This is #13 in a series of essays on aging.

We lose our minds in two different ways. One is forgetfulness, which is annoying. The other is dementia, which is devastating. As I understand the state of medical findings, the two are not necessarily linked. However, one creates anxiety about the other. Many older people nervously monitor their forgetfulness, fearing that they are falling into a loss of everything.

We do forget. Or, more accurately, we temporarily lose our grip on certain words, usually nouns. Names. Film and book titles. Authors. Acquaintances. It is not that we don’t know the author of War and Peace. It is just that, right now, we cannot come up with … starts with T. That name seems to be dodging around inside our brain, just out of reach. We know it will come, but it does not come when we need it to come.

My wife and I have a saying: “It takes a village to remember a noun.” It starts with a T, one says. It’s short, just two syllables, the other says. We both wrack our brains and usually, two minds being better than one, we get it. Whereas, working alone, I may never remember the name of that flowering bush in our back yard.

Permanent forgetting also occurs. I cannot remember the name of my first elementary school. Maybe with the help of the internet I could come up with it, but it’s irretrievably gone from my memory. This kind of forgetting happens throughout life, and I’m not sure it increases with aging. Whereas, losing the ability to retrieve movie titles certainly increases with the years, if my experience is any judge.

Dementia is different. Forgetting is not remembering where you put your keys. Dementia is forgetting what a key is for. That’s an oversimplification, because dementia involves all kinds of forgetting. The point stands, nevertheless, that dementia is a global loss. It may start small but eventually it can take away everything—your recognition of the people who love you, your ability to find your way home, to converse, to follow a plot, to read—everything. That shatters your life, and the lives of those you love.

You can’t fight it. Doing crossword puzzles won’t stave off dementia. Some newly developed drugs slow down the deterioration, but so far they don’t change the outcome. It’s a dreadful disease, and many people fear it. For many people, aging is shadowed by this fear.

Like cancer, it functions beyond our control. That is part of the new world. We may not lose control of our lives, but we dread doing so.