"I Can't Catch My Voice"

It did not begin with a clear diagnosis. It began with a sweet memory of her.

Her mental illness arrived slowly enough that, at first, it seemed like ordinary aging. She misplaced things. She repeated a question she had asked only minutes before. We laughed sometimes with kind intent, the usual way families do when something petty goes obviously wrong. It was comfortable then to believe that nothing serious had begun.

But over time the forgetting widened like an acre of vacant land that multiplied into miles of rolling hills.

Her stories started halfway through themselves. Names slipped away from her, then returned briefly, like visitors who couldn’t stay long. Eventually even the stories that had shaped our family—the ones she told every holiday, every birthday—lost their edges. I witnessed the effort it took for her to reach them, the way someone might search through a dim room for a familiar object that used to sit in the same place. Conversations were increasingly random, similar to the rarity of witnessing a shooting star.

What I remember most is not the forgetting but the space it created.

There were moments when she looked at me with a quiet uncertainty, as though she were trying to place me somewhere inside our unique map that gradually lost its labels. Sometimes recognition would flicker across her face and settle there, warm and relieved.

I learned to live inside those peaceful moments without asking too much of her. I struggled to say goodbye to the mother I no longer knew.

After she died, people spoke about the disease as if it had been a long storm that had finally passed. There was relief in their voices, though they tried to conceal their resolution. Relief that the struggle was over, that the slow psychotic unraveling had reached its end.

But for me something quieter remains.

A quiet appears now in small, ordinary situations. A word that takes longer than it should to arrive. Walking into a room and pausing, unsure what I came there for. Forgetting the name of someone I’ve known for years.

Were the years catching up to mileage transgressed in my mind or does this age of forgetfulness happen to everyone?

I feel a brief tightening in my chest—not panic exactly, but recognition. The memory of watching my mother stand in a kitchen she had used for decades, wondering why her stovetop knobs were missing. She hesitates before opening a cabinet, as though she were visiting a house that may have once belonged to her.

I wonder sometimes whether fear grows 0f genetic inheritance the same way memory does.

Not through certainty, but through resemblance.

The mind begins to study itself in ways it never used to. I notice the momentary gaps now: the pause before a familiar word, the moment when a thought slips sideways and I have to guide it back.

The word eventually arrives. The room explains itself. It takes longer now.

And yet the question lingers somewhere just behind these ordinary recoveries.

I remember the early years of my mother’s illness, before we had a medical term for it. She would brush aside our concern with a laugh and say, “Everyone forgets things.” And she was right. The world is full of amnesia, harmless and often temporary.

The difficulty is that they look almost identical at the beginning.

I try not to measure myself as I reminisce on her final years. That comparison leads nowhere productive. Instead I remember her earlier—her sharp humor, her strong opinions and the way she could tell a story so vividly that it seemed to unfold again in front of you. Mother owned bold confidence with which she moved through the world when everything still held its place.

Those memories are steady for now.

Still, there are mornings when I wake and lie quietly for a moment before getting out of bed, noticing the slow process of gathering the day’s thoughts; schedules, dates, plans, fragments of yesterday returning one by one.

I listen to them pathetically attempt to assemble themselves.

And somewhere in that quiet space, before the day fully begins, I find myself wondering—not whether forgetting will come, but how I will recognize it if it does.

Then I remember something else about my mother.

Even in the later years, when words wandered and days blurred together, there were moments when she laughed at something small—when she replaced her medication with jelly beans, a joke on television, the sudden sweetness of lemon pie in summer. In those moments her face brightened with the same expression she had worn years before, when everything was still clear.

It reminded me that not everything disappears at once.

Some parts of us stay longer than we expect. Kindness. Humor. The simple ability to feel warmth when someone sits beside us and takes our hand.

This morning I stand at the kitchen window with my coffee, watching the hummingbirds crowd the brightly colored feeder.

A blue bird lands on the fence, pauses, then lifts again into the air without hesitation.

For a moment I follow its flight until it disappears beyond the tall trees.

I realize I am still here, noticing the way the morning unfolds, remembering enough to enjoy the moment.

And for now, I will trust in a peculiar darkness that I am not fully committed to.