Writing things down

For a long time while following the process of remembering every day that passes, I had a policy of not keeping a diary and not making notes. I thought it would be good for my discipline to rely on my memory alone. 

True, I would sometimes have to look through photos on my phone or emails with travel details to help me recover the images for particular days if I got stuck, but generally the mental process alone worked.

Prior to starting this journey, I had been a good journal keeper, not writing every day, but filling in the gaps whenever I picked it up. A few years in, I wrote my missing journals retrospectively, using the recollections my memory tags gave me.

Then in 2017, when my mother's Alzheimer's progressed to the point where I returned home to help my father and sister care for her, until that was no longer possible at home, I began to keep a diary of what was happening. The purpose was to learn what did and did not work in responding to her fears when she did not know us - and did not believe that she had a husband and children - and was scared of strangers in her house.

I have kept that going and write at the top of each page a prompt for the image for my memory tag.

This has had a downside. This year, I have fallen out of the habit of reinforcing the tags for the recent month with a review morning and night, and selected days from the past 6 months. I've told myself I can pick up my diary and catch up. To some extent that has worked, but it is not as effective as when I stuck to my routine.

It means it is somewhat harder to recall every day of recent months than the days from 2012, my first full year of this process. Yet, I suspect without the diaries, I would be lost by now.

Forgetting remembering

 I continue with this process of remembering every day that passes. I am coming up to ten years now.

However, it is getting harder to get through the review process and sometimes hitting blanks demotivates me from trying. But then, I'll have a good run or a particular day will be very important to me for the memories it brings or the fresh associations that arise.

Something I have noticed is that I no longer have the memory of my last run through to help me. For a long, long time, whenever I ran through the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags for each day, I would have a sense of when I last did so. If there was a day that gave me a problem, I may well recall how I recovered the tag the previous time.

Now, my process is not so routine. I don't even have a clear idea of how long it takes me to go through the tags for the past 10 years now. At present, I am going through January to December for each year, but stepping back a year each time. I'm currently mid-way through 2018, which was a important year for me as it was when my mother's Alzheimer's reached a critical stage where she no longer felt safe at home because she did not know who we were and was scared of her husband and me being in her house.

In the sessions before this, I ran through the same month of each year. In doing so, I found it was the more recent years that gave me most problems, hence giving those more attention now.