The Aging Brain
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in July 2025.
My major moan about dementia is that we don’t know what it isn’t. I’m pretty sure when I can’t remember my password to gain entry to some internet portal that the enthusiasm of technocrats to constantly change what’s working to something presumably better is the culprit, not my aging brain. When I can’t remember where I stashed the mosquito coils and sunscreen last fall, I embark on the search rather than castigate my brain. But when names and nouns depart to a distant land and access is random and unreliable, I worry.
Except it’s quite common, not just among my age group. We frequently play the charade of shared brain, tossing potentially relevant factoids on to the table until Bingo! someone finds the word and we all congratulate ourselves for helpful perseverance. Or alternately, we agree that we know what s/he means without the word and urge them to carry on with the story.
I want for us to be as comfortable with an aging brain as we are with an aging body. Yes, my knees twinge sometimes and my sleep is interrupted by bathroom visits, but hey, life is still good and I can contribute. But if my brain is going bad, my destiny is dire. I am en route to becoming nobody, an expensive lump on the log of society, an outcast before I am intered or scattered, invisible and/or pitied in my last chapter.
Why haven’t we given the same attention to how the brain ages as we have to how arthritis ‘naturally’ over time gums up our joints or we become dependent on our bifocals or we need people to speak up clearly to make out what they’re saying? I say it’s because knees and eyes and ears are parts of us, and the brain IS us. And what makes the brain an element of a different order? Maybe an old gift from René Descartes in the early 1600s --Cogito, ergo sum: ‘I think therefore I am’.
The dementia literature has tended toward tragedy, the person with dementia losing themselves, first vacating their bodily home and eventually needing a new physical home. If they are seen as becoming other than themselves, it’s usually for the bad – tantrums and paranoia and wandering. No wonder we’re terrified when nouns desert us.
How refreshing, then, to hear Rev Lynn Casteel Harper’s take on dementia (op ed NYT June 22/25; author of On Vanishing, Mortality, Dementia, and What it Means to Disappear). She reviews the memoir of several adult children of people with dementia and finds, with the exception (except for a sliver) of Erica Jong’s daughter, that they discovered lovely aspects of their parents that were previously unavailable to them. Perhaps those qualities were buried deep. More likely it was not excavation that was needed, nor the disappearance of censor boards, but rather finding the motivation and creating the conditions that allow those characters to appear.
Harper holds that our negative narrative about dementia is the worst thing about the condition. ‘The notion that people are gone before they are dead harms the care they receive when they need it most,’ she says, and ‘obscures the reality that a significant measure of their suffering emerges not from the condition alone, but from the social response to it – the part of the situation we are most able to fix.’ Aha, a modern and demographically adapted variation of blaming the victim.
Why do we distance and denigrate aging of the brain differently than aging of the body? Because, I say, we don’t know how to fix it. We don’t have a cure. We don’t even have a reliable intervention to slow it down or ameliorate the symptoms. We could say the same thing about mental illness and addiction for much the same reason. All because we haven’t studied how the brain operates ‘normally’ so we castigate those whose brains operate abnormally, as if somehow our ignorance is their fault.
But we do know quite a lot about how to care respectfully for people, especially vulnerable people. Perhaps allowing people to be more than their brains -- across the full spectrum of life – is the way to finding a more humane way of dealing with the spectre of dementia as well as other mental impairments. It might not protect us from having dementia (isn’t it interesting that we don’t say ‘being demented’ and that ‘demented’ is usually used in reference to insanity?) but it would almost certainly make old age safer.
I’m all for growing old safely.
