How Long Covid Is Rewriting The Final Chapter Of My Life
My approach to coping with cognitive gaps.
My father had a truly remarkable brain, with a spectacular memory. He just never seemed to forget things. I remember I used to test him by showing him long strings of numbers or nonsense and asking him to remember them. Weeks or months later, I’d ask him to recite them back to me, retrieving the paper I’d originally written them on from wherever I’d hidden it to check. He never flubbed. It’s how he came to be fluent in six languages and helped the family to never forget any acquaintance’s birthday. Once I re-found such a note that I had hidden more than three years earlier, and when prompted he reliably chimed off a forty character random alphanumeric sequence he’d seen once as casually as I’d remind a friend of my street address.
Familiarity makes whatever circumstance we grow up in seem perfectly normal to our childhood selves, so it was only years after his death in 1980 that I really started to grasp how remarkable he was. Believing that his retentive capacity was normal, I had done all in my power to condition my brain to be the same kind of steel trap. I didn’t have an address book, I just remembered a bunch of phone numbers. I rarely took notes in class, I just retained what I heard. Decades later, some obscure science topic would come up in…
