Mental Health | Aging

Cement is Setting on the Sails of My Ship

I’ve reached a stage in my life where words sometimes fail me. Most of my friends are there as well and we joke about it sometimes.

My father used to call the thing the Hooseywhatsit, as in, “pass the hooseywhatsit”.

We ask for the salt by saying please pass the white stuff, you know, while we gesture at the shaker. I’m a pretty positive person so I always try to find humour in a difficult situation.

It’s frustrating, but it’s part of aging.

I don’t have a problem when I’m writing.

Although I do sometimes use Google inappropriately.

I might type; “the thing we go out on the ocean in” and invariably Google will return enough clues to prod my memory about the kind of sailing ship I’m trying to remember.

It happens often enough that we noticed something curious.

The words that disappear are invariably nouns.

I don’t forget the word ‘pass’, for example. But I might forget the name of a certain dish on the table; ‘potatoes’, for example. We thought we should name the problem.

We’ve decided to call it Noun Deficiency Syndrome or NDS for short.

Now when I meet someone who is struggling to find a word, I tell them there’s a name for their condition. NDS.

Sometimes, for just a moment, they take it seriously and I have to explain the joke.

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