebound, we will have these activities.
You should have met my parents: the evenings we had watching TV:
“Isn’t that whatsername -you know, used to be in that thing with the sister, and there was a murder, oh what’s her name - you remember? You must do…”
And so on. But they both lived well into their 80s with plenty of their marbles still in good order.
Wife and I have similar conversations that can go on quite long, and no one listening in would know what we are talking about. Sometimes we don’t know either and in the end find out we had no idea what the other was trying to say. These are things marriages are made out of.
I can attest that the only thing worse than being 60-something and having that sort of convo with someone you’ve lived with for 30-something years is …
Having that same convo with someone you’ve only lived with for <2 years. The vast amount of unshared context and the small amount of shared context makes all that 10x more difficult. And 10x more irritating.
Does cleaning out the sink trap under the kitchen bench, and then checking to see how the water drains BEFORE reassembling and reattaching the trap count?
I’d call that “par for the course” …
Of course.
I’ve run water from the tap, through the open drain and into a bucket, then dumped the bucket into the sink.
You may have to create a mental image of that whole process to appreciate how ridiculous it is.
mmm
I’ve done this, and I’m 38. If this counts as mental decay, I’m screwed. Instead I think I’ll file it under my long list of “boneheaded DIY mistakes”. Experience is that thing you get just after you really need it. The trick is not doing it a second time.
Me too. Each of those mistakes, and all at a vigorous adult age.
The idea that a drain makes stuff go “away” is so ingrained that even while working on it, excess water just naturally goes down there. Oops.
A big thank you to all of you that have shared in this thread. I’m on the backside of my 50’s, and have a family with a history of Alzheimers. Hearing a lot of your stories makes me feel not so bad. 
A friend of mine told me he wanted to write a story with me in it. He asked me how I would react to somebody who came in the room and started talking completely out-of-this-world topics.
I told him “To be perfectly honest, I would assume I met this person before. but forgot who he was.”
Me: (Holding out a vegetable) What do you call this?
Homie: (Looking worried) Why, that would be a shallot.
Me: Thank you! I got the word “scallop” in my head and just couldn’t get past it.
This happens once a week or so. I’ll get to a word frustratingly close to the one I want, and my brain just refuses to keep looking for the right one. I am a well-masked stutterer, so have always had a slightly halting speaking style. But that was because the word wouldn’t come out, not because I didn’t know what it was. Same symptoms, different cause.
Every morning I do a series of word games (Wordle, Quordle, Waffle, and so forth) It is amazing how differently my brain responds on different days. Sometimes I am the mozart of these games - the answers just come immediately, with no need for thought or pause, I just blaze through them. Other days I’m the Sherlock Holmes, strategy, letter combinations and the process of elimination lead me to the answers in the nick of time. But there are days when I look at them and just utterly flummoxed - an absolute dullard. I generally close them up and go get a big cup of water, which helps. Having that daily routine gives me an excellent gauge of where I stand though.
Also, once a year I run through a series of arithmetic courses on the Khan Academy to keep my head in the game. In my business, being able to do large/long sums and averages quickly in your head is a huge advantage, so I try to stay agile. This year I went through a major thyroid crisis, and when I tried to start the courses I realized I was going to have to wait until the med.s were titrated up. (A ridiculously and enragingly slow process.) I was shocked at the things that were hard for me. It was a frightening look at old age.
And lastly, I’ll just say that these spots on my hands are weird-looking. They really are the color and texture of liver.
ETA: I am mid-fifties
My mind is pretty sharp still. But of course I am not yet ancient. If you think you might have “subjective cognitive impairment” it can possibly be improved by increasing social activity, practicing mindfulness, exercise, better diet, more reading, learning another language, learning a physical skill like yoga or dancing, challenging the mind with puzzles, getting a pet or leaving an appropriate sacrifice to the Old Ones.
It’s kind of drafty in here. Do you think it’s kind of drafty in here?
I’ve always been one of those “book smart, not street smart” sort of people. I make dumb mistakes all the time. So far I have survived them. I’ve also been pretty awful at mental math for as long as I’ve been alive. Generally anything with a whiff of time pressure, my brain shuts down.
Is it getting worse? I think so. I think it really depends on how well rested I am, whether I’m properly nourished etc. And I think that’s the main difference so far. It used to be I could operate just fine in all conditions, and now it has to be the right conditions.
That’s the all around decline we experience in aging. Fewer and fewer good days when we can operate at our best.
Now sometimes we’re just looking at failure to learn when we were young. Not going to name any screw-ups in particular, but I was pretty young when I learned not to check a sink drain when the trap is disconnected so it’s not something I’ll do now when I’m old. Oopsy, another senior moment there, I accidently did name one of the screw ups.
I am 64 and for the last five or ten years have had a hell of a time with celebrities’ names. I even did the Alzheimer’s test (the one that Trump bragged about, in fact) and passed without any indication of cognitive decay.
At any rate I could be talking about “Groundhog Day” while struggling to remember Bill Murray’s name. It bugs the hell out of me and, notwithstanding my Alzheimer’s test results, still worries me a bit.
I’ve finished the New York Times Sunday crossword under thirty minutes more than fifty times. Never did that ten or twenty years ago, not even once.