Maybe it’s okay that I can’t go back twenty Januarys past, or ten as a way of knowing where I am to consider where I should go from here on the calendar of decades.
I have jotted and journaled intermittently but without discipline. There are no breadcrumbs to follow for a monthly review over the last half century.
I have flitted from one digital notebook to the next (Workflowy, Dynalist, Roam Research, Tana, Obsidian) but without staying in place or returning even at weekly intervals to lay down meetings, calendars, events, people, memories by place in time to be able to find patterns that might become maps going forward.
I do know that the concept of Janus, standing at the threshold with a face looking back and a face looking forward always makes me take stock this time of year when molecular motion outdoors threatens to come to a standstill.
And now that I think of it, it is not journals proper but the writing I have done in the month of January that hold the story. I still have access to the blog—Fragments from Floyd—that survives back into 2007. The first 5 years after the first posts in 2002 have been lost to history.
I do know now that journaling can be a help when things fall apart. They have fallen apart or morphed drastically for me especially in Januarys since 2019. Those portal months have carried me exactly here, exactly now.
January 2019
It has become clear that Ann is losing her grip on logic and language. She is making stuff up, and will not hear me when I suggest it would be helpful to get tested, to know where her mental health lives and where it might go.
We might be dealing with plain vanilla Mild Cognitive Impairment at age 71. It happens. But I’d like to know for sure. If this pattern continues and gets worse over time, she will not be able to safely negotiate the tortuous roads between Goose Creek and the grocery store. She aleady is more hindrance than help in banking, planning and imagining what becomes of us in the future.
January 2020
We have spoken to our realtor about putting the old refurbished farm house on the market, not knowing that over the next few months the world would fall apart and the word pandemic would enter our vocabulary and our lives.
It was the worst time to show a house—when people were scared to travel even in familiar places—much less to the remote reaches of a rural mountain county. But then again, remote independence would have its appeal to the right buyer. The die was cast. We would leave Goose Creek for Rock Hill in June.
January 2021
We now live in a newer home closer to town, with good roads and nearby friends and good neighbors. I will soon need their help more and more.
Ann consents to see her Family Nurse Practioner for a simple cognitive test. She was very much NOT happy to have been coerced into this when she was certain there was nothing wrong with her! Why wasn’t I getting tested too?
She could not remember in this mini-test even one of the five THINGS she would be asked a short time later to repeat. She could not draw a clock showing ten minutes after 11. It was by that time not surprising but her struggle was a gut punch to witness.
We would rule out every other explanation (brain tumors, vascular changes, infections, sleep apnea) and the full battery of cognitive testing was scheduled for June. The scores would be stunningly low on the percentiles against other age-and-education matched test takers. And the world spun backwards.
January 2022
We have a neuralogist now and Ann is taking medications that might help slow down her mental decline. She would be taking a second full battery of test in six months, to compare against the first. Hopefully the downward curve would be gentle and give us time to figure how what to do with all of this. We avoided direct talk about it. The test results sealed our future.
January 2023
We were safe from the pandemic but isolated in our new setting and it was starting to feel like home after leaving Goose Creek that was home for twenty years. But we knew this was not where we could live until we died.
The second tests in June ‘22 confirmed my worst fears, showing a precipitous decline and confirming a diagnosis of Alzheimers. I asked the neurophysiologist how long victims at that level might have before requiring full time care. She said “probably about three years.” She was spot on.
January 2024
By now, we knew what lay ahead for us in broad strokes. We could not stay in rural Virginia where we would not have access to health or housing for our needs. Just before the new year, we had committed to move to Missouri where our son lived and the continuum of care was available.
Ann had stopped driving after a “soft accident” in August of ‘23 and I was on duty full time, doing the shopping, making meals, keeping medical appointments and planning to bug out within the year—specific month unknown but late summer to late fall.
We did not know on New Year’s Eve 2024 that our final Floyd home would be under contract within two months.
January 2025
When the new year came, we lived in an apartment in a mid-Missouri community where everyone was a stranger and every meal or activity was complicated by confusion and agitation.
We did not celebrate when the ball dropped at midnight. Ann would be up pacing at 2 a.m., maybe even drinking coffee, talking out of her head and denying the next day that she had missed any sleep. I knew for sure that I had.
I was not holding up at all well. At least there was a caregivers group that offered support from others who were or had been down the road I was trudging. But there was no fix; no finger in the dike; no distant hope that anything I tried to do would help.
I have never dreaded the coming of a new year with such brutal certainty and lack of hope as this one. I began talking with the admin here about availability of memory care for Ann, but did not know how to cope or who to ask for my own care. I did finally see a counselor off campus a few times to talk it out, but there was no prescription for what to do to avoid burn-out and overwhelm.
January 2026
Janus, the god of portals. A face that looks back through the wrong end of the binoculars that makes huge gone-by events shrink as if they were tiny and trivial; the face looking forward with magnification that compresses time and space and can drown you in the grotesquely huge and likely realities that lie ahead.
Looking back from the portal of this new year, Ann had been in the Memory Care neighborhood since the middle of May. She was okay. She was not okay. I was okay. I was not okay. The opportunity and obligation to move forward on my own was a terrifying as it was liberating. I paced the wood laminate for miles a day muttering to myself.
But now in this new year living alone and looking ahead—even as I sense my physical self in inevitable if slow decline and in “perfect health” for my age, I have hope for the year to come.
I’m journaling regularly now and with benefits, learning what I think by seeing what I say. I am setting down benchmarks to guide; moving forward with the intentions of a man who wants to grow wiser, kinder, and more grateful and not merely grow older by a year.
Life is not over. I am not alone. I am no longer desperate. And I have hope for my own life, even as our future life as a species comes into question.
January 2027
The long-range look by the god of portals need not peer so very far off now, as I will by now be approaching 79. The looking back extends to the vanishing point, while so many memories do not vanish but persist and inform. What am I to think standing here at the brink? What am I to do with the calendar pages that remain beyond the barely-visible horizon of another day?
I hope I will have good visions and good words in the turmoil of 2027; but that might not be my worry after all. I guess we’ll see. Some of you will have traveled with me through it all. It’s been a good ride. Thanks for your companionship.
– Fred First is an author, naturalist, photographer watching Nature under siege since the first Earth Day. Cautiously hopeful. Writing to think it through. Thanks for joining me. Subscribe to My Substack HERE.
