Memory of a Goldfish
My son is leaving home, my mom is moving in, and I'm just trying to stay afloat.
This story originally appeared in the first issue of Geezer magazine. Kim Cross is a New York Times best-selling author, an exceptional teacher, and a truly wonderful human being. In the time since this article was published, her mother passed away. We are deeply grateful for sharing her mother’s story and spirit with us.
After each mountain-bike race, my 17-year-old son and I have a coaching ritual. Austin gives me a play-by-play. Then I ask him two questions:
“What three things did you do well? What’s one thing you can improve?”
The practice comes from The Fearless Mind, a sports psychology book. The point is to focus on what you did well—so you can repeat it—and identify something to work on.
After a particularly challenging race, Austin described how a competitor’s sketchy pass nearly made him crash. In the moment, he was ticked. His adrenaline surged. But he kept his wits, left it behind him, and focused on the mile ahead.
“You didn’t let it get to you,” I said. “How’d you do that?”
“Memory of a goldfish,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“An athlete needs the memory of a goldfish,” he said. “You should only think about what happened in the last three seconds.”
Such an old soul, I thought, wondering how his developing brain had manifested such wisdom. He was right: Successful athletes learn to focus only on the present moment.
Later, I glowed with motherly pride as I repeated Austin’s wise words. My friend smiled and nodded.
“That’s a quote from Ted Lasso.”
My mother has what her grandson wants: the memory of a goldfish.
At 84, she’s still riding her mountain bike. But Mom is racing dementia, and dementia is closing the gap. On an average day, she calls me around 100 times; on a bad day, more than 200. Sometimes she calls and says, “I can’t find my phone!” I gently tell her it’s in her hand.
Mimi—the grandmoniker she chose for herself—has been living alone for almost as long as Austin has been alive. My father saw his grandson’s birth, got to hold him and kiss his tiny feet. But cancer stole him a few days shy of Austin’s first birthday. Dad’s mind stayed sharp until the very end, aware that his body was failing.
Mom’s body seems just about bulletproof, but her memory is like vapor. Her brain is in a state of atrophy, its gray matter shrinking faster than the average rate for her age. As Alzheimer’s erodes her cognition, her mind is becoming more childlike.
I’m hanging in the balance, caught in the middle-age purgatory some call “the sandwich years.” Watching my son prepare to launch, I’m learning how to let go. Watching my mother decline, I’m bracing for the free fall. My heart is ripping between these two extremes.
The grief is paradoxical. As I celebrate all that my son is becoming, I’m mourning the child that’s gone. When I look at photos of him as a round-cheeked, googly-eyed toddler, my heart aches with the implacable pain I associate with death. To my heart, it feels like my child has died, even as he stands before me now with the angular jaw of a man.
My mother is very much alive, but I find myself preemptively mourning, knowing I’ll lose her three times. Now, as our caregiving roles reverse, and the mother who always took care of me is starting to need me like a child. Again the day she forgets who I am. And one more awful time when she dies.
I’m mourning the past and grieving on behalf of the future me who misses the good old days of now.
My son is leaving home, my mother is moving in, and I just want to stay afloat.
On the roller coaster of perimenopause, I marvel at all the ways I’m becoming more like a teenage boy. Austin and I are both lifting weights, guzzling creatine-laced protein shakes, fighting to put on muscle. Our skin is weird. Our moods swing wildly. Our brains and bodies have been temporarily hijacked by our hormones.
I’m still young and dumb enough to do teenage-boy things with my son. We practice backflips off the river bridge, ride dirt jumps at the bike park, and river-surf on a man-made wave at the local whitewater park. Even though he has surpassed me, I plan to remind him who taught him these things, forever.
I have my mother to thank for teaching me you don’t have to act your age. She learned how to mountain bike at the age of 69. In her 70s, she was hopping logs and riding features that had scared me in my 20s.
Two months before she turned 75, riding with a friend nearly 40 years younger, Mom had endured her first and only big crash. She heard a man on the trail behind them trying to pass. Looking over her shoulder while getting out of his way, she rode off a small bridge and into a creek, bracing for impact with one slender arm.
She finished the ride, loaded her bike onto the bike rack, and cooked dinner, as promised, for her 30-year-old friend, gulping down two Tylenol to quiet her aching arm. The next morning, two more Tylenol didn’t silence the pain, so she took herself in for an X-ray. She’d broken the two biggest bones in her arm. Two metal plates, four screws, and a few stitches later, she was back in the mountain bike saddle.
I have a photo of 74-year-old Mimi and 7-year-old Austin back then, each sporting a freshly earned sling. He’d broken his arm on the playground at school after falling off the monkey bars. The school nurse gave him an ice pack, told him to quit crying, and sent him home on the bus.
Ten years later, Austin is racing varsity, a senior on the mountain bike team at his school and on the brink of reaching escape velocity from home. Mimi was forced to give up driving six months ago, so her mountain bike is her last freedom. Every day, sometimes twice, she pedals to the grocery store about a mile away. She buys a Starbucks drink, gummy snakes (not worms), or some other treat.
In September, just before leaving town to watch Austin race in the mountains, I swung by to check on Mimi. She wasn’t home, and her bike was gone, so I figured she was out riding. When she didn’t answer her phone, I felt an unusual pang of worry. Three stops later, with zero calls from her or her retirement community, I tracked her to the emergency room.
She’d fallen at home and ripped an inch-long flap in the heel of her hand. She wrapped her bleeding palm in a paper towel, remembered (thank god) her helmet, and pedaled her bike to urgent care. They called the paramedics, who loaded her bike in the ambulance and drove her to the ER.
When I found her reclining in the ER bed, seven stitches in her hand, she brightened with an incongruous smile. The rest of her looked like a crime scene: swipes of blood on the hospital sheets, her shirt, her fanny pack.
My heart was relieved that she wasn’t hurt worse. But my stomach sank at her logic. Why hadn’t she called me? How was she planning on getting home?
“I’m fine!” she chirped, waving my question off with a Frankensteinian paw. “I can ride my bike!”
We’ve decided—my husband, son, and I—to move Mimi into our downstairs mother-in-law apartment. We looked at the options for memory care, but nothing felt right. It’s terrifying, but this feels like the least-bad choice.
She didn’t take the news well. We had already taken her car away and replaced her beloved iPhone with a simplified, big-buttoned memory-care phone. Now we’re taking away her home. Her independence. Her freedom.
“Can I still ride my bike?” she asked meekly, when she finally came around.
“Yes,” I said. “Everyone thinks I’m crazy, but I’m not going to take that away. But it comes with a very big risk. If you fall and break a hip, you’ll have to go in a wheelchair. Most people don’t come back out.”
“I understand,” she said. Whether or not she truly does, I have no way of knowing.
“Life is like a bicycle,” Albert Einstein said. “To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” Or, like Dory—who, admittedly, was not a goldfish—sings in Finding Nemo: Just keep swimming!
There’s no other way around it. Some things you just have to go through.
When people ask, “How are you doing?” I reply as honestly as I can: What’s good in my life is great. What’s bad is awful. Somehow, both can be true at once. Sometimes in the very same moment.
Dementia fugues are like mountain storms—they often rage in the afternoons but quickly rain themselves out. Instead of arguing with delusions and illogical fixations, I’m learning to bend and sway like trees in high wind. When the wind blows, roots deepen and wood grows more tensile.
I’m learning to wallow in the moments that are purely good. The sweetness of a summer plum. The warmth of winter sun on my cheeks. The sound of my son’s laugh. The way he flexes in a darkened window. The unbidden hugs—with both arms—he bestows when I’m sautéing onions. I store these like a joy-camel.
We’re all learning to laugh at the moments of comical absurdity.
One morning, we woke to alarming news that Mom had called the cops. “A man broke into my house in the middle of the night,” she said. We glanced at each other knowingly. Delusions.
Then we learned that a neighbor had wandered out of assisted living in the middle of the night. Lost, confused, and probably cold, he’d found a warm place with an unlocked door. At some point in the night, Mom found him sitting on her living room couch.
“Were you scared?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “He was just demented.”
Grief and regret are rooted in the past. Fear and worry exist in the future. The only thing we can truly control is how we think and act in the present.
A year ago, Mom drove 100 miles by herself on a winding river road through the Sawtooth National Forest to watch Austin race. Today, she struggles to use a phone. One year from now, Austin will load up his bike and drive to college.
To get through this with my heart intact, I’ll need to strive, like Austin, to have the memory of a goldfish.
I just hope he remembers to call.
Kim Cross would like people to know that after writing this piece, she fact-checked her assumptions about goldfish memory. Turns out, goldfish can recognize human faces, learn to navigate mazes, and retain info for months on end. They’re actually pretty smart—so while the metaphor holds up, she sends her apologies to the entire goldfish community.
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Loved. This. Story. Kim, thank you for sharing it with the world. Anyone who's been part of a sandwich generation (regardless of what part of the sandwich) will related. And anyone who hasn't will enjoy reading your well-told narrative.