All I ask is that you show me this image if I ever start to forget.
Another in our new series Nerdy Notes: Science in Story & Verse
This is another in our new series: Nerdy Notes: Science in Story & Verse
In these posts, our Nerdy Girl scientists and clinicians will share personal stories, insights, poetry, and more. While these posts may be lighter in terms of numbers and figures, they will still be rooted in our tradition and commitment to providing accessible and trustworthy information.
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All I ask is that you show me this image if I ever start to forget.
In the weeks leading up to the publication of this Nerdy Note, I couldn’t put pen to paper for more than two minutes before the grief came rolling like thunder. The three grandparents who were alive during my childhood were my three best friends, and the thought that, by the end, their memories surrounding our best-friendships were completely obscured filled me with a cavernous rage that left me unable to write for days at a time.
Knowing that, this Black History Month, my one goal was to commemorate my grandparents, my mind turned over several options for sharing my reflections in a way that felt both informative and emotionally safe. Those Nerdy Girls are committed to facts; we’re also committed to a sense of humanity.
I finally enlisted the help of Canva’s Magic Media tool to curate a self-portrait that does justice to how I remember my grandparents – a looking glass that, in my own old age, I can peek into and remember that once upon a time, I had a grandmother who tended to my bee stings when we worked in her strawberry and squash gardens and whose calming presence emanated from the light yellow walls of her house. Once upon a time, I had a grandfather who engaged me in our own special routine of going to Bible Study and buying me a new toy at Osco’s on our way home (even as he doted on 18 other grandchildren). During that same once upon a time, I had a grandfather whose laugh could be heard down the block and whose backyard had weeping willow trees taken directly out of a storybook.
To me, memory loss is one of life’s most profound injustices. And just like every other injustice, memory loss is not administered evenly across communities. All four of my grandparents were African-American, the descendants of enslaved peoples. I imagine that some ninety years ago, they sat on the laps of their emancipated great-grandparents and listened to family lores that have been diluted with time like elaborate sandcastles swept away by high tides. For people everywhere with displaced lineages, long and reliable ancestral memory is a currency of privilege; many of us don’t have it. We don’t talk about this historical side effect of racism often, and it’s not the sort of memory loss I initially planned to write about in this Nerdy Note, but its connection to a more “clinical” process of forgetting needs to be acknowledged.
The “clinical” process of forgetting I’m talking about is Alzheimer’s Disease. The most common form of dementia in older adults, Alzheimer’s has emerged as the 7th leading cause of death among older adults in the U.S. The Alzheimer’s Association reports that this disease, while touching millions of Americans’ lives in some form each year, is up to twice as common in Black older adults than in their White counterparts. The exact cause of Alzheimer’s has not yet been pinpointed, with many researchers pointing to potential social factors, including racial biases in diagnostic processes, delays in healthcare access, chronic stress, and depression. If these factors sound familiar, it’s because these are the same factors that often lead to Black communities having disproportionate rates of hypertension, diabetes, obesity, cancer, cardiovascular disease, maternal and infant mortality, and so forth. Just like the brain nodes holding together the complex network of my childhood memories, the causes and consequences of structural racism in healthcare are all interconnected.
Growing up in the Jim Crow South, each of my grandparents was exposed to physical, social, and environmental stressors that wrapped themselves around their genes in vice grips early in life, only to later be expressed through a laundry list of health complications in their seventies. Alzheimer’s in itself is not hereditary in most people. It’s quite rare to possess the specific collection of “risk genes” that increase your likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s, and even with increased risk, it’s far from a sure thing. It’s even rarer to possess the set of “deterministic” genes that can trigger memory loss and directly cause Alzheimer’s. Deterministic genetic mutations are believed to account for one percent of all Alzheimer’s cases, and to date, these mutations have only been found in a few hundred extended families worldwide, all of whom have well-established histories of early-onset (pre-age 65) Alzheimer’s disease. This means that from a strictly genetic standpoint, my personal risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease like my grandparents did in their older age is not significantly higher than anyone else’s. However, from an epigenetic standpoint – knowing how the stress and strain of living in an unequal America take their toll on the bodies and minds of people like me – I find myself concerned. I’m frightened for my parents, for my friends’ parents, for my sister and me, for my future children. I am so deeply afraid of forgetting.
When both of my grandfathers passed away in fall 2009, ten-year-old me was fairly certain that a cure for Alzheimer’s disease would be readily available at the pharmacy well before I lost my grandma in summer 2023. That wasn’t the case. Rather than waiting idly for a cure these next fourteen years, I plan to channel all remaining hope I have into action, and I urge you to join me.
To community, public, and global health advocates everywhere: Please continue to push for policies, systems, and environments that actively unravel the racial under- and overtones of healthcare delivery, particularly for our aging population. Elders are our memory keepers and chief storytellers; in supporting their physical and mental fitness, we are safeguarding our own histories against the rushing tides of time. To borrow the words from late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone – words that drive our ethos as Those Nerdy Girls – “we all do better when we all do better.”
To the geneticists, neuroscientists, social epidemiologists, and all others who ask important questions at the intersections of aging, memory, and health justice: I implore you to continue doing the work. There will be social, cultural, and political pushback as the research discourse shifts from the genetics of memory loss to its epigenetic, environmental, and equity-related root causes. Brace yourself for the discomfort, and keep going.
To everyone else: Show me the above image if I ever start to forget.
And to my grandparents: Thank you so much for the memories.
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