View from the North 40: Of all the things I still have ...

My grandma developed Alzheimer’s in her early 80s, which isn’t a particularly funny way to start a humor column because, of course, the disease is not funny.

There were moments we could laugh, of course, because that’s what Burkes do, find humor.

Like the time Dad stopped to visit Grandma, his mom, and found her playing cards with another care center resident. He asked them what they were playing and Grandma said, “Gin rummy.” At the same time, her fellow card sharp said, “Pinochle.”

“Oh?” Dad said. Who’s winning?” And they both said, “I am.”

Grandma, who was always keen on finding, or generating, humor in everyday life, would’ve laughed at this in her day, so Dad laughed for her and told them they were doing a great job.

As a general rule, I don’t have the best memory or attention span, or luck for that matter, so after my grandma’s diagnosis I have pre-prepared myself and my husband for a future in which I get Alzheimer’s in my early 80s — which is more harsh reality than fodder for a humor column. Sorry.

But imagine my surprise when, a good 25 to 30 years ahead of schedule, I got a little feel for what I assume I can expect for my future. As a symptom of COVID, which I finally caught for the first time a few weeks ago, I found out just how real “COVID brain” is.

I’d like to say I took it in stride, but no. One day I suddenly realized I’d lost an hour and a half of time. I mean, I know what I was doing, researching. Standard stuff, find the right info, extract the data or words that I need, and move on to the next thing. Except I thought I’d done it for 15 minutes, 30 tops. It was almost two hours later.

That was weird, even in my world, but honestly, I didn’t have time to think about it. I was working from home while I was still sick, and I had two writing deadlines looming in the next two hours. At that point, I was one and half hours short of time in which to finish.

Um, OK, I told myself, you’re a professional procrastinator. You have lots of experience with this type of scenario. You can do this.

I switched gears to complete the assignment with the earlier deadline, and I dove in.

But I hit bottom quickly, finding the assignment trickier than usual, and it required phone calls to talk to humans. Not my forte, but I knew the topic and it had rote questions and a rhythm to the writing. I persevered.

I can do this.

Then my phone started blowing up with text messages while I was writing. I needed to look at all the messages in case one was work related. They weren’t, but they kept coming. Friends and family thought that poor little COVID Mary needed her spirits lifted because she’s been home sick all week. They weren’t wrong, but their timing was off — that kills the humor every time. Trust me, I have experience here, too.

I finally had to take a minute to squelch my swearing and stress to tell my friends and family to go away for two hours. Then, I turned back to my computer — and had nothing.

No thoughts. No words. Just a vast, dark nothing where these things should be.

It was so nothing I can’t even describe its nothingness. Was it a dark cavern where only the nothingness echoed against the walls and through the empty spaces? Was my brain stuffed so tightly full of nothingness that no words could fit? Was my brain dead and buried six feet deep? I don’t know.

This is what I do know: I panicked. It wasn’t a very helpful response. I suspect I had crazy eyes. I definitely had a twitch going there for a few minutes.

Two days earlier, I’d lost my senses of smell and taste. I had nothing there, also. I could’ve snorted ground cloves into one nostril, lined the other with a glob of menthol rub and sat there eating raw garlic like candies, and I would’ve sensed nothing. The house might’ve been filling with leaking natural gas. I might’ve smelled like an armpit and dirty socks, but how was I to know.

I rummaged frantically through the house smelling and tasting everything, and it all smelled and tasted like filtered water. Nothing. After two days, what did I get back first? Not my sense of smell. Not the taste of salt, nor sweet or sour or savory, only bitterness. It seemed like a metaphor, and woe was me.

But it was also the breakthrough that led to getting my senses of taste and smell back.

The morning my brain quit, the first words that came back to me were a witty quip made popular in the 1980s: “Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.”

And somewhere in the back of my brain, I heard the Burke in me say, You can’t miss what you’ve never had.

So I have hope for a full recovery.

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I also took a second week off to sleep in, practice the ancient art of Tai Chi meditative walking and watch fail videos on YouTube like a vacation from life at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .